The Whirligig of Time Part 64

"Oh, rot! Did you think I meant you?"

"No, but it's true, for all that. Thank Heaven I have been permitted to live through it!... The truth is, I suppose, I was too successful early in life. In school, in college and afterward it was always the same--I found myself able to do certain things with an ease that surprised and delighted people--no one more than myself. For they weren't things that mattered especially, you see; they were showy, spectacular things that appealed to the public eye, like playing football. I was a good physical specimen, not through any effort or merit of my own, but simply through a natural gift, and a very poor and hollow gift it is, as I've found out. I don't think people quite realize the problem that a man of the athletic type has to face if he's going to make anything out of himself but an athlete. From early boyhood he's conscious of physical superiority; he knows perfectly well that in the last resort he can knock the other fellow down and stamp on him, and that gives him a certain feeling of repose and self-sufficiency that's very pernicious.

It usually pa.s.ses for strength of character, but it's nothing in the world but faith in bone and muscle. And people do worship physical strength so! It's small wonder a man gets his head turned.... Good Lord, the ideas I used to have about myself! Why, in college, if any one had made me say what, in the bottom of my heart, I thought was the greatest possible thing for a man of my years to be, I should have said being a great football player in a great university. That is, I wouldn't have said it, because that would have been like bragging, and it isn't done to brag: but that would have been my secret thought.

"And then, if the man has any brains or any capacity for feeling, he runs up against some of the big forces of life, and he finds his physical strength no more use to him than a broken reed. It's quite a shock! I've been more severely tried than most people are, I imagine, but Heaven knows I needed it! Everything had gone my way before that; I literally never knew what it was to have to put up a fight against something I recognized as stronger than I and likely to beat me in the end. Well, I'm grateful enough for it now. Thank Heaven for it! Thank Heaven for letting me fight and find out my weakness and come through it somehow, instead of remaining a mere mountain of beef all my days!"

Both stood silent for a moment after James had ended this confession, less because they felt embarra.s.sment in the presence of the feeling that lay behind it than because for a short time the past lay on them too heavily for words. After a few seconds they moved as though by a common impulse and walked slowly along the gra.s.sy crest of the ridge, and Harry began again.

"What you say sounds very well coming from you, James, but I have reason to believe that very little, if any of it, is true. It was my privilege to know you during the years you speak of, and I seem to remember you as something more than a mountain of beef. Don't be absurd, James!"

He paused a moment and then went on more seriously: "No, James; if there was ever any danger of any of us suffering from c.o.c.k-sureness it's I, at this moment. Do you realize how ridiculously happy I've been for the last year or so? This success of mine--oh, I've worked, but it's been absurdly easy, for all that--and Madge, and everything--it seems sometimes as if there was something strange and sinister about it. It simply can't be good for any one to be so happy! It worries me."

"Well, as long as it does, you needn't," said James.

"Oh, I see! That makes it quite simple, of course!"

"What I mean," elucidated James, "is that, if you feel that way about it, it's probable that you really deserve what happiness you have. After all, you know, you have paid for some. You have had your times; I don't mind admitting that there have been moments when you weren't quite the archangel which of course you are at present!"

Harry laughed. "The prophet Jeremiah once said something about its being good for a man that he should bear the yoke in his youth. If that is equivalent to saying that the earlier a man has his bad times the better, it may be that I got off more easily by having them in college than if they'd held off till later. One does learn certain things easier if one learns them early. But that doesn't mean that your youth has pa.s.sed without your feeling the yoke, or that your youth has pa.s.sed yet.

You're still in the Jeremiah cla.s.s! One would hardly say that at thirty--you're not much over thirty, are you?"

"A few weeks under, I believe."

"I'm sorry!--Well, at thirty there are surely years of youth ahead of you, which you, having borne your yoke, may look forward to without fear and with every prospect of enjoying to the fullest extent. Whereas I--well, there's even more time for me to bear yokes in, if necessary. I don't much believe that Jeremiah has done with me yet, somehow!"

