I lunched alone at the Gilmore house, and went back to the city at once. The
sun had lifted the mists, and a fresh summer wind had cleared away the smoke
pall. The boulevard was full of cars flying countryward for the Saturday
half-holiday, toward golf and tennis, green fields and babbling girls. I
gritted my teeth and thought of McKnight at Richmond, visiting the lady with
the geographical name. And then, for the first time, I associated John
Gilmore’s granddaughter with the “West” that McKnight had
irritably flung at me.
I still carried my traveling-bag, for McKnight’s vision at the window of
the empty house had not been without effect. I did not transfer the notes to my
pocket, and, if I had, it would not have altered the situation later. Only the
other day McKnight put this very thing up to me.
“I warned you,” he reminded me. “I told you there were queer
things coming, and to be on your guard. You ought to have taken your
revolver.”
“It would have been of exactly as much use as a bucket of snow in
Africa,” I retorted. “If I had never closed my eyes, or if I had
kept my finger on the trigger of a six-shooter (which is novelesque for
revolver), the result would have been the same. And the next time you want a
little excitement with every variety of thrill thrown in, I can put you by way
of it. You begin by getting the wrong berth in a Pullman car, and
end—”
“Oh, I know how it ends,” he finished shortly. “Don’t
you suppose the whole thing’s written on my spinal marrow?”
But I am wandering again. That is the difficulty with the unprofessional
story-teller: he yaws back and forth and can’t keep in the wind; he drops
his characters overboard when he hasn’t any further use for them and
drowns them; he forgets the coffee-pot and the frying-pan and all the other
small essentials, and, if he carries a love affair, he mutters a fervent
“Allah be praised” when he lands them, drenched with adventures, at
the matrimonial dock at the end of the final chapter.
I put in a thoroughly unsatisfactory afternoon. Time dragged eternally. I
dropped in at a summer vaudeville, and bought some ties at a
haberdasher’s. I was bored but unexpectant; I had no premonition of what
was to come. Nothing unusual had ever happened to me; friends of mine had
sometimes sailed the high seas of adventure or skirted the coasts of chance,
but all of the shipwrecks had occurred after a woman passenger had been taken
on. “Ergo,” I had always said “no women!” I
repeated it to myself that evening almost savagely, when I found my thoughts
straying back to the picture of John Gilmore’s granddaughter. I even
argued as I ate my solitary dinner at a downtown restaurant.
“Haven’t you troubles enough,” I reflected, “without
looking for more? Hasn’t Bad News gone lame, with a matinée race booked
for next week? Otherwise aren’t you comfortable? Isn’t your house
in order? Do you want to sell a pony in order to have the library done over in
mission or the drawing-room in gold? Do you want somebody to count the empty
cigarette boxes lying around every morning?”
Lay it to the long idle afternoon, to the new environment, to anything you
like, but I began to think that perhaps I did. I was confoundedly lonely. For
the first time in my life its even course began to waver: the needle registered
warning marks on the matrimonial seismograph, lines vague enough, but lines.
My alligator bag lay at my feet, still locked. While I waited for my coffee I
leaned back and surveyed the people incuriously. There were the usual couples
intent on each other: my new state of mind made me regard them with tolerance.
But at the next table, where a man and woman dined together, a different
atmosphere prevailed. My attention was first caught by the woman’s face.
She had been speaking earnestly across the table, her profile turned to me. I
had noticed casually her earnest manner, her somber clothes, and the great mass
of odd, bronze-colored hair on her neck. But suddenly she glanced toward me and
the utter hopelessness—almost tragedy—of her expression struck me
with a shock. She half closed her eyes and drew a long breath, then she turned
again to the man across the table.
Neither one was eating. He sat low in his chair, his chin on his chest, ugly
folds of thick flesh protruding over his collar. He was probably fifty, bald,
grotesque, sullen, and yet not without a suggestion of power. But he had been
drinking; as I looked, he raised an unsteady hand and summoned a waiter with a
wine list.
The young woman bent across the table and spoke again quickly. She had
unconsciously raised her voice. Not beautiful, in her earnestness and stress
she rather interested me. I had an idle inclination to advise the waiter to
remove the bottled temptation from the table. I wonder what would have happened
if I had? Suppose Harrington had not been intoxicated when he entered the
Pullman car Ontario that night!
