Part 42 (1/2)

We laughed, all of us, for everybody had seen the cases of medals and decorations at the Galleries. I believe for an instant the youngster was half inclined to think he _had_ bought them. I know _I_ was. As some kind of outlandish practical joke, of course. It seemed, absurd as the idea was, so much likelier than that he could have been through the kind of experiences which result in being decorated by foreign governments.

And such an imposing array! The scarlet ribbon of the Legion of Honor, the green of the j.a.panese ”Rising Sun,” the brilliant stripes of Russian and English decorations, and strange ones I had never seen before!

You see, he had turned out much more Middle West than we had imagined.

In the first ten minutes of our conversation he had spoken of ”home,”

and mentioned the name of the town-Dubuque, Iowa! And a few minutes later he gave us, by the merest chance phrase or two, involving the fact that his married sister lived ”a block and a half down the street” from his mother's house, a perfectly complete picture of that street-broad and shady and quiet, of his mother's yellow frame house, and the other, white with a green lawn round it, where his sister lived. And the point was that he was making no effort toward such an effect. He was only being himself.

His dinner companion, the Balkan officer, came in presently and addressed Corey as ”Doctor” (I adjusted myself to _that_, still with the Dubuque setting, however), and it was in the conversation following upon the new introduction that the object of his being in Paris came out. He told us, quite by the way, though not in the least depreciating the importance of his mission-that he was in Paris for a few days looking up anesthetics for the Serbian army. He had been working, he said, down in the Balkans since shortly after the outbreak of the war, in charge of a sanitary section. They'd been out of anesthetics for some time now-impossible to get them in-and they'd been operating, amputating the poor devils' legs and arms, _without_ anesthetics; and now at last he'd left things long enough to come up to Paris himself and see what could be done. He was starting back the next day or the day after that.

Corey, from Dubuque! In a makes.h.i.+ft Serbian field hospital, in that terrible cold, performing delicate and difficult operations-wholesale, as they must have been performed-on wounded Balkan soldiers; probing for bullets in raw wounds-_that_ was a picture to set up beside the one we had of him in Dubuque!

And yet-it wasn't at all a question of doubt (we'd read it all in the papers day after day); it wasn't that we didn't believe Corey was telling the truth; his evidence was too obvious for that-the picture didn't somehow succeed in painting itself-I can't to this day say why.

Surely the Balkans just then-operations without anesthetics, the pageantry and blood-red color of war-surely there was pigment of more brilliant hue than any contained in the mere statement that his married sister lived a block and a half down the street from his mother's. But the picture wasn't painted. Corey wasn't the artist to do it. Not, mind you, that he tried; he was as far from trying to impress one, from affectation, as a boy of fourteen.

I do remember my imagination taking me far enough to think that if I were a soldier, and wounded, and had to have a leg or an arm off, I couldn't think of a man I'd rather have do it than Corey. Oh yes, I believed him; I knew he'd been down there in the Balkans, as he said, and was going back again to-morrow-but I went right on seeing him in Dubuque, practising his quiet, prosperous profession in the same suite of offices his father had used before him.

He himself lent, by the things he said, force and reality to the illusion. He'd like nothing better, he declared, than settling down in Dubuque for the rest of his life, and enjoying a home of his own. He intended, in fact, to do just that when he had finished the Balkan business. ”I'm that type,” he said. ”I never was meant to knock around the world like this.”

And he _was_ that type, so much the type that it seemed hardly credible he shouldn't turn out the exception to prove the rule. He had already, one would think, made a sufficient divergence.

And that, I suppose-the feeling that no personality _could_ follow so undeviating a line, so obviously its own path-was responsible for my impression, when I came later to hear how completely he _had_ followed it, of his being because of it much more unique than he could ever have made himself by turning aside. True enough, there are people who, if they heard the tale, might maintain that he could hardly have accomplished a more striking divergence from type. I'll have to confess I thought so myself-at the first; certainly I thought so all the while I listened, long afterward, to the quiet, though somewhat nasal, and thoroughly puzzled voice of the gentle old man from Dubuque, who seemed, as he recounted the story, to be seeking in me some solution of Corey's phenomenon.

