CHAPTER THREE

Theodosia Linden sat in the high-backed, plush-covered seat of the

sleeping-car, with her hands folded in her lap, looking out of the

window at the flat landscape as it sped past her. The long green rows of

cotton-plants were interspersed with tracts of scrub-oak and pine,

dotted here and there with gray cabins, around which negroes, little and

big, in scanty garments were grouped to watch the train go by;

occasionally it whizzed past a small station, a mere shed set on a

wooden platform reached by a flight of steps, and graced by no name for

the aid of the traveler, except the cabalistic legend, “Southern Express

Company,” on a swinging board at one end. It was before these ultimate

days when factories are springing up all over the new South, and she had

not yet reached the scattered few that upraised their staring yellow

frames by the side of the muddy streams; only the cotton-fields and the

scrub-oaks ran along by the train, with the view of the blue mountains

here and there, and a blue sky above all. Dosia thought that she had

never seen anything so beautiful or inspiring; it was the world outside

of her home.

There is no discontent so deep, so wearying, so soul-embracing, as that

of the girl who is supposed to be contented with the little rounds of

household life. Dosia’s mother had died when she was a small child, but

so much love and care had been given her by relatives and by her father,

a professor in a small college and a gentle and good man, that she had

never felt the loss. When she was twelve years old her father married

again, and, on account of his failing health, they moved from their home

in the West to the far South, where Mr. Linden hoped, with the small

income which he already possessed, to engage in some industry suitable

to his limited powers; but in the enervating climate he gradually lost

all ambition and business habits. He became yellow in complexion and

slouching as to appearance and walk; but he was even more gentle than

before, and gave the benefit of much good advice to the loungers around

the village store or the new people from the North who came to learn the

methods pertaining to cotton-raising, for he always knew how everything

should be done.

He was a kind, affectionate husband and father, always placid and

amiable, and only regretting, as he continually affirmed, that he could

not provide for the family as he should. The children, of whom there

were four by this second marriage, adored their father, as did his wife,

who was a pretty woman, and as gentle, as incompetent, and almost as

self-regretful as himself. The little stepmother had from the first

attached herself to Dosia, whom she treated even at that early stage of

life less as a child than as a friend, to be depended on in all

emergencies.

Dosia could not have told at just exactly what period in her existence

the unthinking content of childhood had left her. It was natural to live

in the small, poorly built house, surrounded by an unkempt yard with

broken fences, with small children to dress and care for and a baby to

be tended, and a dinner-table that was set at sixes and sevens, with a

continual desultory striving after a refinement of dress and living that

was never accomplished. It was a matter of course to be always “clearing

up,” yet never in order, and to be always economizing temporarily in

view of the stated remittance which never could be used for paying

anything but back debts when it did come. Dosia was a sweet-natured

child, affectionate and helpful, with a healthy constitution which made

work unnoticeable, and she had taken life happily in the old-fashioned

way according to the views of her elders, without criticism or comment.

Her education, although desultory, had been fairly good, depending

partly on teachers who came from the North and stayed in Balderville for

their health, and partly on her father, who was a man of taste as well

as culture, and who read with her in the evenings when he felt like it;

for that, as everything else, was a matter of inclination with him and

not of duty. She was fond of reading, and had also somewhat of a talent

for music, which made it possible for her to achieve pleasing results

with very little real tuition or practice. Fortunately, she had been

well taught at the beginning.

Society at Balderville was of the fluctuant, intermittent order that

obtains at minor resorts; the crop of visitors was bad or good,

according to the year, like the peaches or cotton. With some of these

visitors Dosia formed eager, transitory friendships, but with others

there could be no assimilation. There were a few nice families settled

in the place, more or less bound together by a community of interest

centering in Balderville and the future of their children, who were

usually sent away to school when half grown.

Youth is a surprisingly concrete thing, possessing faculties of its

own—a terrible clear-sightedness, for one thing, and a black-and-white

ruled-out sense of justice and injustice; it brought an absolutely new

sense of values to Dosia. It was when she was seventeen that it began to

dawn upon her that the conditions at home, always looked upon as

entirely temporary and sporadic by her father and stepmother, were

really the inevitable expressions of law. She saw that the true

character of her parents was quite different from their own idea of it;

that they would never change materially, and therefore, in the very

nature of things, their fortunes could never change materially; they

would always be going a little faster or a little slower on a down

grade. She wondered at the exhaustless capacity of complacently

believing in worn fallacies which her young eyes saw pitilessly as such.

