In And Out.
by Edgar Franklin.
CHAPTER I
The Great Unrecognized
Up in the ring, the long-nosed person who had been announced as Kid Horrigan was having things much his own way with the smaller person billed as the Bronx Tornado.
It was the wont of Kid Horrigan to step forward lightly, to rap the Tornado smartly on the bridge of the nose, and thereafter to step back as lightly and wait until the few wild blows had fanned the air and the Tornado had returned to his meaningless and somewhat bewildered crouch.
Thereupon, in almost preoccupied fashion, the Kid stepped forward once more--and when he had done it again and again the performance began to grow monotonous and, down in Box B at the ringside, Johnson Boller yawned aloud.
The yawn finished, he leaned over wearily and addressed Anthony Fry.
"If that little wheeze had the pep of a dead mosquito," said Johnson Boller disgustedly, "he"d take that big stiff when his hands are up like that and slip him an uppercut that would freeze him solid!"
Anthony Fry"s intellectual features relaxed in a faint smile.
"He"s had several chances, hasn"t he?" he mused.
"Several? He"s had fifty! He gets three a minute and--well, look at that!"
"Yes, he missed another opportunity then, didn"t he?" said Anthony.
"Curious!"
Johnson Boller"s cigar rolled to the other side of his mouth and he hunched down farther in his chair.
"And nine more rounds of it to go!" he sighed.
Anthony Fry merely smiled more pensively and nodded, removing his nose-gla.s.ses and tapping his teeth reflectively--and, among other things, causing the red-faced, partially alcoholized trio behind them in Box B to wonder what he was doing at a prize fight anyway.
As externals go, there was some ground for the wonder. Anthony Fry at forty-five was very tall, very lean in his aristocratic way, and very, very dignified, from the crown of his high-held head to the tips of his toes. In dress he was utterly beyond criticism; in feature he was thin, austere, and impressive. At first glance one might have fancied him a world-famous surgeon or the inscrutable head of the Steel Trust, but the fact of the matter was that Anthony, these fifteen years gone, had inherited Fry"s Imperial Liniment, with all that that implied.
It implied a good deal in the way of income, yet even among his friends Anthony did not care to have the liniment phase of his quietly elegant existence dwelt upon too insistently. Not that he regarded the business--run by a perfect manager and rarely visited--as a secret shame exactly, but unquestionably Anthony would have preferred that his late father and his two dead uncles, when starting their original pursuit of wealth, had corraled the world"s diamond supply or purchased Manhattan Island at a bargain.
Just now, perhaps, Anthony"s more striking features were emphasized by the nearness of Johnson Boller, one of his few really intimate friends.
Johnson Boller"s age was just about the same, but there the similarity between them stopped short.
Johnson Boller was plump, one might almost say coa.r.s.e. Where Anthony walked with slow dignity, Johnson swaggered. Where Anthony spoke in a measured undertone and smiled frigidly, Johnson thumped out the words and laughed with a bark. About most things except food he was inclined to be gloomy and pessimistic, and this evening the gloom within was even thicker than usual, because Johnson Boller"s wife had left him.
She was a new wife and his first--a beautiful and spirited wife, all of fifteen years younger than Johnson Boller. She was in love with him and he with her, tremendously--and now she was gone. After only six months of unalloyed happiness in the five-thousand-dollar apartment on Riverside Drive, Mrs. Johnson Boller had left for her annual visit of one month to the sister whose accursed husband owned great chunks of Montreal, Quebec, and insisted on living on one of them.
One vast hour Johnson Boller had roamed the vacuum that had been their ideal home; then he had packed his grip and gone to stay with Anthony Fry, in that utter ultimate of everything impeccable and expensive in the way of bachelor apartments, the Hotel Lasande--and even the sight of the fight tickets, when Anthony"s invaluable Wilkins had returned with them, had failed to bring more than a flitting smile to Johnson Boller.