I thought it even afterward, until, sitting there where he had left me, I began slowly to orient the facts in relation to Corey's character. And then, all at once, it came to me that it was exactly because Corey _hadn't_ diverged that he did what he did. He went straight through everything to his predestined end. Any other man would have had stages, subtleties, degrees of divergence. But Corey knew none of those things.

It was from old Mr. Ewing of Dubuque that I had my first news of Corey after that night in the Paris hotel.

He must have gone back to his army in the Balkans the next day, for we were to have seen him that night again in case he had to stay over, and when I asked I was told that Monsieur had gone.

Things kept reminding me of him. The names of streets and places in Paris recalled his flat American misp.r.o.nunciation of them-misp.r.o.nunciations which sounded half as if he were in fun and half as if he didn't know any better, or hadn't paid enough attention to learn them correctly. I believe he saw, or was subconsciously aware of, his own incongruity. Still, one would think he'd have become, so to speak, accustomed to himself in the strange role by then.

I think I must have spoken of him rather often to people, so long as I remained in Paris; and it was, if not exactly curious, at least a little less than one would expect, that I never came in contact with any one else who knew him, until that day, a little while ago, when I met, in the smoking-car of a west-bound train out of Chicago, the man who told me all there was, or ever will be, for any man to tell about Corey.

He may have been sitting there near me all the time; I don't know. But then he was not the kind of man one notices in a smoking-car, or any other place, for that matter. Certainly you would never suspect that so gray and uninteresting an envelope could inclose the ma.n.u.script of a story like Corey's. You had seen hundreds like him before, and you knew what they contained-stereotyped circular letters full of dull, indisputable facts, nothing you wanted or cared to know. And it was precisely because I wished later on one of those very dull facts that I came to speak to my man.

The train coming to a sudden stop brought me out of my oblivion, and, looking idly out of the window to see what place it might be, I was seized by one of those fits of petty annoyance incident to such interruptions, for the train had run so far past the platform that I found it impossible to see the name of the station. I got myself out of my comfortable position, and tried, by turning completely about, to see back to the station. But we had gone too far. And then-I haven't an idea why, for it was of absolutely no importance to me-I looked about for some one to ask. And nearest me, sitting rather uncomfortably upright in his big leather chair, the little rack at his elbow guiltless of any gla.s.s, and holding listlessly in his hand the latest popular magazine, sat a gray-haired, gray-suited old gentleman, looking lonesomely out of his window.

”I beg pardon,” I said. ”Can you tell me what place this is?”

He turned gratefully at the sound of my voice. ”It's --,” he told me.

I've never been able to recall what name he said, because, I suppose, of what came after.

It was certainly not surprising that he should think, from my manner, that I had some interest in the place, and he went on, after a moment's hesitating silence, to say, in his un.o.btrusive but unmistakable Middle-West voice, that the town was a milling center-flour and meal, and that kind of thing.

I saw that I had committed myself to something more in the way of conversation than my laconic word of thanks for his information and a lapse into silence. I wondered what I could say. He was such a nice, kindly old gentleman, and he would never in the world have addressed any one first. I hit upon the most obvious sequence, and asked if, then, he was familiar with that part of the country. He said, oh yes, he was ”a native of Iowa.”

”Indeed?” I said, for lack of anything else to say, and his statement not having been a particularly provocative one.

”Yes,” he said. ”My home is Dubuque.”

Dubuque! Dubuque! What was it I knew about Dubuque? The name struck me instantly with a sense of importance, as if it had rung the bell of a target concealed out of sight. I sought about in my mind for a full minute before I recalled, with a kind of start-Corey.