Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel by Will Levington Comfort
page 20 of 413 (04%)
page 20 of 413 (04%)
![]() | ![]() |
|
heard this with fine interest, but no quickening. Cairns was insatiable
for details of a life that had been spent in Asia and upon ships of the Eastern seas. Everything that Bedient said had a shining exterior of mystery to the American. His vague memories of New York; the water-fronts that had since called his steps; different ships and captains; the men about him, Healy and the packers; his entire detachment from relatives, and his easy familiarity with the great unhasting years--all these formed into a luminous envelope, containing the new friend. "I was always fed somehow," Bedient whispered, as he told about the dim little lad that was himself. "There was always some one good to me. I 'member one old sailor with rings in his ears----" The David Cairns of twenty likewise gave all gladly. Queerly enough, he found the other especially fascinated in anything he told of his mother and sisters, and the life at home in New York, made easy by the infinite little cushions of wealth and culture. A youth eight months away on his first campaign can talk with power on these matters. Here Cairns was wonderful and authoritative and elect to Bedient--particularly in the possession of a living, breathing Mother. This filled the cup of dreams in a way that the dominant exterior matters of the young correspondent's mind--newspaper beats, New York honors, great war stories, and a writer's name--could never have done. Bedient was clearly an inveterate idealist. His dreams were strangely lustrous, but distant, not to be touched nor handled--an impersonal kind of dreaming. Cairns was not so astonished that the other had been of uncommon quality in the beginning, but that his life had not _made_ him common was a miracle, no less. |
|