For they were about to make a journey, I gathered, and the young woman wished
to go alone. I drank three cups of coffee, which accounted for my wakefulness
later, and shamelessly watched the tableau before me. The woman’s protest
evidently went for nothing: across the table the man grunted monosyllabic
replies and grew more and more lowering and sullen. Once, during a brief
unexpected pianissimo in the music, her voice came to me sharply:
“If I could only see him in time!” she was saying. “Oh,
it’s terrible!”
In spite of my interest I would have forgotten the whole incident at once,
erased it from my mind as one does the inessentials and clutterings of memory,
had I not met them again, later that evening, in the Pennsylvania station. The
situation between them had not visibly altered: the same dogged determination
showed in the man’s face, but the young woman—daughter or wife? I
wondered—had drawn down her veil and I could only suspect what white
misery lay beneath.
I bought my berth after waiting in a line of some eight or ten people. When,
step by step, I had almost reached the window, a tall woman whom I had not
noticed before spoke to me from my elbow. She had a ticket and money in her
hand.
“Will you try to get me a lower when you buy yours?” she asked.
“I have traveled for three nights in uppers.”
I consented, of course; beyond that I hardly noticed the woman. I had a vague
impression of height and a certain amount of stateliness, but the crowd was
pushing behind me, and some one was standing on my foot. I got two lowers
easily, and, turning with the change and berths, held out the tickets.
“Which will you have?” I asked. “Lower eleven or lower
ten?”
“It makes no difference,” she said. “Thank you very much
indeed.”
At random I gave her lower eleven, and called a porter to help her with her
luggage. I followed them leisurely to the train shed, and ten minutes more saw
us under way.
I looked into my car, but it presented the peculiarly unattractive appearance
common to sleepers. The berths were made up; the center aisle was a path
between walls of dingy, breeze-repelling curtains, while the two seats at each
end of the car were piled high with suitcases and umbrellas. The perspiring
porter was trying to be six places at once: somebody has said that Pullman
porters are black so they won’t show the dirt, but they certainly show
the heat.
Nine-fifteen was an outrageous hour to go to bed, especially since I sleep
little or not at all on the train, so I made my way to the smoker and passed
the time until nearly eleven with cigarettes and a magazine. The car was very
close. It was a warm night, and before turning in I stood a short time in the
vestibule. The train had been stopping at frequent intervals, and, finding the
brakeman there, I asked the trouble.
It seemed that there was a hot-box on the next car, and that not only were we
late, but we were delaying the second section, just behind. I was beginning to
feel pleasantly drowsy, and the air was growing cooler as we got into the
mountains. I said good night to the brakeman and went back to my berth. To my
surprise, lower ten was already occupied—a suit-case projected from
beneath, a pair of shoes stood on the floor, and from behind the curtains came
the heavy, unmistakable breathing of deep sleep. I hunted out the porter and
together we investigated.
“Are you asleep, sir?” asked the porter, leaning over
deferentially. No answer forthcoming, he opened the curtains and looked in.
Yes, the intruder was asleep—very much asleep—and an overwhelming
odor of whisky proclaimed that he would probably remain asleep until morning. I
was irritated. The car was full, and I was not disposed to take an upper in
order to allow this drunken interloper to sleep comfortably in my berth.
“You’ll have to get out of this,” I said, shaking him
angrily. But he merely grunted and turned over. As he did so, I saw his
features for the first time. It was the quarrelsome man of the restaurant.
I was less disposed than ever to relinquish my claim, but the porter, after a
little quiet investigation, offered a solution of the difficulty.
“There’s no one in lower nine,” he suggested, pulling open
the curtains just across. “It’s likely nine’s his berth, and
he’s made a mistake, owing to his condition. You’d better take
nine, sir.”
I did, with a firm resolution that if nine’s rightful owner turned up
later I should be just as unwakable as the man opposite. I undressed leisurely,
making sure of the safety of the forged notes, and placing my grip as before
between myself and the window.
Being a man of systematic habits, I arranged my clothes carefully, putting my
shoes out for the porter to polish, and stowing my collar and scarf in the
little hammock swung for the purpose.
At last, with my pillows so arranged that I could see out comfortably, and with
the unhygienic-looking blanket turned back—I have always a distrust of
those much-used affairs—I prepared to wait gradually for sleep.
