Winner Take All

The lemon limousine was waiting at the curb. And Dunham stepped out of it, again with his preposterous nimbleness, when Felicity appeared. He stood holding wide the door. But the girl gave him only a nice little nod. She slipped her hand happily into the crook of Perry's arm.

Hamilton had a glimpse of Pig-iron Dunham's face.

"Hooked!" he exclaimed. "Hooked!"

But he had a good look at Perry Blair's too, as the pair passed.

"Dammitt!" he snapped. "Dammitt!" And yet folks wondered why a chap who knocked around this city hunting news sometimes drank more than was good for him.

CHAPTER VII
AS WILLOWS BUD IN SPRING

Cecille was still up, staring out of the window, when Felicity and Perry Blair came in that night. Perry stayed but a moment, only long enough to promise that he would come again. Then he was gone. And Felicity was standing before the other girl, every line of her pulsing triumph.

"Not him!" Cecille cried. She could not have understood the triumph better had Felicity explained with a torrent of words.

"Oh, not him!" with quick, unthinking horror. "He—he's only a boy."

"Who?" demanded Felicity blankly.

"Mr—Mr. Blair."

Felicity's laugh was staccato.

"Him? Good Lord, no. Dunham!" She fairly sang it. "Dunham. Pig-iron Dunham. I knew if I waited I'd cop. Now watch me. Watch my dust!"

Cecille wondered why she didn't pack her bag and get out. But she didn't. She stayed. And later, a little timidly, she inquired about Blair.

"Perry Blair?" Felicity with a racing tongue had been describing how Dunham led her away from the near-accident.

"Perry? Oh, he's a prize-fighter. Light-weight champion, or he was for a minute or so. He wouldn't play the game when he had his chance, I guess, so Dunham and the bunch broke him. Something like that. I never did hear the inside stuff. But they say he was a bust anyway—just a morning-glory—and didn't know his luck. But do I? Did I play the game to-night? Did I pass up Pig-iron and his limousine to come home in a flat-wheeled trolley with my hero, who's already made him sore once? Oh, didn't I though! I guess I'm crazy!"

Cecille recoiled a little from that.

A prize-fighter. A bruiser. A plug-ugly. But—but—why, that wasn't possible. And if your idea of such a one is what Cecille's once was, neither will he fill your eye.

Just a kid. Hamilton had hit it off aptly at that. Level-eyed and diffident of tongue, with only a hint of his hidden bodily perfection lurking in breadth of shoulder and slenderness of waist.

A prize-fighter! Cecille fell asleep wondering how soon he would come again. As to whether he would come at all she was never for a moment in doubt. Once she had watched his eyes follow Felicity across the room she knew. But she hadn't felt sorry for him as Hamilton had. She felt sorry for herself and bitter against Perry. For the time she hated him.

Nor did she have to wonder long. Perry came the next night and escorted Felicity to the Roof. And the next. And next. Then Felicity realized that it would not be good policy to make Dunham sulk. Indeed she knew her luck. Indeed she played the game. The third evening she left Perry at home with Cecille.

And for six whole weeks Broadway nudged and watched it. Broadway watched Perry Blair's courtship of Felicity and Dunham's, if you can call the latter's unhurried pursuit that. Dunham was complacent and patient, Felicity's tactics were not new to him and he did not mind being made conspicuous. And Perry Blair never knew they nudged; never knew they laughed. There is some satisfaction in that. But it is far finer, I think, to be sure that Broadway never guessed at all of the other courtship which went steadily forward in the same interval, elementally, naturally as willows bud in spring. Perry himself was unaware of it. Cecille too—for a while.

For Felicity left him oftener and oftener to the other girl. And almost immediately a common need for the companionship of the other was born in both of them. Upon the boy's part it must have been the urge to carry on his courtship, even vicariously. Lonesomeness was the way Cecille explained it to herself until with the passage of a little time she could no longer tell herself that lie and believe it. And that marked the beginning of a long bad period for her.

She ceased soon to hate him when he spoke of Felicity. Whenever he observed haltingly, as he did over and over again, that it was no place for a girl like her (Fiegenspann's) and that she should be gotten out before it was too late, she learned to agree with him mechanically. Instead of hating his blindness, as persistently as she dared she swung the conversation more and more to other things.

From the beginning she found it hard to make him talk about himself. That instantly set him apart from all other men in her experience. For they had talked of little else. And yet, when finally she had it from him, she found his ambition anything but vague.

