The Fighting Chance

He had been a fool. He had imagined that he could control himself, and practise the moderation that other men practised when they chose. The puerile restraint annoyed him; his implied inability to master himself humiliated him, the more so because, secretly, he was horribly afraid in the remote depths of his heart.

Exactly how it happened he did not remember, except that he had gone down town on business and had lunched with several men. There was claret. Later he remembered another café, farther up town, and another, more brilliantly lighted. After that there were vague hours--the fierce fever of debauch wrapping night and day in flame through which he moved, unseeing, unheeding, deafened, drenched soul and body in the living fire; or dreaming, feeling the subsiding fury of desire pulse and ebb and flow, rocking him to unconsciousness.

His father's old servants had found him again, this time in the area; and this time the same ankle, not yet strong, had been broken.

Through the waning winter days, as he lay brooding in bitterness, realising that it was all to do over again, Plank's shy visits became gradually part of the routine. But it was many days before Siward perceived in the big, lumbering, pink-fisted man anything to attract him beyond the faintly amused curiosity of one man for another who is in process of establishing himself as the first of a race.

As for reciprocation in other forms except the most superficial, or of permitting a personal note to sound ever so discreetly, Siward tolerated no such idea. Even the tentative advances of Plank hinting on willingness, and perhaps ability, to help Siward in the Amalgamated tangle were pleasantly ignored. Unpaid services rendered by men like Plank were impossible; any obligation to Plank was utterly out of the question. Meanwhile they began to like one another--at least Siward often found himself looking forward with pleasure to a visit from Plank. There had never been any question of the latter's attitude toward Siward.

Plank began to frequent the house, but never informally. It is doubtful whether he could have practised informality in that house even at Siward's invitation. Something of the attitude of a college lower classman for a man in a class above seemed to typify their relations; and that feeling is never entirely eradicated between men, no matter how close their relationship in after-life.

One very bad night Plank came to the house and was admitted by Gumble. Wands, the second man, stood behind the aged butler; both were apparently frightened.

That something was amiss appeared plainly enough; and Plank, instinctively producing a card, dropped it on a table and turned to go. It may have been that the old butler recognised the innate delicacy of the motive, or it may have been a sudden confidence born of the necessities of the case, for he asked Plank to see his young master.