Black is White

by George Barr McCutcheon

Up to half-past nine they discussed the blue envelope with every inmate of the house, from Mrs John Desmond, the housekeeper, down to the voiceless but eloquent decanter of port that stood between them, first on the arm of one chair, then the other. They were very old men; they could soliloquise without in the least disturbing each other. An observer would say, during these periods of abstraction, that their remarks were addressed to the decanter, and that the poor decanter had something to say in return. But, for all that, their eyes seldom left the broad blue envelope that had lain there since half-past eight.

They knew that it came directly or indirectly from the man to whom they owed their present condition of comfort and security after half a century of vicissitudes; from the man whose life they had saved more than once in those old, evil days when comforts were so few that they passed without recognition in the maelstrom of events. From mid-ocean James Brood was speaking to his son. His words—perhaps his cry for help—were lying there on the end of the table, confined in a flimsy blue envelope, and no one dared to liberate them.

Frederic Brood deserved a thrashing for staying out so late—at least, so the decanter had been told a dozen times or more, and the clock, too, for that matter, to say nothing of the confidences reposed in the coal-scuttle, the fire implements, and other patient listeners of a like character.

It may be well to state that these bosom friends and comrades of half a hundred years had quarrelled at seven o'clock that evening over a very important matter—the accuracy of individual timepieces. The watch of Mr Danbury Dawes had said it was five minutes before seven; that of Mr Joseph Riggs three minutes after. Since then neither had spoken to the other, but each slyly had set his watch by the big clock in the hall before going into dinner, and was prepared to meet any argument.

Twenty years ago these two old cronies had met James Brood in one of the blackest holes of Calcutta, a derelict being swept to perdition with the swiftness and sureness of a tide that knows no pause. They found him when the dregs were at his lips and the stupor of defeat in his brain. Without meaning to be considered Samaritans, good or bad, they dragged him from the depths and found that they had revived a man. Those were the days when James Brood's life meant nothing to him, days when he was tortured by the thought that it would be all too long for him to endure; yet he was not the kind to murder himself as men do who lack the courage to go on living.

Weeks after the rescue in Calcutta, these two soldiers of fortune, and another John Desmond, learned from the lips of the man himself that he was not such as they, but rich in this world's goods, richer than the Solomon of their discreet imagination. Shaken, battered, but sobered, he related portions of his life's story to them, and they guessed the rest, being men who had lived by correctly guessing for half the years of their adventurous lives.

Like Brood they were Americans. But, unlike him, they had spent most of their lives in the deserts of time and had sown seeds which could never be reaped except in the form of narrative. Ever in pursuit of the elusive thing called luck, they had found it only in hairbreadth escapes from death, in the cunning avoidance of catastrophe, in devil-may-care leaps in the dark, in all the ways known to men who find the world too small.

Never had luck served them on a golden platter. For twenty-five years and more these three men, Dawes, Riggs, and poor John Desmond, had thrashed through the world in quest of the pot of gold at the foot of the rainbow, only to find that the rainbow was for ever lifting, for ever shifting; yet they complained not. They throve on misfortune, they courted it along with the other things in life, and they were unhappy only when ill luck singled one of them out and spared the others.

What Brood told them of his life brought the grim smile of appreciation to the lips of each. He had married a beautiful foreigner—an Austrian, they gathered—of excellent family, and had taken her to his home in New York City, a house in lower Fifth Avenue where his father and grandfather had lived before him. And that was the very house in which two of the wayfarers, after twenty years, now sat in rueful contemplation of a blue envelope.

A baby boy came to the Broods in the second year of their wedded life, but before that there had come a man—a music-master, dreamy-eyed, handsome, Latin; a man who played upon the harp as only the angels are believed to play. In his delirious ravings Brood cursed this man and the wife he had stolen away from him; he reviled the baby boy, even denying him; he laughed with blood-curdling glee over the manner in which he had cast out the woman who had broken his heart and crushed his pride; he wailed in anguish over the mistake he had made in allowing the man to live that he might gloat in triumph.