“As long as I live, I fancy,” repeated the other. In the pause the young man put his hands to his hips and his chin on his breast as he slouched down in the chair and asked: “Where’s Laura?”
“Over at her mother’s,” replied the father. “Nobody will interrupt us–and so I thought we could get down to grass roots and talk this thing out.”
The Judge crossed his handsome ankles and sat looking at his trim toes.
“I suppose that idea is as good as any.” He put one long, lean, hairy hand on the short, fat knee beside him and said: “The whole trouble with our Protestant religion is that we have no confessor. So some of us talk to our lawyers, and some of us talk to our doctors, and in extreme unction we talk to our newspapers.”
He grinned miserably, and went on: “But we all talk to some one, and now I’m going to talk to you–talk for once, Doctor, right out of my soul–if I have one.”
He rose nervously, obeying some purely physical impulse, and then sat down again, with his hands in his thick, black hair, and his elbows on his bony knees.
“All right, Tom,” piped the Doctor, “go ahead.”
“Well, then,” he began as he looked at the floor before him, “do you suppose I don’t know that you know what I’m up to? Do you think I don’t know even what the town is buzzing about? Lord, man, I can feel it like a scorching fire. Why,” he exclaimed with emotion, “feeling the hearts of men is my job. I’ve been at it for fifteen years–”
He broke off and looked up. “How could I get up before a jury and feel them out man by man as I talked if I wasn’t 234sensitive to these things? You’ve seen me make them cry when I was in the practice. How could I make them cry if I didn’t feel like crying myself. You’re a doctor–you know that. People forget what I am–what a thousand stringed instrument I am. Now, Doctor Jim, let me tell you something. This is the bottom hard pan of the truth: I never before really cared for these women–these other women–when I got them. But I do care for the chase, I do care for the risk of it–for the exhilaration of it–for the joy of it!”
The Doctor’s mouth twitched and he took a breath as if about to speak. Van Dorn stopped him: “Don’t cut in, Doc Jim–let me say it all out. I’m young. I love the moonlight and the stars and I never go through a wood that I do not see trysting places there–and I never see a great stretch of prairie under the sunshine that I do not put in a beautiful woman and go following her–not for her–Doctor Jim, but for the joy of pursuit, for the thrill of uncovering a bared, naked soul, and the overwhelming danger of it. God–man, I’ve stood afraid to breathe, flattened against a wall and heard the man-beast growl and sniff, hunting me. I love to love and be loved; but not less do I love to hunt and be hunted. I’ve hidden under trees, I’ve skulked in the shadows, I’ve walked boldly in the sunlight with my life in my hand to meet a woman’s eyes, to feel her guilty shudder in my arms. Oh, Doctor Jim, you don’t understand the riot in my blood that the moon makes shining through the trees upon the water, with great, shadowy glades, and the tinkle of cow bells far away, and a woman afraid of me–and I afraid of her–and nothing but the stars and the night between us.”