"I like animals," he told her on one such occasion, "and the—the country. I guess that's what I am, a country boy. I sure would like to own a ranch."

He'd not pressed her so eagerly for her hopes. Scarcely. His singleness of interest at least was wholly masculine. But that didn't deter her. She found herself giving them to him just the same, just as eagerly.

"A ranch!" she seized hungrily upon that word. "A home! A white house on a hill with light green shutters. The house, of course, not the hill." She went further.

"And a white and blue kitchen." Her haste to tell him was bubbling. "With aluminum pots and pans. Dozens! A whole set!"

And, somehow subdued:

"They're very expensive."

Broadway never knew anything about that courtship. But Felicity used to wake up, now and then, and hear the other girl crying softly in the night.

It was a long bad period for Cecille. At first the birth of this wholly new thing within her baffled her own power to reason. She watched its mushroom growth with fascination, just a little aghast. But when, all in a kind of cataclysmic flash, she thought to recognize it for what it was, she shrank away as if from a malignant fungus.

From the first evening one thing had intrigued her. Her discovery that the sensation of pervading cleanliness which she always had from him was not a result of the careful clothes he wore but something more essential made her remember how the Sunday-groomed louts of other days, reeking with cheap toilet water and hair oil, had filled her with dull loathing. She had never attempted an analysis of that distaste. Now trying to analyze its opposite, in the case of Perry Blair, she arrived at a disquieting certainty. She found she could no more be near him, no more glance at him, without being conscious of him physically, than she could strike her head against a wall and not be hurt.

She realized more. She realized how keenly she liked being near him. She realized how often, and for how long, she had been making little opportunities to stand close, so that her shoulder brushed his. How often she had contrived a fleeting contact of their hands. And yet if anybody had tried to tell her that this was the blooming of a perfect thing to be cherished all her days she would have suffered unutterably that she had been found out. As it was she suffered sufficiently. She cried too often into her pillow. But she wasn't yet wholly debased in her own eyes. That came directly, inevitably.

One Saturday afternoon, urged more enthusiastically by him than she had ever been urged before, she accompanied him to a gymnasium far uptown.

"I'm keeping in shape, you see," he told her without his usual diffidence. "I don't know quite why. Everybody says I'm through, but sometimes I think something may turn up. Enough to bring me a little stake anyhow. And, anyway, it pays me a little. I'm working out with Jack English. He's a welter; he's getting ready for a go with Levitt. I've told you a lot about this business, but you can't judge much just from talk. I—I'd like to have you come up and watch me box."

There it was, of a sudden. There was his shyness again, so lamely come upon him that it colored his face. And the halting boyishness of the request had warmed Cecille's face too; warmed her through and through. She knew an impulse to hug his head to her breast, a very mature and motherly impulse.

He had told her much of this business; so much that she hardly recoiled from it at all. A welter—yes, she understood that. Between a light-weight and a middle.

But she hesitated so long that he thought he had guessed her objection and hastened to reassure her.

"There won't be anybody there," he said. "Nobody. Just English and his trainer and me. You needn't be afraid—"

"I'm not," she stopped him. "It's not—that."

So she went.

CHAPTER VIII
MY LAD

She found herself an hour later in a huge light room, with a floor like a dance hall and much strange paraphernalia against the walls. Little of it she was able to identify, though she took it all in with alert and eager eyes. This was the chiefest part of his life, so she must not even seem to slight it. The Indian clubs and dumb-bells—but they were easy. And the roped-off square at one end. That was the ring.

She found herself alone for a while, and was thrilled and excited and very happy. And then a quiet man who was, she guessed correctly, English's trainer came briskly toward her.

"You needn't be afraid." So Perry had assured her.

Surely not if this man's bearing was any criterion. He brought her a chair.

"Thank you." Her voice sounded small in that high-ceiled room. He only bowed in reply and went quietly away.

And then the next time she looked up it was to find Perry standing there beside her—a different Perry—a pagan Perry, stripped of all save trunks and shoes, yet unconscious of his nakedness.

"I'm not afraid," she'd told him. "It's not that."

Now she knew why she had hesitated about coming. And she was sorry, and breathlessly glad.

A pagan Perry, and one more beautiful than she otherwise could ever have dreamed. And yet, after the first startled glance, while she still dropped her head and put palms to her cheeks to hide a furious color, his lack of self-consciousness dismayed her, until it occurred to her that these were his working clothes—casual, ordinary. And with that a queer thought, seemingly unrelated, flashed through her head. She remembered that women almost never went to prize-fights—it was a man's sport—and she was jealously glad over that.

