Why not? Was I not a man of imagination? Was I not young and did I not have a strong body?
As I washed the dried blood off my face, put on my Sunday suit and adjusted my tie I in fancy swept the field of commercial adventure with my somewhat damaged eyes. There were the great cities of Chicago and New York I had not yet seen, although I had read much about them and about men who had grown from poverty to riches and power in them. Like all young Americans I had read innumerable tales of men who had begun with nothing and had become great leaders, owners of railroads, governors of states, foreign ambassadors, generals of armies, presidents of great modern republics. Abraham Lincoln walking miles through a storm after a hard day’s work to borrow his first book, Jay Gould the young Wall Street clerk, setting up a great dynasty of wealth, Daniel Drew the cattle dealer becoming a millionaire, Garfield the canal-boat boy and Vanderbilt the ferryman become President and millionaire, Grant the failure, hauling hides from his father’s tannery at Galena, Illinois, to St. Louis—and, it was said, getting so well piped sometimes on the homeward journey that he fell off the wagon—he also became great, the winner of a mighty war, President of his country, a noted traveler, receiving the homage of kings. “And I can carry my liquor better than he could, by all reports,” I said to myself.
Were these men any better than myself? At the moment and in spite of the gloom of an hour before, I thought not, and as for my having but ninety-eight dollars, what did that matter? As a matter of fact one gathered from having read American history that there was a sort of advantage to be gained from starting with nothing. One had something to talk and brag about in one’s old age, and when one became a candidate for President one furnished one’s campaign managers with materials for campaign slogans.
And now I was dressed and had tiptoed out of the house, tapped on Nora’s door and was waiting for her outside. I had decided that when she came out I would not make an appeal for her woman’s sympathy by telling of what had actually happened to me. “I do not want woman’s sympathy,” I thought proudly. What I wanted was woman’s respect. I wanted to conquer them, to have them at my feet, to stand before them the conquering male.
When Nora came and when we had walked to where there was a street light and she had seen my damaged countenance I began at once to brag and to reconstruct the fight at the warehouse more to my own fancy. Not one but four men had attacked me and I had valiantly stood my ground. An inspiration came. I had got into the fight, I told Nora, because of a woman. A young woman, a working girl like Nora herself had passed the platform and the men at work there with me had begun making remarks that were not very nice. What was I to do? I was one who could never stand quietly by and hear an innocent woman, particularly one who had to work for her living and had perhaps no men of her own to stand up for her, hear such a woman subjected to insult. I had, I told Nora, at once pitched into the four men and there had been a terrible fight.
As I described the fancied affair to Nora the feint and the cross on which I had so depended had worked wonderfully. I had received many hard blows, it was true, and Nora could see by looking at my face how I had suffered, but I had given better than I had received. Like a tornado I had swept up and down the warehouse platform making feints with my right and whipping my powerful left to the jaws of my opponents until at last they were all laid out like dead men before me. And then I had come home, a little fearful that I might have killed one or two of the men but not waiting to see. “I did not care,” I said. “If my opponents have suffered a terrible beating at my hands and if one or two of them die of their injuries it was their own fault. They should have known better than to have insulted a woman in my presence.”
I had told Nora my story and we had walked in silence until we had come to a street lamp when she suddenly stopped and, taking my left hand, turned it up to the light. As I had not succeeded in the actual fight in striking a blow with it, the hand was unmarked by a bruise. “Huh!” said Nora and we went on in silence.
The silence, which was one of the hardest I have ever had to bear, continued until we had finished our walk—which on that evening did not last very long,—and had got back to the house.
On the steps in front we stopped and Nora stood for a time looking at me. It was a look I did not much fancy, but what was I to do? Two or three times during our walk I had tried to begin talking a little and had attempted to patch up the structure of my yarn so that it would not be quite so full of holes and leaky but could think of no way to explain the unbruised surface and uninjured knuckles of my left, so I had taken refuge in a kind of sullen silence.
I had even begun to feel a little injured and angry and was asking myself what right Nora had to question my story—was feeling, to tell the truth, much as I was later to feel when some editor or critic rejected, as not sound, one of my written tales—that is to say, resentful and intolerant of the editor or critic and inclined to call him a fool and to attribute to him all kinds of secret and degrading motives. I was feeling much in this mood, I say, when we had got back to the steps and were standing in the darkness in front.