The Best Short Stories of 1918 Part 43

"Exactly!" he said, "exactly! That's what we always thought in Dubuque-and I've known Jim Corey since the day he was born. Why, he'd go away on one of his trips, and stay a year, sometimes two, and the day after he'd get back you'd think he'd never been out of Dubuque, except he was so glad to be home."

And, talking with a growing and homely fluency, the nasal quality of his rather pleasant voice increasing according to the sharpness of his interest, he proceeded to sketch in, with the fine brush of his provincialism, all the details of that picture I had had so clearly of Corey that night in Paris, more than four years before.

It was astonis.h.i.+ng how right my picture had been; how they, who had known him always, had been no better able than I to visualize Corey outside Dubuque.

And it seemed to have been the merest chance which had led him, the year of his graduation from medical school, to take his first trip away from his native State. He had "put himself" through college, and had come out with all the school had to give, wanting more. It was doubtful if Corey had ever read a novel through in his life, but the college library yielded up treasures in scientific and medical books whose plots he remembered as easily as boarding-school girls remember the plots of Laura Jean Libbey.

In the end he had happened to be engrossed in some experiments or other with herbs, and it was that which led him to decide upon going to China.

He was going to study Chinese herbs. And he had gone, straight, without any stops _en route_, as he did everything. But when he had been in Pekin two weeks the Boxer Rebellion broke out, and there he was in the thick of it; and a G.o.d-send he was, too, in the foreign legations, fighting and caring for wounded by turns, day and night, youth and strength and his fresh fine skill counting for ten in that beleaguered handful of desperate men.

It was for that he had got his first decoration-j.a.pan's Order of the Rising Sun, and a little later had come from France, for the same service, and quite to the surprise of Corey, the scarlet ribbon of the Legion of Honor.

There had been, of course, the appropriate furore-pictures and full-page interviews in the San Francisco papers on his way home, and Dubuque expecting to see him come back transformed, a hero, conscious of honors won. But he had arrived, to their amazement, merely himself, and they had accepted him, after a day or two, at his own valuation.

That was the first, and it seemed after that, although he was always off to one of the far corners of the earth, they were never able to look upon him when he came home as a distinguished traveler returned. He was simply, as he seemed to wish to be, "Jim," or sometimes "Doc" Corey come home again. And yet they knew about the things he had done. They knew where he had been. And they knew, too, about his decorations. They had seen them on one or two occasions, when he had been the guest of the evening at the "Business Men's Banquet," and he had "dressed up," the old gentleman said, in a full-dress suit and all his decorations. "Two rows, all kinds, by then." One could imagine him doing that, in a spirit of comic masquerade. And one could imagine him also doing it merely to please them.

His wife, after he was married, used to get out his decorations and show them to her women friends, and at this Corey only laughed good-humoredly. But she never showed them to men; she seemed to sense how that would embarra.s.s him.

I asked when he had married her, and who she was.

She had been visiting friends, he said, in Dubuque, when Corey came back, he believed, from the Balkan War, in the spring of 1913. Pretty quick work they made of it, too. In August that same summer they had the wedding at her house in Des Moines. But it had surprised n.o.body. They knew he'd been wanting to settle down; and she was just the right kind of girl-nice and wholesome, and fond of her home. At last, he said, he was going to begin to live.

He had dropped at once into his place, exactly as if he had never been away at all-as if, after his graduation, he had come home to practise his profession. There was nothing even about his house to indicate the traveler; no obtrusive trophies of strange lands; no bizarre knick-knacks. In a room in the attic were a half-full dunnage-bag, a traveler's kit, and an officer's trunk, small size, the lid pressed down but warped a little so that it would not lock. And in the corner three pairs of heavy, discarded boots, gathering dust. That was all.

And he _was_ happy; naturally, sanely, unaffectedly happy. There was no room for doubt about that. "Honesty," Mr. Ewing called it. He used that word over and over again in relation to Corey's psychology at that time.

"And there wasn't," he said, "a hypocritical bone in Jim Corey's body."

One could see what he meant, and see, too, that it had, in his mind, some obscure bearing on what came after.

He waited a little here before he went on, as if he were going over to himself incidents too trivial to relate, but which would not separate themselves from his memory of Corey in those days.

"Well," he began, abruptly, rousing himself from his secret contemplation, "there was that winter, nineteen-thirteen, and the next summer, nineteen-fourteen; and then the European war began."

"And he went!" I supplemented, involuntarily, since from the trend of the narrative I had, of course, seen that coming.

"No," said Mr. Ewing in a surprisingly quiet tone of contradiction. "No, he didn't. I was like you. _I_ thought he'd go."

"You thought he _would_!" I exclaimed, for it seemed to me he had just been trying to make me see how unshakably he had believed Corey to be fixed in Dubuque.

"Certainly," he said. "You'd think it would be only natural he'd want to go. Wouldn't _you_?" he asked, as if he had detected in my expression some disposition not to agree.

"_I_ would," I said, still wondering at the ease with which he had brushed aside what I had foreseen was to be his climax. For my imagination had long since outrun his story to the end of the usual domestic tragedy, wherein Corey had, at the first call of adventure, forsaken without a word his home and his wife, to find (had not Mr.

Ewing told me in the very beginning of his death, three months before, some place in Europe?) his abrupt and unexpected denouement.

There had been, then, something else. "But he did," I put forth, "finally go? You said, I think, that he died over there?"

