Both men had much in common, had lived life in somewhat similar ways, and regarded life from the same angles. Their philosophy was harsh rather than sentimental4, and both were realists. Paula made a practice of calling them the pair of “Brass5 Tacks6.”
“Oh, yes,” she laughed to them, “I understand your attitude. You are successes, the pair of you—physical successes, I mean. You have health. You are resistant8. You can stand things. You have survived where men less resistant have gone down. You pull through African fevers and bury the other fellows. This poor chap gets pneumonia9 in Cripple Creek10 and cashes in before you can get him to sea level. Now why didn’t you get pneumonia? Because you were more deserving? Because you had lived more virtuously11? Because you were more careful of risks and took more precautions?”
She shook her head.
“No. Because you were luckier—I mean by birth, by possession of constitution and stamina12. Why, Dick buried his three mates and two engineers at Guayaquil. Yellow fever. Why didn’t the yellow fever germ, or whatever it is, kill Dick? And the same with you, Mr. Broad-shouldered Deep-chested Graham. In this last trip of yours, why didn’t you die in the swamps instead of your photographer? Come. Confess. How heavy was he? How broad were his shoulders? How deep his chest?—wide his nostrils13?—tough his resistance?”
“He weighed a hundred and thirty-five,” Graham admitted ruefully. “But he looked all right and fit at the start. I think I was more surprised than he when he turned up his toes.” Graham shook his head. “It wasn’t because he was a light weight and small. The small men are usually the toughest, other things being equal. But you’ve put your finger on the reason just the same. He didn’t have the physical stamina, the resistance,—You know what I mean, Dick?”
“In a way it’s like the quality of muscle and heart that enables some prizefighters to go the distance—twenty, thirty, forty rounds, say,” Dick concurred14. “Right now, in San Francisco, there are several hundred youngsters dreaming of success in the ring. I’ve watched them trying out. All look good, fine-bodied, healthy, fit as fiddles15, and young. And their spirits are most willing. And not one in ten of them can last ten rounds. I don’t mean they get knocked out. I mean they blow up. Their muscles and their hearts are not made out of first-grade fiber16. They simply are not made to move at high speed and tension for ten rounds. And some of them blow up in four or five rounds. And not one in forty can go the twenty-round route, give and take, hammer and tongs17, one minute of rest to three of fight, for a full hour of fighting. And the lad who can last forty rounds is one in ten thousand—lads like Nelson, Gans, and Wolgast.
“You understand the point I am making,” Paula took up. “Here are the pair of you. Neither will see forty again. You’re a pair of hard-bitten sinners. You’ve gone through hardship and exposure that dropped others all along the way. You’ve had your fun and folly19. You’ve roughed and rowdied over the world—”
“Played the wild ass,” Graham laughed in.
“And drunk deep,” Paula added. “Why, even alcohol hasn’t burned you. You were too tough. You put the other fellows under the table, or into the hospital or the grave, and went your gorgeous way, a song on your lips, with tissues uncorroded, and without even the morning-after headache. And the point is that you are successes. Your muscles are blond-beast muscles, your vital organs are blond-beast organs. And from all this emanates20 your blond-beast philosophy. That’s why you are brass tacks, and preach realism, and practice realism, shouldering and shoving and walking over lesser21 and unluckier creatures, who don’t dare talk back, who, like Dick’s prizefighting boys, would blow up in the first round if they resorted to the arbitrament of force.”
Dick whistled a long note of mock dismay.
“And that’s why you preach the gospel of the strong,” Paula went on. “If you had been weaklings, you’d have preached the gospel of the weak and turned the other cheek. But you—you pair of big-muscled giants— when you are struck, being what you are, you don’t turn the other cheek—”
“No,” Dick interrupted quietly. “We immediately roar, ’Knock his block off!’ and then do it.—She’s got us, Evan, hip18 and thigh22. Philosophy, like religion, is what the man is, and is by him made in his own image.”
And while the talk led over the world, Paula sewed on, her eyes filled with the picture of the two big men, admiring, wondering, pondering, without the surety of self that was theirs, aware of a slipping and giving of convictions so long accepted that they had seemed part of her.
Later in the evening she gave voice to her trouble.
“The strangest part of it,” she said, taking up a remark Dick had just made, “is that too much philosophizing about life gets one worse than nowhere. A philosophic23 atmosphere is confusing—at least to a woman. One hears so much about everything, and against everything, that nothing is sure. For instance, Mendenhall’s wife is a Lutheran. She hasn’t a doubt about anything. All is fixed24, ordained25, immovable. Star-drifts and ice-ages she knows nothing about, and if she did they would not alter in the least her rules of conduct for men and women in this world and in relation to the next.
“But here, with us, you two pound your brass tacks, Terrence does a Greek dance of epicurean anarchism, Hancock waves the glittering veils of Bergsonian metaphysics, Leo makes solemn obeisance26 at the altar of Beauty, and Dar Hyal juggles27 his sophistic blastism to no end save all your applause for his cleverness. Don’t you see? The effect is that there is nothing solid in any human judgment28. Nothing is right. Nothing is wrong. One is left compassless, rudderless, chartless on a sea of ideas. Shall I do this? Must I refrain from that? Will it be wrong? Is there any
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