Dalyrimple licked his lips.
“You’ll run me for the State Senate?”
“I’ll put you in the State Senate.”
Mr. Fraser’s expression had now reached the point nearest a smile and Dalyrimple in a happy frivolity felt himself urging it mentally on—but it stopped, locked, and slid from him. The barn-door and the jaw were separated by a line strait as a nail. Dalyrimple remembered with an effort that it was a mouth, and talked to it.
“But I’m through,” he said. “My notoriety’s dead. People are fed up with me.”
“Those things,” answered Mr. Fraser, “are mechanical. Linotype is a resuscitator of reputations. Wait till you see the Herald, beginning next week—that is if you’re with us—that is,” and his voice hardened slightly, “if you haven’t got too many ideas yourself about how things ought to be run.”
“No,” said Dalyrimple, looking him frankly in the eye. “You’ll have to give me a lot of advice at first.”
“Very well. I’ll take care of your reputation then. Just keep yourself on the right side of the fence.”
Dalyrimple started at this repetition of a phrase he had thought of so much lately. There was a sudden ring at the door-bell.
“That’s Macy now,” observed Fraser, rising. “I’ll go let him in. The servants have gone to bed.”
He left Dalyrimple there in a dream. The world was opening up suddenly——The State Senate, the United States Senate—so life was this after all—cutting corners—common sense, that was the rule. No more foolish risks now unless necessity called—but it was being hard that counted—Never to let remorse or self-reproach lose him a night’s sleep—let his life be a sword of courage—there was no payment—all that was drivel—drivel.
He sprang to his feet with clinched hands in a sort of triumph.
“Well, Bryan,” said Mr. Macy stepping through the portières.
The two older men smiled their half-smiles at him.
“Well Bryan,” said Mr. Macy again.
Dalyrimple smiled also.
“How do, Mr. Macy?”
He wondered if some telepathy between them had made this new appreciation possible—some invisible realization….
Mr. Macy held out his hand.
“I’m glad we’re to be associated in this scheme—I’ve been for you all along—especially lately. I’m glad we’re to be on the same side of the fence.”
“I want to thank you, sir,” said Dalyrimple simply. He felt a whimsical moisture gathering back of his eyes.
The Four Fists.
Scribner’s Magazine (June 1920)
At the present time no one I know has the slightest desire to hit Samuel Meredith; possibly this is because a man over fifty is liable to be rather severely cracked at the impact of a hostile fist, but, for my part, I am inclined to think that all his hitable qualities have quite vanished. But it is certain that at various times in his life hitable qualities were in his face, as surely as kissable qualities have ever lurked in a girl’s lips.
I’m sure every one has met a man like that, been casually introduced, even made a friend of him, yet felt he was the sort who aroused passionate dislike—expressed by some in the involuntary clinching of fists, and in others by mutterings about “takin’ a poke” and “landin’ a swift smash in ee eye.” In the juxtaposition of Samuel Meredith’s features this quality was so strong that it influenced his entire life.
What was it? Not the shape, certainly, for he was a pleasant-looking man from earliest youth: broad-bowed with gray eyes that were frank and friendly. Yet I’ve heard him tell a room full of reporters angling for a “success” story that he’d be ashamed to tell them the truth that they wouldn’t believe it, that it wasn’t one story but four, that the public would not want to read about a man who had been walloped into prominence.
It all started at Phillips Andover Academy when he was fourteen. He had been brought up on a diet of caviar and bell-boys’ legs in half the capitals of Europe, and it was pure luck that his mother had nervous prostration and had to delegate his education to less tender, less biassed hands.
At Andover he was given a roommate named Gilly Hood. Gilly was thirteen, undersized, and rather the school pet. From the September day when Mr. Meredith’s valet stowed Samuel’s clothing in the best bureau and asked, on departing, “hif there was hanything helse, Master Samuel?” Gilly cried out that the faculty had played him false. He felt like an irate frog in whose bowl has been put goldfish.
“Good gosh!” he complained to his sympathetic contemporaries, “he’s a damn stuck-up Willie. He said, ‘Are the crowd here gentlemen?’ and I said, ‘No, they’re boys,’ and he said age didn’t matter, and I said, ‘Who said it did?’ Let him get fresh with me, the ole pieface!”
For three weeks Gilly endured in silence young Samuel’s comments on the clothes and habits of Gilly’s personal friends, endured French phrases in conversation, endured a hundred half-feminine meannesses that show what a nervous mother can do to a boy, if she keeps close enough to him—then a storm broke in the aquarium.
Samuel was out. A crowd had gathered to hear Gilly be wrathful about his roommate’s latest sins.
“He said, ‘Oh, I don’t like the windows open at night,’ he said, ‘except only a little bit,’” complained Gilly.
“Don’t let him boss you.”
“Boss me? You bet he won’t. I open those windows, I guess, but the darn fool won’t take turns shuttin’ ’em in the morning.”
“Make him, Gilly, why don’t you?”
“I’m going to.” Gilly nodded his head in fierce agreement. “Don’t you worry. He needn’t think I’m any ole butler.”
“Le’s see you make him.”
At this point the darn fool entered in person and included the crowd in one of his irritating smiles. Two boys said, “‘Lo, Mer’dith”; the others gave him a chilly glance and went on talking to Gilly. But Samuel seemed unsatisfied.
“Would you mind not sitting on my bed?” he suggested politely to two of Gilly’s particulars who were perched very much at ease.
“Huh?”
“My bed. Can’t you understand English?”
This was adding insult to injury. There were several comments on the bed’s sanitary condition and the evidence within it of animal life.
“S’matter with your old bed?” demanded Gilly truculently.
“The bed’s all right, but——”
Gilly interrupted this sentence by rising and walking up to Samuel. He paused several inches away and eyed him fiercely.
“You an’ your crazy ole bed,” he began. “You an’ your crazy——”
“Go to it, Gilly,” murmured some one.
“Show