TWO'S COMPANY.
Elma was just engaged in debating with herself internally how a
young lady of perfect manners and impeccable breeding, travelling
without a chaperon, ought to behave under such trying circumstances,
after having allowed herself to be drawn unawares into familiar
conversation with a most attractive young artist, when all of a
sudden a rapid jerk of the carriage succeeded in extricating her
perforce, and against her will, from this awkward dilemma. Something
sharp pulled up their train unexpectedly. She was aware of a loud
noise and a crash in front, almost instantaneously followed by a
thrilling jar--a low dull thud--a sound of broken glass--a quick
blank stoppage. Next instant she found herself flung wildly forward
into her neighbour's arms, while the artist, for his part, with
outstretched hands, was vainly endeavouring to break the force of
the fall for her.
All she knew for the first few minutes was merely that there had
been an accident to the train, and they were standing still now in
the darkness of the tunnel.
For some seconds she paused, and gasped hard for breath, and tried
in vain to recall her scattered senses. Then slowly she sank back
on the seat once more, vaguely conscious that something terrible
had happened to the train, but that neither she nor her companion
were seriously injured.
As she sank back in her place, Cyril Waring bent forward towards
her with sympathetic kindliness.
"You're not hurt, I hope," he said, holding out one hand to help
her rise. "Stand up for a minute, and see if you're anything worse
than severely shaken. No? That's right, then! That's well, as far
as it goes. But I'm afraid the nervous shock must have been very
rough on you."
Elma stood tip, with tears gathering fast in her eyes. She'd have
given the world to be able to cry now, for the jar had half stunned
her and shaken her brain; but before the artist's face she was
ashamed to give free play to her feelings. So she only answered,
in a careless sort of tone--
"Oh, it's nothing much, I think. My head feels rather queer; but
I've no bones broken. A collision, I suppose. Oughtn't we to get
out at once and see what's happened to the other people?"
Cyril Waring moved hastily to the door, and, letting down the window,
tried with a violent effort to turn the handle from the outside.
But the door wouldn't open. As often happens in such accidents, the
jar had jammed it. He tried the other side, and with some difficulty
at last succeeded in forcing it open. Then he descended cautiously
on to the six-foot-way, and held out his hand to help Elma from
the carriage.
It was no collision, he saw at once, but a far more curious and
unusual accident.
Looking ahead through the tunnel, all was black as night. A dense
wall of earth seemed to block and fill in the whole space in front
of them. Part of one broken and shattered carriage lay tossed about
in wild confusion on the ground close by. Their own had escaped.
All the rest was darkness.
In a moment, Cyril rightly divined what must have happened to the
train. The roof of the tunnel had caved in on top of it. At least
one carriage--the one immediately in front of them--had been
crushed and shattered by the force of its fall. Their own was the
last, and it had been saved as if by a miracle. It lay just outside
the scene of the subsidence.
One thought rose instinctively at once in the young man's mind. They
must first see if any one was injured in the other compartments, or
among the debris of the broken carriage; and then they must make
for the open mouth of the tunnel, through which the light of day
still gleamed bright behind them.
He peered in hastily at the other three windows. Not a soul in any
one of the remaining compartments! It was a very empty train, he
had noticed himself, when he had got in at Tilgate; the one solitary
occupant of the front compartment of their carriage, a fat old
lady with a big black bag, had bundled out at Chetwood. They were
alone in the tunnel--at this end of the train at least; their sole
duty now was to make haste and save themselves.
He gazed overhead. The tunnel was bricked in with an arch on top.
The way through in front was blocked, of course, by the fallen mass
of water-logged sandstone. He glanced back towards the open mouth.
A curious circumstance, half-way down to the opening, attracted at
once his keen and practised eye.
Strange to say, the roof at one spot was not a true arc of a
circle. It bulged slightly downwards, in a flattened arch, as if
some superincumbent weight were pressing hard upon it. Great heavens,
what was this? Another trouble in store! He looked again, still
more earnestly, and started with horror.
In the twinkling of an eye, his reason told him, beyond the shadow
of a doubt, what was happening at the bulge. A second fall was
just about to take place close by them. Clearly there were TWO
weak points m the roof of the tunnel. One had already given way in
front; the other was on the very eve of giving way behind them. If
it fell, they were imprisoned between two impassable walls of sand
and earth. Without one instant's delay, he turned and seized his
companion's hand hastily.
"Quick! quick!" he cried, in a voice of eager warning. "Run, run
for your life to the mouth of the tunnel! Here, come! You've only
just time! It's going, it's going!"
But Elma's feminine instinct worked quicker and truer than even
Cyril Waring's manly reason. She didn't know why; she couldn't say
how; but in that one indivisible moment of time she had taken in
and grasped to the full all the varying terrors of the situation.
Instead of running, however, she held back her companion with a
nervous force she could never before have imagined herself capable
of exerting.
"Stop here," she cried authoritatively, wrenching his arm in her
haste. "If you go you'll be killed. There's no time to run past.
It'll be down before you're there. See, see, it's falling."
Even before the words were well out of her mouth, another great
crash shook the ground behind them. With a deafening roar, the
tunnel gave way in a second place beyond. Dust and sand filled the
air confusedly. For a minute or two all was noise and smoke and
darkness. What exactly had happened neither of them could see.
But now the mouth of the tunnel was blocked at either end alike,
and no daylight was visible. So far as Cyril could judge, they
two stood alone, in the dark and gloom, as in a narrow cell, shut
in with their carriage between two solid walls of fallen earth and
crumbling sandstone.
