Part 43 (1/2)

”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.”