I do remember my imagination taking me far enough to think that if I were a soldier, and wounded, and had to have a leg or an arm off, I couldn’t think of a man I’d rather have do it than Corey. Oh yes, I believed him; I knew he’d been down there in the Balkans, as he said, and was going back again to-morrow—but I went right on seeing him in Dubuque, practising his quiet, prosperous profession in the same suite of offices his father had used before him.
He himself lent, by the things he said, force and reality to the illusion. He’d like nothing better, he declared, than settling down in Dubuque for the rest of his life, and enjoying a home of his own. He intended, in fact, to do just that when he had finished the Balkan business. “I’m that type,” he said. “I never was meant to knock around the world like this.”
And he was that type, so much the type that it seemed hardly credible he shouldn’t turn out the exception to prove the rule. He had already, one would think, made a sufficient divergence.
And that, I suppose—the feeling that no personality could follow so undeviating a line, so obviously its own path—was responsible for my impression, when I came later to hear how completely he had followed it, of his being because of it much more unique than he could ever have made himself by turning aside. True enough, there are people who, if they heard the tale, might maintain that he could hardly have accomplished a more striking divergence from type. I’ll have to confess I thought so myself—at the first; certainly I thought so all the while I listened, long afterward, to the quiet, though somewhat nasal, and thoroughly puzzled voice of the gentle old man from Dubuque, who seemed, as he recounted the story, to be seeking in me some solution of Corey’s phenomenon.
I thought it even afterward, until, sitting there where he had left me, I began slowly to orient the facts in relation to Corey’s character. And then, all at once, it came to me that it was exactly because Corey hadn’t diverged that he did what he did. He went straight through everything to his predestined end. Any other man would have had stages, subtleties, degrees of divergence. But Corey knew none of those things.
It was from old Mr. Ewing of Dubuque that I had my first news of Corey after that night in the Paris hotel.
He must have gone back to his army in the Balkans the next day, for we were to have seen him that night again in case he had to stay over, and when I asked I was told that Monsieur had gone.
Things kept reminding me of him. The names of streets and places in Paris recalled his flat American mispronunciation of them—mispronunciations which sounded half as if he were in fun and half as if he didn’t know any better, or hadn’t paid enough attention to learn them correctly. I believe he saw, or was subconsciously aware of, his own incongruity. Still, one would think he’d have become, so to speak, accustomed to himself in the strange rôle by then.
I think I must have spoken of him rather often to people, so long as I remained in Paris; and it was, if not exactly curious, at least a little less than one would expect, that I never came in contact with any one else who knew him, until that day, a little while ago, when I met, in the smoking-car of a west-bound train out of Chicago, the man who told me all there was, or ever will be, for any man to tell about Corey.
He may have been sitting there near me all the time; I don’t know. But then he was not the kind of man one notices in a smoking-car, or any other place, for that matter. Certainly you would never suspect that so gray and uninteresting an envelope could inclose the manuscript of a story like Corey’s. You had seen hundreds like him before, and you knew what they contained—stereotyped circular letters full of dull, indisputable facts, nothing you wanted or cared to know. And it was precisely because I wished later on one of those very dull facts that I came to speak to my man.