The Man Who Could Not Lose
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Richard Harding Davis >> The Man Who Could Not Lose
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THE MAN WHO COULD NOT LOSE
by Richard Harding Davis
The Carters had married in haste and refused to repent at leisure.
So blindly were they in love, that they considered their marriage
their greatest asset. The rest of the world, as represented by
mutual friends, considered it the only thing that could be urged
against either of them. While single, each had been popular. As a
bachelor, young "Champ" Carter had filled his modest place
acceptably. Hostesses sought him for dinners and week-end parties,
men of his own years, for golf and tennis, and young girls liked
him because when he talked to one of them he never talked of
himself, or let his eyes wander toward any other girl. He had been
brought up by a rich father in an expensive way, and the rich
father had then died leaving Champneys alone in the world, with no
money, and with even a few of his father's debts. These debts of
honor the son, ever since leaving Yale, had been paying off. It had
kept him very poor, for Carter had elected to live by his pen, and,
though he wrote very carefully and slowly, the editors of the
magazines had been equally careful and slow in accepting what he
wrote.
With an income so uncertain that the only thing that could be said
of it with certainty was that it was too small to support even
himself, Carter should not have thought of matrimony. Nor, must it
be said to his credit, did he think of it until the girl came along
that he wanted to marry.
The trouble with Dolly Ingram was her mother. Her mother was a
really terrible person. She was quite impossible. She was a social
leader, and of such importance that visiting princes and society
reporters, even among themselves, did not laugh at her. Her
visiting list was so small that she did not keep a social
secretary, but, it was said, wrote her invitations herself.
Stylites on his pillar was less exclusive. Nor did he take his
exalted but lonely position with less sense of humor. When Ingram
died and left her many millions to dispose of absolutely as she
pleased, even to the allowance she should give their daughter, he
left her with but one ambition unfulfilled. That was to marry her
Dolly to an English duke. Hungarian princes, French marquises,
Italian counts, German barons, Mrs. Ingram could not see. Her
son-in-law must be a duke. She had her eyes on two, one somewhat
shopworn, and the other a bankrupt; and in training, she had one
just coming of age. Already she saw her self a sort of a dowager
duchess by marriage, discussing with real dowager duchesses the way
to bring up teething earls and viscounts. For three years in Europe
Mrs.Ingram had been drilling her daughter for the part she intended
her to play. But, on returning to her native land, Dolly, who
possessed all the feelings, thrills, and heart-throbs of which her
mother was ignorant, ungratefully fell deeply in love with
Champneys Carter, and he with her. It was always a question of
controversy between them as to which had first fallen in love with
the other. As a matter of history, honors were even.
He first saw her during a thunder storm, in the paddock at the
races, wearing a rain-coat with the collar turned up and a Panama
hat with the brim turned down. She was talking, in terms of
affectionate familiarity, with Cuthbert's two-year- old, The Scout.
The Scout had just lost a race by a nose, and Dolly was holding the
nose against her cheek and comforting him. The two made a charming
picture, and, as Carter stumbled upon it and halted, the race-horse
lowered his eyes and seemed to say: "Wouldn't YOU throw a race for
this?" And the girl raised her eyes and seemed to say: "What a
nice-looking, bright-looking young man! Why don't I know who you
are?"
So, Carter ran to find Cuthbert, and told him The Scout had gone
lame. When, on their return, Miss Ingram refused to loosen her hold
on The Scout's nose, Cuthbert apologetically mumbled Carter's name,
and in some awe Miss Ingram's name, and then, to his surprise, both
young people lost interest in The Scout, and wandered away together
into the rain.
After an hour, when they parted at the club stand, for which Carter
could not afford a ticket, he asked wistfully: "Do you often come
racing?" and Miss Ingram said: "Do you mean, am I coming
to-morrow?"
"I do!" said Carter.
"Then, why didn't you say that?" inquired Miss Ingram. "Otherwise
I mightn't have come. I have the Holland House coach for to-morrow,
and, if you'll join us, I'll save a place for you, and you can sit
in our box.
"I've lived so long abroad," she explained, "that I'm afraid of not
being simple and direct like other American girls. Do you think
I'll get on here at home? "
"If you get on with every one else as well as you've got on with
me," said Carter morosely, I will shoot myself."
Miss Ingram smiled thoughtfully. "At eleven, then," she said, "in
front of the Holland House."