Her stepmother still looked upon the father, as he did upon himself, as

a successful and energetic man of business for the moment only disabled

by his failing health, and believed herself to be always on the point of

managing the little money they had with superhuman economy, so that it

would cover all household emergencies; only Dosia knew that there could

never be more money, and that what there was must always slip away. This

knowledge laid the future waste and rendered effort futile. What was the

use, for instance, of putting cushions on the lounge over the place

where there was a big hole in the cover, until they could buy the new

one? There never would be a new one. What was the use of pretending that

when the cracked and heterogeneous plates and dishes were replaced the

table would be properly set once more? They never would be replaced.

If Theodosia had not been of a sweet nature, scorn would have embittered

her; as it was, she was still loving, but she grew tired. She taught a

little, in the odd chances that served, and gained a few pence here and

there by it, for teaching brought an absurdly pitiful wage. She went to

the simple entertainments of the place, which were mostly among the

older people, and played the piano sometimes at them, when she could be

spared long enough from her duties at home to practice beforehand. The

young people around showed the usual rural effect of propinquity and

childish habit in pairing off insensibly as they grew up; it was always

said of such and such a one, in local parlance, that they “went

together,” and arrangements were made in view of this known fact

whenever festivities were in prospect, but Dosia had never “gone with”

anyone for more than a few days at a time, when some young visitor

staying in the place had given her the preference in the dances and

picnics and straw-rides. For the rest, she sewed and mended and baked

and took care of the children, and read, and found her father’s

walking-sticks for him, and filled the lamps and fed the dogs and went

on errands. Her father and stepmother were quite contented, and why

should she not be?

[Illustration: _Theodosia_]

But there came a time when there seemed to be no point to living; after

the day’s work, what was there? What would there ever be? The children

played merrily and went to bed happy. The father and mother loved each

other, their very limitations made their engrossing interest, they were

contented to be discontented. Dosia took herself to task for her own

discontent, she prayed against it, she made bracing rules for herself

which she strove to follow; she read, she sewed with fresh vigor, she

was nobly self-sacrificing. Mrs. Linden often said that she didn’t know

how they would ever get along without Dosia. She also often spoke of the

advantages she would like to give the girl, and at first Dosia had

listened with pleased hope to these aspirations, but as no effort was

ever made to realize them in even the simplest way, they only served

after a while to show more plainly the flatness of living.

Many a night—like many another girl!—Dosia sat in the window of her

shelving attic room, bathed in the golden moonlight, with her hair

falling on her shoulders and her hands clasped before her, a picture for

none to see. The warm summer odors of pine and hickory were around her.

The tide of youth was so strong in her heart! In vain she tried to stem

it. She longed inexpressibly for that outer world, of which she had

read, where youth was a power. In an age of modern young womanhood,

clever, self-satisfying, potential, Dosia belonged to the old régime

where sentiment still holds sway. She wanted, indeed, to learn more

about many things,—she longed to study music,—but she felt no

inspiration and no desire for the life of an artist; she was, in fact,

just a girl, who longed with vague indefiniteness, yet none the less

intensely, for the joyous life of a girl; the pleasure of being sought,

the excitement of shining, for music and dancing and little daily

delights, and—love. She dimly discerned unknown glories that made her

breath come quickly. Dosia dreamed of some one in the far future who

would be very good and very noble, whose love would hold her to

everything that was beautiful and right, with whom she would prove

herself extraordinarily witty and brilliant and fascinating, and whose

hand on hers would set her heart beating. She imagined pouring out her

heart to him,—that heart which seemed to be forever shut in her breast

now, with none to understand it, none to care,—going to him with all

these doubts and self-convictions and hopes, and feeling the blessedness

of his response. “You darling,” he would say, “don’t you know I was

loving you all the time? We neither of us knew each other, to be sure,

but the love was there all the same; it had existed since the beginning

of the world.”

She began to show the effects of that terrible atrophy which affects not

only the mind but the very blood of girlhood, and which does not need

iron as a curative power so much as a legitimate and healthy excitement.