"You're not afraid of the future, though, are you?" asked James after a pause.

"Oh, no--that would never do. I feel about it as.... One can't say these things without sounding c.o.c.ksure and insufferable!"

"You mean you'll do your best under the circ.u.mstances?"

"Yes, or make a good try at it! And then.... Of course I can't be as happy as I am without having a good deal at stake; I've given hostages to fortune--that's Francis Bacon, not me. And if fortune should look upon those hostages with a covetous eye--if anything, for instance, should happen to Madge in what's coming, why, there are still plenty of things that the worst fortune can't spoil!... Well, you know."

"Yes," said James; "I know."

"In fact, there are certain things in the past so dear to me that perhaps, if it came to the point, it would be almost a joy to pay heavily for them. But that's only the way I feel about it now, of course. It's easy enough to be brave when there's no danger."

"Yes," said James, "but I think you're right in the main. After all, the past is one's own--inalienably, forever! While the future is any man's....

"Of course you know," he went on after a pause, "that my past would have been nothing at all to me without you. It sounds funny, but it's true."

"Funny is the word," said Harry.

"But perfectly true. I should never have come through--all this business if it hadn't been for you."

"Look here, James, you're not going to thank me for saving your soul, are you? That would be a little forced!"

"My dear man, I'm not thanking you, I'm telling you! You were the one good thing I held on to; I was false and wicked in about every way I could be, but I did always try, in a sort of blind and blundering way, to be true to you. You've been--unconsciously if you will have it so--the best influence of my life, and I thought it might be well to tell you, that's all."

"Well, I won't pretend I'm not glad to hear it," said Harry soberly. "It is rather remarkable when you come to think of it," he went on after a moment, "how our lives have been bound up together. It's rather unusual with brothers, I imagine. Generally they see a good deal too much of each other during their early years and when they grow up they settle down into an acquaintanceship of a more or less cordial nature. But with us it's been different. Being apart during those early years, I suppose, made it necessary for us to rediscover each other when we grew up...."

"Yes," said James, "and the process of rediscovering had some rather lively pa.s.sages in it, if I remember right."

"It did! But it was a good thing; it gave us a new interest in each other. One reason why people are commonly so much more enthusiastic about their friends than about their relations is because their relations are an accident, but their friends are a credit to them. It just shows what a selfish thing human nature is, I suppose."

"I see; a new way of being a credit to ourselves. Well, most of it's on my side, I imagine."

Harry turned gravely toward his brother. "It seems to me, James, you suffer under a tendency to overestimate my virtues. You mustn't, you know; it's extremely bad for me. I should say, if questioned closely, that that was your one fault--if one expects a kindred tendency to shield me from things I ought not to be shielded from."

"Oh, rot, man!"

"You needn't talk--you do. I've felt it, all along, though you've done your job so well that for the most part I never knew what you'd saved me from."

"Well.... I might go so far as to say that when I've put you before myself I generally find I'm all right, and when I put myself first I generally find I'm all wrong. But as I've been all wrong most of the time, it doesn't signify much!"

"Hm. You put it so that I can't insist very hard. It's there, though, for all that. Funny thing. I don't believe it's a bit usual between friends, really, especially between brothers. Whatever started you on it? It must have been more or less conscious."

For a moment James thought of telling him. They had lived so long since then; it would be amusing for them to trace together the effects of that one little guiding idea. But he thought of the years ahead, and they seemed to call out to him with warning voices, voices full of a tale of tasks unfinished and the need of a vigilance sharper than before. So he only laughed a little and said:

"Oh, it's you that are exaggerating now! You mustn't get ideas about it; it's no more than you'd do for me, or any one for any one else he cares about. But little as it is, don't grudge it to me, for though it may not have done you much good, it's been the saving of me...."

So they walked and talked as the sun sank low and the night fell gently from a cloudless sky. To Madge and Beatrice, seeing them silhouetted against that final blaze of glory in the west, they seemed almost as one figure.