It shamed her. But she looked again. And again. And sudden rebellion at that shame led her to a wholly spontaneous, wholly unconsidered act. Perry was deep in abstraction. She knew what he was brooding over. That made her rebellious, too. Suddenly she reached out and laid her hand upon his bare shoulder.

He looked around and smiled.

"Hard?" He believed he understood the expression he had surprised in her eyes.

"I'm in pretty good shape. I'm pretty hard."

She made only a muffled attempt at reply. She found it, without speaking, hard enough to breathe.

Hard? Yes. Unexpectedly undeniable, like a billiard ball. Nor could she very well stammer that it was the smoothness of his skin which had stunned her. She dropped her head again. She could not have kept it up after that and kept her eyelids open.

When she finally lifted it Perry was already in the ring and English vaulting the ropes. English was as unclothed as the other, yet she found immediately that she could look at him without any disturbing mixture of ecstasy and guilt. And even critically, too. He was thick, bulky. He did not make one catch one's breath. And brown. And Perry's whiteness! She took her lower lip between her teeth.

"Time!" the trainer called.

She cried sharply aloud.

The sound came unsummoned, in spite of herself.

Why, they had just been standing there together—just talking—just laughing—just boys! But with that signal they had exploded into action. No other word could hope to convey that sudden burst of motion.

They touched gloves! She followed that. English tried to hit him! She followed that. And then thud! thud! thud! She could not beat as swiftly with one fist the palm of her other hand as Perry's glove struck thrice the welter's face.

Thud! thud! thud! And skip and shuffle—thud! And a straining, desperate embrace.

"Oh, he's so much bigger," she heard herself wailing. "He's so much bigger!"

And the trainer, remembering through it all her presence:

"Watch it! Watch it! Watch—that—left—hand!"

She saw then that it was Perry's short, jabbing, stiff left forearm which perplexed the heavier man. She saw the latter set himself to swing, and take it in the face, and go off balance. And set and take it again. And she didn't cry out any more. She leaned forward, so tensely set herself in every muscle that she found she was tired when the trainer stopped it.

"Time!"

The trainer she learned then was not pleased. He snarled at Jack English. But English only grinned.

"Slow!" he said. "Slow! Oh, boy! So'd you look slow trying to pace the Empire State Express."

And there was more. Faster, faster and faster. And cruder! He could never tell her again that this was merely sport. And English was bigger and his size did count. At the last he seemed barely to snap his right gloved hand forward, and Perry staggered back.

"Time!"

She thanked God, out loud, for that.

Perry stood for a while, his back toward her, sagging against the ropes. And English, one hand on his shoulder, was talking to him.

"Is he hurt?" she weakly asked the trainer.

He gave her a fleet glance.

"Some. Not bad." And louder to the other two:

"That's plenty."

A second later Perry nodded across the room to her and went to dress. But Jack English slid through the ropes and approached. There was some blood on his lip, and he wiped it away. She marveled at so little sign of conflict. He came straight to her, glistening with sweat. The trainer threw him a robe, which he wrapped about him to his very chin. She thought the welter-weight was bashful, too. And Irish—that without a doubt from his bright eyes.

"Your lad?" he asked.

"My—my what?"

She'd hardly been ready for the abrupt question. It confused her.

"Your steady?" This time he nodded toward the door through which Perry had disappeared.

Jack English was almost thirty—an old man for the prize-ring—and had a family. Under his bright regard Cecille stammered, and stammered a lie.

"Yes," she said, not steadily, and very softly indeed. "Yes, my—my lad."

English nodded sagely.

"Been worried about him lately, I suppose? Bothered by what folks are saying?"

"I—I haven't heard much," she said, and this was all the truth.

"Don't you!" he advised her. "Don't you listen. And don't you believe, either."

Still that bright regard. And thereupon Cecille realized that she had been troubled deeply by one thing which she had heard. Felicity had passed it on to her.

"They say he cheated," she voiced it, wide-eyed. "That he has a—yellow streak."

"So's a Bengal tiger." Such succinctness was reassuring. "A whole lot of 'em. And a man like him don't cheat. You'd oughta know that." Laconic, but good to listen to. And again:

"Don't you worry. I never saw a man so fast—so quick! That's why I'm using him. And some day—some day when he's in earnest—he's going to find out that he can hit. And they? They've said words that they'll choke then to swallow."