Even Mrs. Linden noticed that the girl looked thin and pale, and showed

listlessness in place of energy, after several neighbors had openly

commented on the fact; she said placidly that she was really worried

about Dosia, and wished that she could have a change. And then one of

those impossible, wonderful things happened which alter the whole

surface of the earth. A rich aunt in Cincinnati wrote that Dosia was to

go to New York to study music, and spend the winter with a married

cousin, Lois Alexander, in one of the suburbs.

Thus it came that Theodosia was journeying North, dressed in a new suit

of blue serge, which had been sent from Atlanta, to fit her measure,

with the rest of her traveling outfit. As she sat in the Pullman car,

with her head in its little gray felt hat against the high back of the

seat, and looked down at the tips of her new shoes, and then at the

fingers of her new gloves, she felt like a princess.

Dress in Balderville had been a matter of necessity, not of

choice—bleared and shapeless in effect from much “making over,” as

purchase was not to be thought of. Dosia had had no new clothing for

such a long time that the sensation of delight was so keen that she

almost felt as if it must be wicked. Her skin seemed satin smooth with

the clean freshness of dainty linen against it, and the unwonted perfume

of the suède gloves was subtly intoxicating. She took furtive glimpses

of herself in the glass panel beside her, and the sight filled her with

a delighted wonder. She could hardly believe that she really looked so

much like other people.

It was her toilet that engaged her attention, not her face; she had that

exaggerated idea of the importance of dress which belongs to people who

have never been able to exercise their taste or fancy for

it—particularly those who live in the country. A bit of bright velvet

was like a picture to her, ribbons made a poem; for her face she cared

little. It was not beautiful, but sweet and youthful—just a girl’s

face; small, quite pale, except when she spoke, when the color varied in

it with the moment. She had blue eyes, a good mouth with a short upper

lip, white teeth, and a pretty chin. Her blue eyes had a bright, alert

look in them that waited on those with whom she held converse; her

slender young figure bent slightly forward, while her lips parted

unconsciously, as if in deep attention. This, with her varying color,

gave her a charm.

But her greatest attraction was still the innocent, artless expression

of extreme youth which experience has never touched, which has nothing

to remember and nothing to forget—the typical fair white page, still

unwritten upon, although she had been twenty on her last birthday.

When she looked at the scenery, she kept seeing at first only the family

group at the station as she had left it: her father, tall, gray-bearded,

with hollow eyes, a continually working mouth, a slouching gait, a worn

hat and an old striped coat; her stepmother, short, stout, pretty, and

unkempt, in a frayed and faded shirtwaist, and a skirt pinned with a

large brass safety-pin dragging away from the belt; three barefooted

children in nondescript attire beside her, and a curly-haired,

brown-eyed boy of two holding her dress with one hand and throwing

kisses with the other. That was how Dosia had seen them last. The elders

had been so kind about her going, her eyes filled remorsefully at the

thought; she had been so shamelessly glad to go! And yet, she did love

them. Mingled with a sense of kindness was also a strange little

disappointment—she felt that when they turned homeward with their backs

to the train they would let her slip out of their lives with the same

ease with which they had accustomed themselves to let other things go,

with a selfish inertia too deep to feel anything long. Only the

baby—little Rolf—he would miss her; he would cry, at any rate for a

while, for his Dosia to put him to sleep. Her lips trembled and her arms

yearned for him, with a sudden savage instinct of latent motherhood

unknown to her placid stepmother. It was characteristic of this girl,

who was tired of taking care of children, that the fact of there being a

two-year-old baby also at her cousin’s house seemed now its crowning

attraction; she turned comfortingly to intimate speculations about the

darling.

After a while the rush-rushing of the train, the sense of traveling,

blurred out the past for her. She was journeying to the life that was

hers by right; the luxurious appointments of the car, her own new

elegance, began to seem a part of her, wonted necessaries to which,

indeed, she had been born. It was a buffet-car, and she took the card

offered her by the white-aproned colored waiter and selected her dinner

as she saw others doing. He was so long in bringing it that she thought

he had forgotten it; but at last he brought the meal, and she ate it

from the table which he had obseqiously fastened up in front of her;

there was an exhilaration in the performance of this very simple act

which made several people look at her with a smiling indulgence.