Carter walked away with a flurried, heated suffocation around his
heart and a joyous lightness in his feet. Of the first man he met
he demanded, "Who was the beautiful girl in the rain-coat?" And
when the man told him, Carter left him without speaking. For she
was quite the richest girl in America. But the next day that fault
seemed to distress her so little that Carter, also, refused to
allow it to rest on his conscience, and they were very happy. And
each saw that they were happy because they were together.
The ridiculous mother was not present at the races, but after
Carter began to call at their house and was invited to dinner, Mrs.
Ingram received him with her habitual rudeness. As an impediment in
the success of her ambition she never considered him. As a boy
friend of her daughter's, she classed him with "her" lawyer and
"her" architect and a little higher than the "person" who arranged
the flowers. Nor, in her turn, did Dolly consider her mother; for
within two months another matter of controversy between Dolly and
Carter was as to who had first proposed to the other. Carter
protested there never had been any formal proposal, that from the
first they had both taken it for granted that married they would
be. But Dolly insisted that because he had been afraid of her
money, or her mother, he had forced her to propose to him.
"You could not have loved me very much," she complained, "if you'd
let a little thing like money make you hesitate."
"It's not a little thing," suggested Carter. "They say it's several
millions, and it happens to be YOURS. If it were MINE, now!"
"Money," said Dolly sententiously, "is given people to make them
happy, not to make them miserable."
"Wait until I sell my stories to the magazines," said Carter, "and
then I will be independent and can support you."
The plan did not strike Dolly as one likely to lead to a hasty
marriage. But he was sensitive about his stories, and she did not
wish to hurt his feelings.
"Let's get married first," she suggested, "and then I can BUY you
a magazine. We'll call it CARTER'S MAGAZINE and we will print
nothing in it but your stories. Then we can laugh at the editors!"
"Not half as loud as they will," said Carter.
With three thousand dollars in bank and three stories accepted and
seventeen still to hear from, and with Dolly daily telling him that
it was evident he did not love her, Carter decided they were ready,
hand in hand, to leap into the sea of matrimony. His interview on
the subject with Mrs. Ingram was most painful. It lasted during the
time it took her to walk out of her drawing-room to the foot of her
staircase. She spoke to herself, and the only words of which Carter
was sure were "preposterous" and "intolerable insolence." Later in
the morning she sent a note to his flat, forbidding him not only
her daughter, but the house in which her daughter lived, and even
the use of the United States mails and the New York telephone
wires. She described his conduct in words that, had they come from
a man, would have afforded Carter every excuse for violent
exercise.
Immediately in the wake of the note arrived Dolly, in tears, and
carrying a dressing-case.
"I have left mother!" she announced. "And I have her car
downstairs, and a clergyman in it, unless he has run away. He
doesn't want to marry us, because he's afraid mother will stop
supporting his flower mission. You get your hat and take me where
he can marry us. No mother can talk about the man I love the way
mother talked about you, and think I won't marry him the same day!"
Carter, with her mother's handwriting still red before his eyes,
and his self-love shaken with rage flourished the letter.
"And no mother," he shouted, "can call ME a 'fortune-hunter' and a
'cradle-robber' and think I'll make good by marrying her daughter!
Not until she BEGS me to!"
Dolly swept toward him like a summer storm. Her eyes were wet and
flashing. "Until WHO begs you to?" she demanded. "WHO are you
marrying; mother or me?"
"If I marry you," cried Carter, frightened but also greatly
excited, "your mother won't give you a penny!"
"And that," taunted Dolly, perfectly aware that she was ridiculous,
"is why you won't marry me!"
For an instant, long enough to make her blush with shame and
happiness, Carter grinned at her. "Now, just for that," he said, "I
won't kiss you, and I WILL marry you!" But, as a matter of fact, he
DID kiss her. Then he gazed happily around his small sitting-room.
"Make yourself at home here," he directed, "while I pack my bag."
"I MEAN to make myself very much at home here," said Dolly
joyfully, "for the rest of my life."
From the recesses of the flat Carter called: "The rent's paid only
till September. After that we live in a hall bedroom and cook on a
gas-stove. And that's no idle jest, either."
Fearing the publicity of the City Hall license bureau, they
released the clergyman, much to the relief of that gentleman, and
told the chauffeur to drive across the State line into Connecticut.
"It's the last time we can borrow your mother's car," said Carter,
"and we'd better make it go as far as we can."