"I hope so." Her voice was meek and small.

"I know so," said English. "Don't you worry. You've picked a game guy. He can take punishment. You stick!"

"I—I mean to." Her voice was smaller still.

She wanted to cry.

And that night when they were riding home together upon a bus-top she tried an experiment. How long they had been riding thus she did not know, but all in a breath she was conscious of the contact of his knee. That was what she had been avoiding—trying to make herself avoid—ever since she'd grown aware of her impulse to stay always close. But now she tried an experiment. She contemplated the contact contentedly for a time. Then drew away.

Perry had been thinking of Felicity.

"Crowding you?" he asked.

She shook her head. And a minute later she let her knee move back against him. Proved! Instantly the tiny pulse had picked up its throbbing in her throat. Yet she let the contact endure. Defiant, she rode all the way home that way.

But the inevitable reaction came. Revulsion might be the more accurate word applied to Cecille. That night she had stripped off one stocking in preparation for bed; she had sat longer than she could have told, broodingly studying her bare knee.

"No smoother than he," she murmured at last.

The sound of her own voice smote her, the thing that she had said.

As her head flung up she encountered in a mirror her own reflection. She stared, transfixed, at her image; her moist, curling mouth, her dusky cheeks and eyelids drooping down. Then she closed her eyelids tight to shut it out. She groped and found the light and snapped it off. And she lay hours upon her face, her hair fanwise on her pillow, sick and debased.

She laid it to the pitch that she had touched. You had to be defiled. But she didn't blame Felicity. She wasn't that kind of a coward. It must be the slow poison of her frank creed. She'd fight it. Game? She'd be game. But this time she refused to wonder why she didn't pack her bag and get out. She couldn't. She knew she couldn't go. She wondered why she couldn't cry.

Thus she found a private little hell in what should have been pure glory.

But she fought. After she had admitted to herself that she loved him, she crouched from it like something in a corner. Love? That wasn't love! And yet Felicity in all her passionless calculation had never once—

It baffled her, bowed her down. It was too snarled now. She'd never make it out. But she wouldn't go again to the gymnasium. No! But what of that? She had only to close her eyes to see. She fought it.

It was a very hot though private little hell.

CHAPTER IX
DUNHAM TALKS BUSINESS

And presently Perry learned why he had been keeping in shape. Something did turn up. It happened in this wise:

Felicity had been very canny; she'd made each trump card tell. And with Perry Blair waved always in his face, Dunham had grown ugly.

"You know I'm crazy about you," he complained. "Give that four-flusher the gate."

"A million Johns have told me that," Felicity answered. "Talk business."

But Dunham had refused to talk business. He was ugly about it. And then he thought to see a way around. He sent for Perry Blair, and Perry came. That surprised Dunham. He had expected in the end to have to go to Blair. He did not know how Felicity, unwittingly, had helped him.

For Felicity, unable not to enjoy a little the boy's inarticulate devotion, had indulged herself. With artistry that would have called down from Hamilton even hotter sarcasm, she had let Perry glimpse her soul; not the cheap and tawdry thing which unsympathetic persons were likely to think it, but her real one, a little saddened, a little forlorn!

"I wish I could get away from all this," she'd said, with appropriate wistfulness. "I'm dead sick of it—sick of it all. I wish I could go away—somewhere—anywhere where things are clean. Where there are trees and growing grass—"

It was a very good speech. She knew it must be because she had heard a high-priced leading lady utter it in a three-dollar-and-a-half Broadway success.

And it proved effective uttered by Felicity. For it fooled Perry. Fooled him badly just when he had begun to speculate a little concerning her soul himself. Perry believed her. But then it is easy for any woman to fool any man. Twice as easy when he wants so badly to be fooled.

Perry cursed his lack of ready money. And then Dunham sent for him. And he went, hiding his eagerness.

They held the conversation in Dunham's book-lined office. The books were never used; the office saw strange usage. And the conference was short.

"Ready to be a good boy?" Dunham asked.

Perry rose to leave.

"Sit down," said Dunham. "That was intended as a joke. My mistake."

But it angered him; angered him almost as much as it did to look upon the boy's unsquandered youth.

"I've got something for you at last," he offered. "If you care to take it."

"I'll listen," said Perry.

So Dunham drew readily upon invention.