Afterwards she put her gray felt hat in the rack, and took off her

jacket, and made herself comfortable, as she saw others had done. The

car was by no means crowded, and she had seen from the first that there

was no one who could serve as a peg to hang a romance on—only

middle-aged women and men, and a mother with half-grown children. She

fell to wondering, as she had done many times before, what her cousins

would be like; she was prepared to love them dearly. With the

unconscious egotism of her age, everything in this new life was to

revolve around her. The other players were accessories—she was the star

performer.

The afternoon whirled away amid patches of light and dark, of green and

shadow, red clay and somber pine, scattered white houses and rounded

overhanging slopes that shut out the day. Dosia looked, and dreamed—and

dreamed. Then night closed her into the train, with its crimson plush

and gleaming woods and lights, and strange faces, and impalpable

cinders, and that rush-rushing still. Then the berths were made up,

people sitting the while in tired, silent groups in other sections,

holding on to cloaks and hand-bags, before disappearing singly behind

the curtains. Dosia crept under hers. She had first tried to braid the

brown hair that would curl itself out of the plaits, and then lay down

at last without removing any clothing, with both hands tucked under her

soft cheek and her eyes staring before her. There had been a bustle of

walking to and fro before the berths were made ready, but after a while

all was still behind the long curtains, that waved outward a little when

the train went suddenly around a curve. Gradually those wide-open blue

eyes began to close; she seemed to be floating in a blissful dream on

pillows of roseate down, between waking and sleeping; and then—_God in

heaven_! A crash as of a breaking world, an awful, blinding, helpless

terror! A giant force had her by the throat, clutching her, beating her

against the planks, jamming her into awful darkness as if she were a

creature without bone or sinew, while her shrieking voice lost itself

among the other voices shrieking. A plunge, and then—nothing.

The night was inky black, and the wind that swept down the gorge brought

an occasional raindrop with it. Dosia felt one fall on her cheek. A long

while after that she heard voices, then a man’s hand was passed over her

face and a voice close above her said, “It is a woman,” and added,

bending still nearer to her, “Can you speak?”

Dosia opened her lips, but no sound came from them; instead, she broke

into a helpless sobbing in which there were no tears. The man spoke to

some one near, and she became aware that there were other sounds of

talking and distress around her. Far up above them an occasional light

twinkled and disappeared.

Presently the man bent down to her again, and, lifting her head gently,

placed something soft under it. His touch was compassionate, and his

tone still more so as he said:

“Are you in much pain?”

She tried again to speak, and again the sobbing spoke for her. She

wanted to question him, but could not. He seemed to divine her thought.

“Never mind; do not try to answer me. Perhaps you wonder where you are.

There has been a terrible accident—the trestle gave way, and one car

fell down here; the others, I believe, smashed farther up somewhere.

People are coming to us with light and stretchers, and all we have to do

now is to wait patiently. I wonder if you will try and do just as I tell

you? Move your right foot—yes, there—now your left—now this arm—now

the other. Why, that’s brave of you!”—as she tried to raise herself a

little. “Perhaps you will be able to stand soon.” He broke off suddenly

with a groan: “I wish to Heaven I had some whisky! I wish to Heaven I

had! but there’s not a drop left in the flask.”

The wind began to blow harder, and the rain to descend, and the sounds

of moving and confusion around increased. The lights Dosia had seen

above seemed to get nearer, and then twinkled down close to the wreck;

but even then, in the opaque blackness of the night, they remained only

isolated points of light, diffusing no radiance around them, as they

dipped down to the earth, and rose again, and wavered and went backward

and forward; with them came more voices and stumbling feet, sounds half

swallowed by the depth of the night and the growing fury of the gusts of

wind.

Dosia felt a new and terrible pang of loneliness as the fleeting flash

of a lantern above her revealed that there was no one beside her; it was

like being dropped again into nothingness. She did not know how long she

lay there. With the recognized tones came a returning wave of life,

though she scarce knew what was said. A strong arm raised her to a

sitting position, and held her there, with her head resting against the

shoulder of this new-found friend. “Drink this—all of it. I want to see

if you can stand after a few moments, and perhaps walk—there are so few

stretchers.” Dosia could feel him involuntarily shudder.

“No, I will not leave you”—he spoke as one would to a little child, as

she made a faint, terrified motion to hold his arm—“I will not leave

you. I will take you every step of the way. You are a girl, aren’t you?

Were you alone on the train? Had you no friends with you?”