We were still dazed, I think, for we wandered like two troubled children, our
one idea at first to get as far away as we could from the horror behind us. We
were both bareheaded, grimy, pallid through the grit. Now and then we met
little groups of country folk hurrying to the track: they stared at us
curiously, and some wished to question us. But we hurried past them; we had put
the wreck behind us. That way lay madness.
Only once the girl turned and looked behind her. The wreck was hidden, but the
smoke cloud hung heavy and dense. For the first time I remembered that my
companion had not been alone on the train.
“It is quiet here,” I suggested. “If you will sit down on the
bank I will go back and make some inquiries. I’ve been criminally
thoughtless. Your traveling companion—”
She interrupted me, and something of her splendid poise was gone. “Please
don’t go back,” she said. “I am afraid it would be of no use.
And I don’t want to be left alone.”
Heaven knows I did not want her to be alone. I was more than content to walk
along beside her aimlessly, for any length of time. Gradually, as she lost the
exaltation of the moment, I was gaining my normal condition of mind. I was
beginning to realize that I had lacked the morning grace of a shave, that I
looked like some lost hope of yesterday, and that my left shoe pinched
outrageously. A man does not rise triumphant above such handicaps. The girl,
for all her disordered hair and the crumpled linen of her waist, in spite of
her missing hat and the small gold bag that hung forlornly from a broken chain,
looked exceedingly lovely.
“Then I won’t leave you alone,” I said manfully, and we
stumbled on together. Thus far we had seen nobody from the wreck, but well up
the lane we came across the tall dark woman who had occupied lower eleven. She
was half crouching beside the road, her black hair about her shoulders, and an
ugly bruise over her eye. She did not seem to know us, and refused to accompany
us. We left her there at last, babbling incoherently and rolling in her hands a
dozen pebbles she had gathered in the road.
The girl shuddered as we went on. Once she turned and glanced at my bandage.
“Does it hurt very much?” she asked.
“It’s growing rather numb. But it might be worse,” I answered
mendaciously. If anything in this world could be worse, I had never experienced
it.
And so we trudged on bareheaded under the summer sun, growing parched and dusty
and weary, doggedly leaving behind us the pillar of smoke. I thought I knew of
a trolley line somewhere in the direction we were going, or perhaps we could
find a horse and trap to take us into Baltimore. The girl smiled when I
suggested it.
“We will create a sensation, won’t we?” she asked.
“Isn’t it queer—or perhaps it’s my state of
mind—but I keep wishing for a pair of gloves, when I haven’t even a
hat!”
When we reached the main road we sat down for a moment, and her hair, which had
been coming loose for some time, fell over her shoulders in little waves that
were most alluring. It seemed a pity to twist it up again, but when I suggested
this, cautiously, she said it was troublesome and got in her eyes when it was
loose. So she gathered it up, while I held a row of little shell combs and
pins, and when it was done it was vastly becoming, too. Funny about hair: a man
never knows he has it until he begins to lose it, but it’s different with
a girl. Something of the unconventional situation began to dawn on her as she
put in the last hair-pin and patted some stray locks to place.
“I have not told you my name,” she said abruptly. “I forgot
that because I know who you are, you know nothing about me. I am Alison West,
and my home is in Richmond.”
So that was it! This was the girl of the photograph on John Gilmore’s
bedside table. The girl McKnight expected to see in Richmond the next day,
Sunday! She was on her way back to meet him! Well, what difference did it make,
anyhow? We had been thrown together by the merest chance. In an hour or two at
the most we would be back in civilization and she would recall me, if she
remembered me at all, as an unshaven creature in a red cravat and tan shoes,
with a soiled Pullman sheet tied around my neck. I drew a deep breath.
“Just a twinge,” I said, when she glanced up quickly.
“It’s very good of you to let me know, Miss West. I have been
hearing delightful things about you for three months.”
“From Richey McKnight?” She was frankly curious.
“Yes. From Richey McKnight,” I assented. Was it any wonder McKnight
was crazy about her? I dug my heels into the dust.
“I have been visiting near Cresson, in the mountains,” Miss West
was saying. “The person you mentioned, Mrs. Curtis, was my hostess.
We—we were on our way to Washington together.” She spoke slowly, as
if she wished to give the minimum of explanation. Across her face had come
again the baffling expression of perplexity and trouble I had seen before.
“You were on your way home, I suppose? Richey spoke about seeing
you,” I floundered, finding it necessary to say something. She looked at
me with level, direct eyes.
“No,” she returned quietly. “I did not intend to go home.
I—well, it doesn’t matter; I am going home now.”
A woman in a calico dress, with two children, each an exact duplicate of the
other, had come quickly down the road. She took in the situation at a glance,
and was explosively hospitable.