Now they were watching the second preliminary bout, and could he but have traded one thousand of these bouts for a single hour with his beloved Beatrice, Johnson Boller would have gladly.
"In the main," said Anthony Fry, "that absurd little chap up there typifies my whole conception of opportunity."
"Huh?" Johnson Boller said.
"The chance for that fatal uppercut is there--it was there a minute ago and it will be there a minute hence, and probably two minutes hence. Our Tornado hasn"t seen it yet; he may go to the end of the ten rounds and never see it, and yet, unless this Horrigan chap changes his tactics, it will be repeated again and again. Would he see it if the bout ran twenty rounds?"
"How the d.i.c.kens should I know?" Johnson Boller muttered.
"I"d be quite willing to wager," Anthony smiled thoughtfully, "that he _would_ see it!"
Johnson Boller surveyed his friend narrowly. It was obvious that Anthony"s attention had strayed from the alleged battle--and small wonder! It was equally obvious that Anthony"s mind was wandering off into the abstract; and not infrequently these little journeys--provided they went not too far--were quite entertaining.
Johnson Boller, therefore, with an impulse he was to regret bitterly in the very near future, gave a prod to discussion by smiling in his own unhappy way and saying:
"What"s the idea, Anthony? You"re wrong, but--what is it?"
"My idea," said the proprietor of Fry"s Imperial Liniment slowly, "is merely this, Johnson: that the whole proposition of the man who is a dire failure, the man who is a tremendous success, is vastly exaggerated."
"Meaning?"
"That failure does not of necessity imply incapacity or inept.i.tude--or success any tremendous capability, in many cases, for that matter. Taken by and large, we are all made of much the same stuff, you know. The trouble lies in the failure of the plain, average, reasonably stupid citizen to recognize opportunity"s one solitary knock!" Anthony smiled, growing himself more interested by the second. "Now, if opportunity were but decent enough to knock twice, at least double the number of striving humans would recognize her nearness and grasp her. If she could bring herself to knock three times, say, our successes would be tripled.
If----"
"And if she knocked a thousand times in succession, everybody"d be a millionaire," Johnson Boller suggested.
"Something like that," smiled Anthony. "The chap who does know opportunity, recognizes her mainly by accident, I honestly believe. Now, if we could but take each man and place opportunity before him and hold her there until he fully understood that she was present, the word failure would be omitted from the dictionaries a generation hence."
Anthony Fry winked rapidly, which in itself was rather a bad sign because it indicated that the theorizing portion of his cultured brain was growing quite rapt. At another time, very likely, Johnson Boller would have heeded the warning and turned Anthony"s attention gently back to the fight; but to-night Boller sought refuge from the haunting loneliness that Beatrice had left behind.
"I don"t agree with you!" he said flatly.
"Eh?"
"Nix!" said Johnson Boller. "Any guy who can come face to face with a regular honest-to-goodness opportunity, Anthony, and not know her inside of one second, could have her tied to his right leg for two hundred years and never know she was there."
"You really believe that?"
"Oh, I know it!" said Johnson Boller. "I have several millions of years of human experience to prove that I"m right."
Anthony leaned closer, causing the largest of the red-faced trio behind to growl senselessly as he was forced to shift for a view of the ring.
"Let us a.s.sume, Johnson, the individual A," said Anthony. "A wished to become a lawyer; he had his chance and missed it. We will a.s.sume him to be peculiarly stupid; we will say that he had opportunity for the second time--and again failed to grasp her. Can you think that, deliberately led up to his third opportunity of becoming a lawyer, A will turn his back for the third time?"
"Certainly," said Johnson Boller, without thought and solely because Anthony"s precise driveling interested him a little more than the affair of the ring.
"Pah!" Mr. Fry said angrily.
Just here Mr. Horrigan slipped while making his --nth jab at the Tornado"s nose--slipped and fell upon the Tornado"s fist and thereafter reeled about for a few seconds. Johnson Boller emitted his first real laugh of the evening; Anthony Fry, who had not seen the incident, failed even to smile.