It was one of those days in May. Blue was the sky and sunshine was
in the air, and in the park little girls from the tenements, in
white, were playing they were queens. Dolly wanted to kidnap two of
them for bridesmaids. In Harlem they stopped at a jeweler's shop,
and Carter got out and bought a wedding-ring.
In the Bronx were dogwood blossoms and leaves of tender green and
beds of tulips, and along the Boston Post Road, on their right, the
Sound flashed in the sunlight; and on their left, gardens, lawns,
and orchards ran with the road, and the apple trees were masses of
pink and white.
Whenever a car approached from the rear, Carter pretended it was
Mrs. Ingram coming to prevent the elopement, and Dolly clung to
him. When the car had passed, she forgot to stop clinging to him.
In Greenwich Village they procured a license, and a magistrate
married them, and they were a little frightened and greatly happy
and, they both discovered simultaneously, outrageously hungry. So
they drove through Bedford Village to South Salem, and lunched at
the Horse and Hounds Inn, on blue and white china, in the same room
where Major Andre was once a prisoner. And they felt very sorry for
Major Andre, and for everybody who had not been just married that
morning. And after lunch they sat outside in the garden and fed
lumps of sugar to a charming collie and cream to a fat gray cat.
They decided to start housekeeping in Carter's flat, and so turned
back to New York, this time following the old coach road through
North Castle to White Plains, across to Tarrytown, and along the
bank of the Hudson into Riverside Drive. Millions and millions of
friendly folk, chiefly nurse- maids and traffic policemen, waved to
them, and for some reason smiled.
"The joke of it is," declared Carter, "they don't know! The most
wonderful event of the century has just passed into history. We are
married, and nobody knows!"
But when the car drove away from in front of Carter's door, they
saw on top of it two old shoes and a sign reading: "We have just
been married." While they had been at luncheon, the chauffeur had
risen to the occasion.
"After all," said Carter soothingly, "he meant no harm. And it's
the only thing about our wedding yet that seems legal."
Three months later two very unhappy young people faced starvation
in the sitting-room of Carter's flat. Gloom was written upon the
countenance of each, and the heat and the care that comes when one
desires to live, and lacks the wherewithal to fulfill that desire,
had made them pallid and had drawn black lines under Dolly's eyes.
Mrs. Ingram had played her part exactly as her dearest friends had
said she would. She had sent to Carter's flat, seven trunks filled
with Dolly's clothes, eighteen hats, and another most unpleasant
letter. In this, on the sole condition that Dolly would at once
leave her husband, she offered to forgive and to support her.
To this Dolly composed eleven scornful answers, but finally decided
that no answer at all was the most scornful.
She and Carter then proceeded joyfully to waste his three thousand
dollars with that contempt for money with which on a honey-moon it
should always be regarded. When there was no more, Dolly called
upon her mother's lawyers and inquired if her father had left her
anything in her own right. The lawyers regretted he had not, but
having loved Dolly since she was born, offered to advance her any
money she wanted. They said they felt sure her mother would
"relent."
"SHE may," said Dolly haughtily. "I WON'T! And my husband can give
me all I need. I only wanted something of my own, because I'm going
to make him a surprise present of a new motor-car. The one we are
using now does not suit us.
This was quite true, as the one they were then using ran through
the subway.
As summer approached, Carter had suddenly awakened to the fact that
he soon would be a pauper, and cut short the honey- moon. They
returned to the flat, and he set forth to look for a position.
Later, while still looking for it, he spoke of it as a "job." He
first thought he would like to be an assistant editor of a
magazine. But he found editors of magazines anxious to employ new
and untried assistants, especially in June, were very few. On the
contrary, they explained they were retrenching and cutting down
expenses--they meant they had discharged all office boys who
received more than three dollars a week. They further "retrenched,"
by taking a mean advantage of Carter's having called upon them in
person, by handing him three or four of his stories--but by this he
saved his postage-stamps.
Each day, when he returned to the flat, Dolly, who always expected
each editor would hastily dust off his chair and offer it to her
brilliant husband, would smile excitedly and gasp, "Well?" and
Carter would throw the rejected manuscripts on the table and say:
"At least, I have not returned empty- handed." Then they would
discover a magazine that neither they nor any one else knew
existed, and they would hurriedly readdress the manuscripts to that
periodical, and run to post them at the letter-box on the corner.
"Any one of them, if ACCEPTED," Carter would point out, "might
bring us in twenty-five dollars. A story of mine once sold for
forty; so to-night we can afford to dine at a restaurant where wine
is NOT 'included.'"
