"I can't do it, Fergus, and you have no right to ask me. If Anthy tells me to go, I will go. It is between us. Can't you see it?"
"Wull," said Fergus, hopelessly, "you an' me must ha' it oot."
With this, Fergus turned about and began to take off his coat. Nort remembered long afterward the look of Fergus deliberately taking off his coat--his angular, bony form, his wiry, freckled neck, his rough, red hair, his loose sleeves held up by gayly embroidered armlets, the trousers bagging in extremity at his knees. Even in that moment he felt a curious deep sense of pity, pity mingled with understanding, sweep over him. He had come some distance in the few short hours since Anthy's face had looked up into his.
Fergus laid his coat and hat at the trunk of a beech tree and began slowly to roll up his sleeves.
Nort suddenly laughed aloud. It was unbelievable, ridiculous! Why, it was uncivilized! It simply wasn't done in the world he had known.
Nort had never in his life been held down to an irrevocable law or principle, never been confronted by an unescapable fact of life. Some men go through their whole lives that way. He had never met anything from which there was not some easy, safe, pleasant, polite way out--his wit, his family connections, his money. But now he was looking into the implacable, steel-blue eyes of Fergus MacGregor.
"But, Fergus," he said, "I don't want to fight. I like you."
"There's them that _has_ to fight," responded Fergus.
"I never fought anybody in my life," said Nort, as though partly to himself.
Fergus continued, like some implacable fate, getting ready. He was now hitching up his belt.
Every artistic nature sooner or later meets some such irretrievable human experience. It asks only to see life, to look on, to enjoy. But one day this artistic nature makes the astonishing discovery that nature plays no favourites, that life is, after all, horribly concrete, democratic, little given to polite discrimination, and it gets itself suddenly taken seriously, literally, and dragged by the heels into the grime and common coarseness of things.
Nort was still inclined to argue, for it did not seem real to him.
"It won't prove anything, Fergus, fighting never does."
And yet at the very moment that Nort was saying that he was horribly afraid, and he spoke the literal truth, a very strange procession of thoughts was passing swiftly through the back of his mind. He was somehow standing aside and seeing himself as he was at that moment, seeing, indeed, every detail of the scene before him like a picture, every tree and leaf, the carpet of leaves and bracken, seeing Fergus moving about. Yes, and he was laughing, away back there, at the picture he saw, and wondering at it, and thrilling over it, at the very moment that he was so horribly afraid. He was even speculating, back there, a little cynically, whether he, Nort, would finally stay to fight or run away. He actually did not know!