But sleep did not visit me. The train came to frequent, grating stops, and I
surmised the hot box again. I am not a nervous man, but there was something
chilling in the thought of the second section pounding along behind us. Once,
as I was dozing, our locomotive whistled a shrill warning—“You keep
back where you belong,” it screamed to my drowsy ears, and from somewhere
behind came a chastened “All-right-I-will.”
I grew more and more wide-awake. At Cresson I got up on my elbow and blinked
out at the station lights. Some passengers boarded the train there and I heard
a woman’s low tones, a southern voice, rich and full. Then quiet again.
Every nerve was tense: time passed, perhaps ten minutes, possibly half an hour.
Then, without the slightest warning, as the train rounded a curve, a heavy body
was thrown into my berth. The incident, trivial as it seemed, was startling in
its suddenness, for although my ears were painfully strained and awake, I had
heard no step outside. The next instant the curtain hung limp again; still
without a sound, my disturber had slipped away into the gloom and darkness. In
a frenzy of wakefulness, I sat up, drew on a pair of slippers and fumbled for
my bath-robe.
From a berth across, probably lower ten, came that particular aggravating snore
which begins lightly, delicately, faintly soprano, goes down the scale a note
with every breath, and, after keeping the listener tense with expectation, ends
with an explosion that tears the very air. I was more and more irritable: I sat
on the edge of the berth and hoped the snorer would choke to death. He had
considerable vitality, however; he withstood one shock after another and
survived to start again with new vigor. In desperation I found some cigarettes
and one match, piled my blankets over my grip, and drawing the curtains
together as though the berth were still occupied, I made my way to the
vestibule of the car.
I was not clad for dress parade. Is it because the male is so restricted to
gloom in his every-day attire that he blossoms into gaudy colors in his pajamas
and dressing-gowns? It would take a Turk to feel at home before an audience in
my red and yellow bathrobe, a Christmas remembrance from Mrs. Klopton, with
slippers to match.
So, naturally, when I saw a feminine figure on the platform, my first instinct
was to dodge. The woman, however, was quicker than I; she gave me a startled
glance, wheeled and disappeared, with a flash of two bronze-colored braids,
into the next car.
Cigarette box in one hand, match in the other, I leaned against the uncertain
frame of the door and gazed after her vanished figure. The mountain air flapped
my bath-robe around my bare ankles, my one match burned to the end and went
out, and still I stared. For I had seen on her expressive face a haunting look
that was horror, nothing less. Heaven knows, I am not psychological. Emotions
have to be written large before I can read them. But a woman in trouble always
appeals to me, and this woman was more than that. She was in deadly fear.
If I had not been afraid of being ridiculous, I would have followed her. But I
fancied that the apparition of a man in a red and yellow bath-robe, with an
unkempt thatch of hair, walking up to her and assuring her that he would
protect her would probably put her into hysterics. I had done that once before,
when burglars had tried to break into the house, and had startled the parlor
maid into bed for a week. So I tried to assure myself that I had imagined the
lady’s distress—or caused it, perhaps—and to dismiss her from
my mind. Perhaps she was merely anxious about the unpleasant gentleman of the
restaurant. I thought smugly that I could have told her all about him: that he
was sleeping the sleep of the just and the intoxicated in a berth that ought,
by all that was fair and right, to have been mine, and that if I were tied to a
man who snored like that I should have him anæsthetized and his soft palate put
where it would never again flap like a loose sail in the wind.
We passed Harrisburg as I stood there. It was starlight, and the great crests
of the Alleghanies had given way to low hills. At intervals we passed smudges
of gray white, no doubt in daytime comfortable farms, which McKnight says is a
good way of putting it, the farms being a lot more comfortable than the people
on them.
I was growing drowsy: the woman with the bronze hair and the horrified face was
fading in retrospect. It was colder, too, and I turned with a shiver to go in.
As I did so a bit of paper fluttered into the air and settled on my sleeve,
like a butterfly on a gorgeous red and yellow blossom. I picked it up curiously
and glanced at it. It was part of a telegram that had been torn into bits.
There were only parts of four words on the scrap, but it left me puzzled and
thoughtful. It read, “—ower ten, car seve—.”
“Lower ten, car seven,” was my berth—the one I had bought and
found preempted.