Fortunately, they never lost their sense of humor. Otherwise the
narrow confines of the flat, the evil smells that rose from the
baked streets, the greasy food of Italian and Hungarian
restaurants, and the ever-haunting need of money might have crushed
their youthful spirits. But in time even they found that one, still
less two, cannot exist exclusively on love and the power to see the
bright side of things-- especially when there is no bright side.
They had come to the point where they must borrow money from their
friends, and that, though there were many who would have opened
their safes to them, they had agreed was the one thing they would
not do, or they must starve. The alternative was equally
distasteful.
Carter had struggled earnestly to find a job. But his inexperience
and the season of the year were against him. No newspaper wanted a
dramatic critic when the only shows in town had been running three
months, and on roof gardens; nor did they want a "cub" reporter
when veterans were being "laid off" by the dozens. Nor were his
services desired as a private secretary, a taxicab driver, an agent
to sell real estate or automobiles or stocks. As no one gave him a
chance to prove his unfitness for any of these callings, the fact
that he knew nothing of any of them did not greatly matter. At
these rebuffs Dolly was distinctly pleased. She argued they proved
he was intended to pursue his natural career as an author.
That their friends might know they were poor did not affect her,
but she did not want them to think by his taking up any outside
"job" that they were poor because as a literary genius he was a
failure. She believed in his stories. She wanted every one else to
believe in them. Meanwhile, she assisted him in so far as she could
by pawning the contents of five of the seven trunks, by learning to
cook on a " Kitchenette," and to laundry her handkerchiefs and iron
them on the looking-glass.
They faced each other across the breakfast-table. It was only nine
o'clock, but the sun beat into the flat with the breath of a
furnace, and the air was foul and humid.
"I tell you," Carter was saying fiercely, "you look ill. You are
ill. You must go to the sea-shore. You must visit some of your
proud, friends at East Hampton or Newport. Then I'll know you're
happy and I won't worry, and I'll find a job. I don't mind the
heat-and I'll write you love letters"--he was talking very fast and
not looking at Dolly--"like those I used to write you, before----"
Dolly raised her hand. "Listen!" she said. "Suppose I leave you.
What will happen? I'll wake up in a cool, beautiful brass bed,
won't I--with cretonne window-curtains, and salt air blowing them
about, and a maid to bring me coffee. And instead of a bathroom
like yours, next to an elevator shaft and a fire-escape, I'll have
one as big as a church, and the whole blue ocean to swim in. And
I'll sit on the rocks in the sunshine and watch the waves and the
yachts--"
"And grow well again!" cried Carter. "But you'll write to me," he
added wistfully, "every day, won't you?"
In her wrath, Dolly rose, and from across the table confronted him.
"And what will I be doing on those rocks?" she cried. "You KNOW
what I'll be doing! I'll be sobbing, and sobbing, and calling out
to the waves: 'Why did he send me away? Why doesn't he want me?
Because he doesn't love me. That's why! He doesn't LOVE me!' And
you DON'T!" cried Dolly. "you DON'T!"
It took him all of three minutes to persuade her she was mistaken.
"Very well, then," sobbed Dolly, "that's settled. And there'll be
no more talk of sending me away!
"There will NOT!" said Champneys hastily. "We will now," he
announced, "go into committee of the whole and decide how we are to
face financial failure. Our assets consist of two stories,
accepted, but not paid for, and fifteen stories not accepted. In
cash, he spread upon the table a meagre collection of soiled bills
and coins. "We have twenty-seven dollars and fourteen cents. That
is every penny we possess in the world."
Dolly regarded him fixedly and shook her head.
"Is it wicked," she asked, "to love you so?"
"Haven't you been listening to me?" demanded Carter.
Again Dolly shook her head.
"I was watching the way you talk. When your lips move fast they do
such charming things."
"Do you know," roared Carter, "that we haven't a penny in the
world, that we have nothing in this flat to eat?"
"I still have five hats," said Dolly.
"We can't eat hats," protested Champneys.
"We can sell hats!" returned Dolly. "They cost eighty dollars
apiece!"
"When you need money," explained Carter, "I find it's just as hard
to sell a hat as to eat it."
"Twenty-seven dollars and fourteen cents," repeated Dolly. She
exclaimed remorsefully: "And you started with three thousand! What
did I do with it?"
"We both had the time of our lives with it!" said Carter stoutly.