"Oh yes-finally. But that, you see, wasn't what counted. It wasn't the same. It was the way he went."

"The _way_?" I repeated.

"Yes. He didn't go the way, I mean, that I thought he'd go. The way _you_ thought, too."

I said I didn't understand; that I couldn't see what difference it made _how_ he went, so long as he did go in the end.

"It made _all_ the difference," said Mr. Ewing. "You see, he didn't rush off, at the first news of the fighting, the way you'd think a man would.

Why, we used to read the papers and talk over the war news together, and every day I'd expect to hear him say something about going. He knew all the places, and the way everything was over there, but he never seemed to care to be there himself. He used to come round to my house just before supper-time in the evenings and we'd sit on the porch and talk, or maybe I'd go round to his porch. I asked him one day if he didn't want to go, and all he said was, 'Why should I?' And I said I didn't know, it seemed to me that he would. And he said he was comfortable for the first time in his life; he never had liked b.u.mping around in all sorts of places; hated it as a matter of fact. I asked him why, if that was the case, he'd kept it up for so long, all those years; and he laughed, and said _he_ didn't know; he never _had_ been able to figure that out."

Mr. Ewing fell silent here, tapping his right foot on the carpet a little impatiently and looking speculatively, yet without seeing, at me.

I had the impression that he felt he had utterly failed, up to now, in making some subtle point in his story clear, and was considering how best he might make me see. I was sure of it when, after a longish pause, he continued, for he seemed to have decided upon the abandonment of subtleties altogether, and to give me, for my own interpretation, the facts as they occurred.

Things had gone on without any change all that winter and the next summer. In August Corey went to some sort of convention of medical men in Philadelphia. He was to have been gone something over two weeks. At the end of that time Mrs. Corey had received a letter saying that some experiments in which he was specially interested had developed rather unexpectedly, and Corey, together with several others, had been detailed to stay on and work them out to their conclusion. He couldn't say just how many days it would take; he would let her know.

At the end of another two weeks Corey was still away. The first phase of the experiments had unhappily come to grief, and they had had to begin from the first again. It was annoying, but since they had gone into it, there was nothing else to be done. He would leave for home on the moment of the work's completion. Meantime there would be little opportunity for letter-writing. She was not to worry.

As the days went on Mrs. Corey began to regret not having gone along in the beginning, as he had wanted her to do. Mr. Ewing stopped in now and then to inquire. Her reticence made him wonder if she might not be hearing. It was plain that she _did_ worry, but, as Mr. Ewing said, she was not the talkative kind.

And then, one morning, just two months from the day he had left, Corey arrived unexpectedly by the ten-fifty train. Mr. Ewing, pa.s.sing the house on his way home that evening, had been surprised to see Corey, in his s.h.i.+rt-sleeves, tr.i.m.m.i.n.g shrubs in the garden. And he had stopped to welcome him back, and they had talked about the war in quite the old way, so that from that evening on it was exactly the same as it had been before Corey had gone to his convention in Philadelphia.

It appears that all this time a very natural intimacy was growing up between these two, gentle old Mr. Ewing and Corey. And I can imagine that Corey, who became, as it were, the instantaneous friend of every one, had made in his life very few actual contacts, few, if any, real and intimate friends.h.i.+ps. And perhaps that was why this friends.h.i.+p, based as it was on such small outward manifestations as talking over the news in the daily papers together, had prospered. Then, too, there was the relations.h.i.+p, distant enough to be free of demands.

Corey had returned from the Philadelphia trip the last week in October.

It was on a Sunday afternoon near the middle of December that Mr. Ewing, sitting reading his weekly ill.u.s.trated paper, looked up to see through the window Corey coming quickly along the walk. Mr. Ewing was struck by something peculiar in his friend's appearance, something hurried in the set of his hat and overcoat, yet as if he himself were entirely unconscious of haste.

He turned in at the gate, and Mr. Ewing got up and opened the door.

Corey came through it, Mr. Ewing said, as if escaping from something outside, something of which he was physically afraid. He almost pushed past Mr. Ewing and into the room, and with scarcely a glance to make sure they were alone, he spoke, and his voice was strained like a note on a too taut violin string:

"She's found it! _This_-where I'd had it hid!"

He held extended in his open hand, as if there were no longer any reason for concealing it from any one, what appeared to Mr. Ewing's bewildered eyes to be a bit of ribbon, striped green and red, and a bit of bronze metal attached.

"What is it?" he asked, stupefied by the completeness of the change that had come upon the man before him.

"It's the _Croix_!" Corey's voice was impatient, "The _Croix de Guerre_!"

Mr. Ewing stared at the bright-colored thing, trying to comprehend.

Corey still held it outstretched in his hand, and the bronze Maltese cross with its crossed swords slipped through his fingers and hung down.

Corey's voice was going on. Mr. Ewing had missed something.

"... So now she knows," was the end of what he heard-and in that instant his eye caught the words engraved on the cross, _Republique Francaise_, and the full meaning of its being there in Corey's hand burst suddenly upon him.

The new French decoration! The _Croix de Guerre_!

"You've _been_ there?" he managed to say. "You've been over there?"

"How else would I get it?" said Corey, with a kind of abandon, as if he were confessing now to some fullness of shame. "You see, she's right. I couldn't resist."

Mr. Ewing was lost. "Resist what?"

"This!" Corey closed his fingers now on the _Croix_. "A new decoration!"