"We've talked it over," he said. "Devereau and I and some of the other boys. And we've decided that there's nothing in it for any of us as the situation now stands. The title's too obscured. You claim it. So does Montague. So we've decided to offer you a match with—"

"I've challenged Montague," Perry interrupted. "He paid no attention to it."

"Not Montague," Dunham corrected silkily. "Holliday."

And instantly Perry knew what Dunham hoped to do.

"Why not Montague?" he asked.

"Why not Holliday?" countered Dunham, his voice silkier still.

And Perry couldn't very well say because Montague was a boxer first and a fighter afterward. He couldn't say because he knew they considered Holliday, young, wicked, punishing, even more certain to whip him. He hesitated.

"But you're going to whip Holliday," Dunham went on tentatively, as if sure of what was in the other's mind.

Perry watched him.

"We're going to see to that. It'll be a twenty-round fight to a decision. Somewhere in the South. But you'll stop Holliday in the eighth round."

"I fight fair," said Perry, "or I don't fight at all."

"Don't get excited." Dunham was laughing at him a little, not pleasantly. "You'll be no party to anything—ah—iniquitous. Beat him before that if you're able. But it'll come in the eighth, don't doubt that. I'm just telling you beforehand so that you'll lose no sleep in case you're afraid of Holliday." That was a thrust. "I'm telling you so you needn't kill yourself training to get ready, though you don't look over-fed." That was another. Yet Perry felt that he had balanced them both when he looked the huge man's jelly-bulk up and down.

"Holliday's going to be champion some day," Dunham went unconcernedly on. "He's bound to be, whether we want him or not. But Montague comes first. Montague's been a good boy. We merely require your agreement to meet him should you dispose of Holliday, that is all. And since that is assured—" He waved a fat hand. "Personally I believe that Montague is very much better than you are—no offense intended—and against him you can take care of yourself."

Rapidly Perry cast it up. They were that confident of Holliday's superiority! And they didn't care whether he suspected their game or not; they weren't even bothering to work carefully. He could take it or leave it. He'd have to. That rank! That coarse! It was an easy sum. Two and two made four.

"Whatever agreement is fixed between you and Holliday is no affair of mine," he decided at last. "When?"

"A month—five weeks."

"How much?"

Dunham pondered.

"Twenty thousand. We'll give you five for your share."

They were that cool!

"Not me."

"A twenty-thousand-dollar purse seems reasonable," ruminated Dunham. "It may not be a popular match. And Holliday'll come high."

"That's your affair. I'll fight one way."

Dunham lifted an eyebrow.

"Well?"

"Winner take all."

"But you're certain to win! The fight'll be fixed!"

Perry sensed then how greatly the gross man wanted to laugh. Not bother to train? That old one! Did Dunham really think he was taking him at his word? Why, his mind in all the days to come would be riveted on just one thing—that eighth round. He wanted to laugh, too, bitterly. Did they think he was that innocent!

"That's your affair," he repeated. "I fight winner take all."

There are some who insist that Pig-iron Dunham was not without a virtue. His next words seem to prove it.

"Better take your five thousand," he suggested good-naturedly. "It's better than nothing. Holliday could double-cross us."

That cool!

"Winner take all," droned Perry.

"Winner take all!" Dunham snapped.

And that afternoon they signed articles, Hamilton acting for Blair.

The same night Perry told Felicity what he had done.

"So I—I'll either have twenty thousand dollars in a month or so," he made bad work of it, "or I'll know that I'm never likely to have it. If you—if you'll wait … I'm glad you like the country. I've always wanted a ranch."

Felicity was needlessly callous, either because it made her despise herself a little for the part she had played, or because she was just Felicity. Surely she was more brutal than she need have been.

For she sat, chin propped upon one hand, and stared derisively into the boy's self-conscious eyes.

"You poor hick!" she said deliberately. "You poor cross-roads hick! Twenty thousand dollars? Why, that's chicken-feed compared with my price."

In one way it was merciful. It was quickly over. Perry's self-consciousness passed. Calm as she had been impudent he surveyed her. Once his lip twitched; he half-opened his mouth as if to speak, and then thought better of it. He'd talk to no woman like that. He left her without a word.

And she sat biting her lip a little while, till Dunham came to the table.

"Honey—" he began.

"Don't honey me!" The words lashed back at him. "I'm sick of honeying. Talk cash!"

And Dunham was sick of temporizing.

He talked.

So when Cecille came in the next day, Saturday, at noon, and found Felicity with her bag packed, few words were necessary. She knew the moment had come.