"And that's all there is to that. Post-mortems," he pointed out,
"are useful only as guides to the future, and as our future will
never hold a second three thousand dollars, we needn't worry about
how we spent the first one. No! What we must consider now is how we
can grow rich quick, and the quicker and richer, the better.
Pawning our clothes, or what's left of them, is bad economics.
There's no use considering how to live from meal to meal. We must
evolve something big, picturesque, that will bring a fortune. You
have imagination; I'm supposed to have imagination, we must think
of a plan to get money, much money. I do not insist on our plan
being dignified, or even outwardly respectable; so long as it keeps
you alive, it may be as desperate as--"
"I see!" cried Dolly; "like sending mother Black Hand letters!"
"Blackmail----" began that lady's son-in-law doubtfully.
"Or!" cried Dolly, "we might kidnap Mr. Carnegie when he's walking
in the park alone, and hold him for ransom. Or"--she rushed on--
"we might forge a codicil to father's will, and make it say if
mother shouldn't like the man I want to marry, all of father's
fortune must go to my husband!"
"Forgery," exclaimed Champneys, "is going further than I----"
"And another plan," interrupted Dolly," that I have always had in
mind, is to issue a cheaper edition of your book, 'The Dead Heat.'
The reason the first edition of 'The Dead Heat' didn't sell----"
"Don't tell ME why it didn't sell," said Champneys. "I wrote it!"
"That book," declared Dolly loyally, "was never properly
advertised. No one knew about it, so no one bought it!"
"Eleven people bought it!" corrected the author.
"We will put it in a paper cover and sell it for fifty cents,"
cried Dolly. " It's the best detective story I ever read, and
people have got to know it is the best. So we'll advertise it like
a breakfast food."
"The idea," interrupted Champneys, "is to make money, not throw it
away. Besides, we haven't any to throw away. Dolly sighed bitterly.
"If only," she exclaimed, "we had that three thousand dollars back
again! I'd save SO carefully. It was all my fault. The races took
it, but it was I took you to the races."
"No one ever had to drag ME to the races," said Carter. " It was
the way we went that was extravagant. Automobiles by the hour
standing idle, and a box each day, and----"
"And always backing Dromedary," suggested Dolly. Carter was touched
on a sensitive spot. "That horse," he protested loudly, "is a
mighty good horse. Some day----"
"That's what you always said," remarked Dolly, "but he never seems
to have his day."
"It's strange," said Champneys consciously. "I dreamed of Dromedary
only last night. Same dream over and over again." Hastily he
changed the subject.
"For some reason I don't sleep well. I don't know why."
Dolly looked at him with all the love in her eyes of a mother over
her ailing infant.
"It's worrying over me, and the heat,"' she said. "And the garage
next door, and the skyscraper going up across the street, might
have something to do with it. And YOU," she mocked tenderly,
"wanted to send me to the sea-shore."
Carter was frowning. As though about to speak, he opened his lips,
and then laughed embarrassedly.
"Out with it," said Dolly, with an encouraging smile. "Did he win?"
Seeing she had read what was in his mind, Carter leaned forward
eagerly. The ruling passion and a touch of superstition held him in
their grip.
"He 'win' each time," he whispered. "I saw it as plain as I see
you. Each time he came up with a rush just at the same place, just
as they entered the stretch, and each time he won!" He slapped his
hand disdainfully upon the dirty bills before him. "If I had a
hundred dollars!"
There was a knock at the door, and Carter opened it to the elevator
boy with the morning mail. The letters, save one, Carter dropped
upon the table. That one, with clumsy fingers, he tore open. He
exclaimed breathlessly: "It's from PLYMPTON'S MAGAZINE! Maybe--I've
sold a story!" He gave a cry almost of alarm. His voice was as
solemn as though the letter had announced a death.
"Dolly," he whispered, "it's a check--a check for a HUNDRED
DOLLARS!"
Guiltily, the two young people looked at each other.
"We've GOT to!" breathed Dolly. "GOT to! If we let TWO signs like
that pass, we'd be flying in the face of Providence."
With her hands gripping the arms of her chair, she leaned forward,
her eyes staring into space, her lips moving.
"COME ON, you Dromedary!" she whispered.
They changed the check into five and ten dollar bills, and, as
Carter was far too excited to work, made an absurdly early start
for the race-track.
"We might as well get all the fresh air we can," said Dolly.
"That's all we will get!"