Hostages to Fortune Read Free Page B

Thumbs Up! Here he was safe from sympathy.
    The looks the patrons turned on him showed him his mistake. The atmosphere of the bar had undergone a change; the falling barometer on the wall seemed to be its gauge. He had ventured into the very vale of tears just waiting for someone to shed them over. The weekend bachelors enjoying an evening free from their wives’ supervision had arrived at a state of emotional unsteadiness, their sang-froid had thawed, and emanations reaching him from several of them made him feel they would be willing to exempt him from the strict application of the club’s code, his being such a special case, and that they felt he was wishing they would. When one of them detached himself from the bar and tacked toward him he took refuge on the terrace. To be shunned by sober men was painful, to be sought out by maudlin ones was worse. It seemed it was to be his lot now to endure both.
    A breeze had risen and set the trees sighing. Above the everlasting murmur of the stream the first of the evening’s chorus of peepers was tentatively tuning up. The light from the barroom mixed milkily with the mist rising off the water as it cooled in the chill of the night. Overhead a half moon shone and the sky to the north was sprinkled with stars but to the south it was black and the blackness was spreading rapidly northward. The quickening breeze now carried the smell, or rather the absence of smells, of approaching rain. A first, far-distant rumble of thunder was like the yawn of some awakening beast of prey about to begin its nightly prowl. The barometer of his disposition was beginning its nightly fall, only tonight it was falling faster as his quickening memories marshaled like a gathering storm.
    He felt on his forehead the first, premonitory raindrop and he went inside. As he passed through the barroom, Eddie, from behind the counter, said, “Good night, Mr. Curtis. And”—holding out a fist, thumb up—“welcome back.”
    He faltered only for an instant. “Thanks,” he said, and to all he nodded good-night.
    Passing the door of the room in which his wedding night had been spent, he considered this latest evidence of the changes in himself and of the wariness with which he must expect now to be treated. Eddie and he had called each other by their first names for years.
    In his room, the duplicate in every detail of the one he had just passed, as flashes of lightning drew nearer and more frequent, he studied his reflection in the mirror. He recited to himself these verses:
    I look into my glass
    And view my wasted skin,
    And say, “Would God it came to pass
    My heart had shrunk as thin!”
    For then, I, undistrest
    By hearts grown cold to me,
    Could lonely wait my endless rest
    With equanimity.
    But time, to make me grieve,
    Part steals, lets part abide;
    And shakes this fragile frame at eve
    With throbbings of noontide.
    The mist was lifting from the mountains now. From their wooded slopes it rose in plumes like smoke from scattered breakfast campfires. The moment had come for him to make a decision. Whether to overhaul his long-neglected vest, thereby delaying the fishing, or to start fishing, thereby delaying, or at least taking on one at a time, the memories which the contents of the vest were sure to stir. A fly-fisherman’s vest contained more things than a boy’s pants pockets. Even from the outside of it there dangled on strings a tackle shop in miniature: nail clippers, folding scissors (a gift from Tony, those), a surgeon’s hemostat used to disgorge hooks from fishes’ mouths, the bottle of dope for making dry flies float. His vest had been put away with no expectation of its ever being used again and never looked at in all the time since. That in its many pockets he carried on him an album of images in the form of flies and gadgets, he knew, and in the course of the day—if he stuck it out—he would, willy-nilly, turn the pages of