“You poor things,” she said. “If you’ll take the first
road to the left over there, and turn in at the second pigsty, you will find
breakfast on the table and a coffee-pot on the stove. And there’s plenty
of soap and water, too. Don’t say one word. There isn’t a soul
there to see you.”
We accepted the invitation and she hurried on toward the excitement and the
railroad. I got up carefully and helped Miss West to her feet.
“At the second pigsty to the left,” I repeated, “we will find
the breakfast I promised you seven eternities ago. Forward to the
pigsty!”
We said very little for the remainder of that walk. I had almost reached the
limit of endurance: with every step the broken ends of the bone grated
together. We found the farm-house without difficulty, and I remember wondering
if I could hold out to the end of the old stone walk that led between hedges to
the door.
“Allah be praised,” I said with all the voice I could muster.
“Behold the coffee-pot!” And then I put down the grip and folded up
like a jack-knife on the porch floor.
When I came around something hot was trickling down my neck, and a despairing
voice was saying, “Oh, I don’t seem to be able to pour it into your
mouth. Please open your eyes.”
“But I don’t want it in my eyes,” I replied dreamily.
“I haven’t any idea what came over me. It was the shoes, I think:
the left one is a red-hot torture.” I was sitting by that time and
looking across into her face.
Never before or since have I fainted, but I would do it joyfully, a dozen times
a day, if I could waken again to the blissful touch of soft fingers on my face,
the hot ecstasy of coffee spilled by those fingers down my neck. There was a
thrill in every tone of her voice that morning. Before long my loyalty to
McKnight would step between me and the girl he loved: life would develop new
complexities. In those early hours after the wreck, full of pain as they were,
there was nothing of the suspicion and distrust that came later. Shorn of our
gauds and baubles, we were primitive man and woman, together: our world for the
hour was the deserted farm-house, the slope of wheat-field that led to the
road, the woodland lot, the pasture.
We breakfasted together across the homely table. Our cheerfulness, at first
sheer reaction, became less forced as we ate great slices of bread from the
granny oven back of the house, and drank hot fluid that smelled like coffee and
tasted like nothing that I have ever swallowed. We found cream in stone jars,
sunk deep in the chill water of the spring house. And there were eggs, great
yellow-brown ones,—a basket of them.
So, like two children awakened from a nightmare, we chattered over our food: we
hunted mutual friends, we laughed together at my feeble witticisms, but we put
the horror behind us resolutely. After all, it was the hat with the green
ribbons that brought back the strangeness of the situation.
All along I had had the impression that Alison West was deliberately putting
out of her mind something that obtruded now and then. It brought with it a
return of the puzzled expression that I had surprised early in the day, before
the wreck. I caught it once, when, breakfast over, she was tightening the sling
that held the broken arm. I had prolonged the morning meal as much as I could,
but when the wooden clock with the pink roses on the dial pointed to half after
ten, and the mother with the duplicate youngsters had not come back, Miss West
made the move I had dreaded.
“If we are to get into Baltimore at all we must start,” she said,
rising. “You ought to see a doctor as soon as possible.”
“Hush,” I said warningly. “Don’t mention the arm,
please; it is asleep now. You may rouse it.”
“If I only had a hat,” she reflected. “It wouldn’t need
to be much of one, but—” She gave a little cry and darted to the
corner. “Look,” she said triumphantly, “the very thing. With
the green streamers tied up in a bow, like this—do you suppose the child
would mind? I can put five dollars or so here—that would buy a dozen of
them.”
It was a queer affair of straw, that hat, with a round crown and a rim that
flopped dismally. With a single movement she had turned it up at one side and
fitted it to her head. Grotesque by itself, when she wore it it was a thing of
joy.
Evidently the lack of head covering had troubled her, for she was elated at her
find. She left me, scrawling a note of thanks and pinning it with a bill to the
table-cloth, and ran up-stairs to the mirror and the promised soap and water.
I did not see her when she came down. I had discovered a bench with a tin basin
outside the kitchen door, and was washing, in a helpless, one-sided way. I felt
rather than saw that she was standing in the door-way, and I made a final
plunge into the basin.
“How is it possible for a man with only a right hand to wash his left
ear?” I asked from the roller towel. I was distinctly uncomfortable: men
are more rigidly creatures of convention than women, whether they admit it or
not. “There is so much soap on me still that if I laugh I will blow
bubbles. Washing with rain-water and home-made soap is like motoring on a
slippery road. I only struck the high places.”
Then, having achieved a brilliant polish with the towel, I looked at the girl.
She was leaning against the frame of the door, her face perfectly colorless,
her breath coming in slow, difficult respirations. The erratic hat was pinned
to place, but it had slid rakishly to one side. When I realized that she was
staring, not at me, but past me to the road along which we had come, I turned
and followed her gaze. There was no one in sight: the lane stretched dust white
in the sun,—no moving figure on it, no sign of life.
