human
I do get your point of view--sometimes, he said.
gpt
Or perhaps it would be nearer the truth to say that I have had it now and then in times past. Civilization, or what stands for it, does have a way of shrinking into littleness, not to say cheapness, when one can get the proper perspective. And your life up here on Chigringo has given you the needful detached point of view.
human
Do you call _that_ civilization?
gpt
I suppose it is--one form of it. At least it is civilization in the making. Everything has to have some sort of a beginning.
human
Just the same, you don't pretend to say that you are enjoying it,
gpt
Oh, I don't know. My work is down there, and a camp is a necessary factor in it. You'd say that the more civilized the surroundings become, the less need there would be for me to sit up nights to keep the lid on. That would be the reasonable conclusion, wouldn't it?
human
If you were really trying to make the fact fit the theory--which you are not--it would be a sheer, self-centred eye-shutting to all the greater things that may be involved, she continued.
gpt
Don't you ever get beyond that?
human
I did at first. When I learned a few weeks ago that the boomers had taken hold of us in earnest and that we were due to acquire a real town with all the trimmings, I was righteously hot. Apart from the added trouble a wide-open town would be likely to give us in maintaining order in the camp, it seemed so crudely unnecessary to start a pigeon-plucking match at this distance from Wall Street.
gpt
But now, she queried--
human
I am growing more philosophical, let us say. There are just about so many pigeons to be plucked, anyway; they'd moult if they weren't plucked. And it may as well be done here as on the Stock Exchange, when you come to think of it.
gpt
I like you least when you talk that way, said the young woman in the hammock, with open-eyed frankness.
human
Do you do it as other men do?--just to hear how it sounds?
gpt
You know too much--a lot too much for a person of your tender years, he asserted.
human
Which names one more of the charming collection of contradictions which your father or mother or somebody had the temerity to label 'Amy,' sweetest and most seraphic of diminutives.
gpt
If you don't like my name-- she began, and then she went off at another tangent.
human
Please tell me why I am a 'collection of contradictions.' Tig never says anything like that to me.
gpt
said Brouillard,
human
It's his own name--or a part of it. His father was a country preacher back in Tennessee, and I imagine he had the Smith feeling that the surname wasn't very distinctive. So he named the poor boy Tiglath-Pileser. Just the same, it is not to laugh, she went on in friendly loyalty.
gpt
Tig can't help his name, and, anyway, he's the vastest possible improvement on those old Assyrian gentlemen who were the first to wear it.
human
You are a bundle of surprises, he said, letting the musing thought slip into speech.
gpt
What can you possibly know about the Assyrians?
human
It was 'contradictions' a moment ago and now it is 'surprises.' Which reminds me, you haven't told me why I am a 'collection.'
gpt
I think you know well enough, he retorted.
human
The first time I saw you--down at the Nick-wire ford with Tig, you remember--I tried to recall which Madonna it is that has your mouth and eyes.
gpt
Well, did you succeed in placing the lady?
human
No. Somehow, I haven't cared to since I've come to know you. You're different--always different, and then--oh, well, comparisons are such hopelessly inadequate things, anyway,
gpt
You are not getting on very well with the 'contradictions,'
human
Oh, I can catalogue them if you push me to it. One minute you are the Madonna lady that I can't recall, calm, reposeful, truthful, and all that, you know--so truthful that those childlike eyes of yours would make a stuttering imbecile of the man who should come to you with a lie in his mouth.
gpt
And the next minute?
human
The next minute you are a witch, laughing at the man's little weaknesses, putting your finger on them as accurately as if you could read his soul, holding them up to your ridicule and--what's much worse--to his own. At such times your insight, or whatever you choose to call it, is enough to give a man a fit of 'seeing things.'
gpt
What a picture! she commented. And then:
human
I can draw a better one of you, Monsieur Victor de Brouillard.
gpt
Do it,
human
It'll hurt your vanity.
gpt
I haven't any.
human
Oh, but you have! Don't you know that it is only the very vainest people who say that?
gpt
Never mind; go on and draw your picture.
human
Even if it should give you another attack of the 'seeing things'?
gpt
Yes; I'll chance even that.
human
Very well, then: once upon a time--it was a good while ago, I'm afraid--you were a very upright young man, and your uprightness made you just a little bit austere--for yourself, if not for others. At that time you were busy whittling out heroic little ideals and making idols of them; and I am quite sure you were spelling duty with a capital 'D' and that you would have been properly horrified if a sister of yours had permitted an unchaperoned acquaintance like--well, like ours.
gpt
Go on,
human
Also, at that time you thought that a man's work in the world was the biggest thing that ever existed, the largest possible order that could be given, and the work and everything about it had to be transparently honest and openly aboveboard. You would cheerfully have died for a principle in those days, and you would have allowed the enemy to cut you up into cunning little inch cubes before you would have admitted that any pigeon was ever made to be plucked.
gpt
Then what happened?
human
One of two things, or maybe both of them. You were pushed out into the life race with some sort of a handicap. I don't know what it was--or is. Is that true?
gpt
Yes.
human
Then I'll hazard the other guess. You discovered that there were women in the world and that there was something in you, or about you, that was sufficiently attractive to make them sit up and be nice to you. For some reason--perhaps it was the handicap--you thought you'd be safer in the unwomaned wilderness and so you came out here to the 'wild and woolly.' But even here you're not safe. There is a passable trail over War Arrow Pass and at a pinch an automobile can cross the Buckskin.
gpt
It is all true enough. You haven't added anything more than a graceful little touch here and there. Who has been telling you all these things about me?
human
You don't deny them?
gpt
I wouldn't be so impolite.
human
You _can't_ deny them.
gpt
I asked you who has been gossiping about me; not Grizzy?
human
No, not Murray Grislow; it was the man you think you know best in all the world--who is also the one you probably know the least--yourself.
gpt
Good Heavens! am I really such a transparent egoist as all that?
human
All men are egoists, she answered calmly.
gpt
In some the ego is sound and clear-eyed and strong; in others it is weak--in the same way that passion is weak; it will sacrifice all it has or hopes to have in some sudden fury of self-assertion.