“I like it,” said Fallows.
“One night in New York I heard a newspaper man talk.... It was in a back-room bar on Sixth avenue. I see now he was a bit broken down. He looked to me then all that was splendid and sophisticated. I wanted to be like him——”
Fallows bent forward, his face tender as a father’s. “You poor little chap,” he said, as if he did not see Morning now, but the listening boy in the back-room bar.
“You see, I never really got the idea of having money—it went so quickly. The idea of a big bundle didn’t get a chance to sink in. I’ve had several hundred dollars at once from riding—but the next day’s races, or the next, got it. What I’m trying to say is—winnings didn’t seem to belong to me. Poverty was a habit. I always think yet in nickels and dimes. I seem to belong—steerage. It wasn’t long after I listened to that reporter, that I got a newspaper job, chasing pictures. A year after that the wars began. I went out first on my own hook; in fact, I think you’d call it that now. I seem to get into a sort of mania to be off—when the papers begin to report trouble. I didn’t know I was poorly fixed this time, until here in Tokyo I saw how the others go about it. Dinner-clothes, and all sorts of money invested in them—whether the war makes good or not——”
“I was right,” Fallows said finally. He had listened as a forest in a drouth listens for rain.
Morning was embarrassed. He had been caught in the current of the other’s listening. It was not his way at all to talk so much. He wasn’t tamed altogether; and then he had been extra hurt by the night and the day. An element of savagery arose, with the suspicion that Fallows might be making fun of him.
“What were you right about, Mr. Fallows?”
“You’ve got an especial guardian.”
Morning waited. The fuel was crackling. The Californian watched the fire and finally began to talk.
“You’re one of them. I saw it in your stuff. Then they told me here that you lived in a little Japanese hotel alone. That’s another reason. Your kind come up alone—always alone. To-day I saw you watching that picture business. You looked tired—as if you had a long way yet to swim against the current. You had a fight on—inside and out. You’ll keep on fighting inside, long after the world outside has called a truce. When you’re as old as I am—maybe before—you’ll have peace inside and out.”