At this fresh misfortune, Elma sat down on the footboard with her
face in her hands, and began to sob bitterly. The artist leaned over
her and let her cry for a while in quiet despair. The poor girl's
nerves, it was clear, were now wholly unstrung. She was brave, as
women go, undoubtedly brave; but the shock and the terror of such
a position as this were more than enough to terrify the bravest.
At last Cyril ventured on a single remark.
"How lucky," he said, in an undertone, "I didn't get out at Warnworth
after all. It would have been dreadful if you'd been left all alone
in this position."
Elma glanced up at him with a sudden rush of gratitude. By the dim
light of the oil lamp that still flickered feebly in the carriage
overhead, she could see his face; and she knew by the look in
those truthful eyes that he really meant it. He really meant he
was glad he'd come on and exposed himself to this risk, which he
might otherwise have avoided, because he would be sorry to think a
helpless woman should be left alone by herself in the dark to face
it. And, frightened as she was, she was glad of it too. To be alone
would be awful. This was pre-eminently one of those many positions
in life in which a woman prefers to have a man beside her.
And yet most men, she knew, would have thought to themselves at
once, "What a fool I was to come on beyond my proper station, and
let myself in for this beastly scrape, just because I'd go a few
miles further with a pretty girl I never saw in my life before,
and will probably never see in my life again, if I once get well
out of this precious predicament."
But that they would ever get out of it at all seemed to both of them
now in the highest degree improbable. Cyril, by reason, Elma, by
instinct, argued out the whole situation at once, and correctly.
There had been much rain lately. The sandstone was water-logged. It
had caved in bodily, before them and behind them. A little isthmus
of archway still held out in isolation just above their heads. At
any moment that isthmus might give way too, and, falling on their
carriage, might crush them beneath its weight. Their lives depended
upon the continued resisting power of some fifteen yards or so of
dislocated masonry.
Appalled at the thought, Cyril moved from his place for a minute,
and went forward to examine the fallen block in front. Then he
paced his way back with groping steps to the equally ruinous mass
behind them. Elma's eyes, growing gradually accustomed to the
darkness and the faint glimmer of the oil lamps, followed his
action with vague and tearful interest.
"If the roof doesn't give way," he said calmly at last, when he
returned once more to her, "and if we can only let them know we're
alive in the tunnel, they may possibly dig us out before we choke.
There's air enough here for eighteen hours for us."
He spoke very quietly and reassuringly, as if being shut up in a
fallen tunnel between two masses of earth were a matter that needn't
cause one the slightest uneasiness; but his words suggested to
Elma's mind a fresh and hitherto unthought-of danger.
"Eighteen hours," she cried, horror-struck. "Do you mean to say
we may have to stop here, all alone, for eighteen hours together?
Oh, how very dreadful! How long! How frightening! And if they don't
dig us out before eighteen hours are over, do you mean to say we
shall die of choking?"
Cyril gazed down at her with a very regretful and sympathetic face.
"I didn't mean to frighten you," he said; "at least, not more than
you're frightened already; but, of course, there's only a certain
amount of oxygen in the space that's left us; and as we're using
it up at every breath, it'll naturally hold out for a limited time
only. It can't be much more than eighteen hours. Still, I don't
doubt they'll begin digging us out at once; and if they dig through
fast, they may yet be in time, even so, to save us."
Elma bent forward with her face in her hands again, and, rocking
herself to and fro in an agony of despair, gave herself vip to a
paroxysm of utter misery. This was too, too terrible. To think of
eighteen hours in that gloom and suspense; and then to die at last,
gasping hard for breath, in the poisonous air of that pestilential
tunnel.
For nearly an hour she sat there, broken down and speechless; while
Cyril Waring, taking a seat in silence by her side, tried at first
with mute sympathy to comfort and console her. Then he turned to
examine the roof, and the block at either end, to see if perchance
any hope remained of opening by main force an exit anywhere. He
even began by removing a little of the sand at the side of the line
with a piece of shattered board from the broken carriage in front;
but that was clearly no use. More sand tumbled in as fast as
he removed it. He saw there was nothing left for it but patience
or despair. And of the two, his own temperament dictated rather
patience.
He returned at last, wearied out, to Elma's side. Elma, still
sitting disconsolate on the footboard, rocking herself up and down,
and moaning low and piteously, looked up as he came with a mute
glance of inquiry. She was very pretty. That struck him even now.
It made his heart bleed to think she should be so cowed and terrified.
"I'm sorry to bother you," he said, after a pause, half afraid to
speak, "but there are four lamps all burning hard in these four
compartments, and using up the air we may need by-and-by for our
own breathing. If I were to climb to the top of the carriage--which
I can easily do--I could put them all out, and economize our oxygen.
It would leave us in the dark, but it'd give us one more chance
of life. Don't you think I'd better get up and turn them off, or
squash them?"
Elma clasped her hands in horror at the bare suggestion.
"Oh dear, no!" she cried hastily. "Please, PLEASE don't do that.
It's bad enough to choke slowly, like this, in the gloom. But to
die in the dark--that would be ten times more terrible. Why, it's
a perfect Black Hole of Calcutta, even now. If you were to turn
out the lights I could never stand it."
Cyril gave a respectful little nod of assent.
"Very well," he answered, as calm as ever. "That's just as you will.
I only meant to suggest it to you. My one wish is to do the best
I can for you. Perhaps"--and he hesitated--"perhaps I'd better
let it go on for an hour or two more, and then, whenever the air
begins to get very oppressive--I mean when one begins to feel it's
really failing us--one person, you know, could live on so much
longer than two... it would be a pity not to let you stand every
chance. Perhaps I might---"
Elma gazed at him aghast in the utmost horror. She knew what he meant
at once. She didn't even need that he should finish his sentence.
"Never!" she said, firmly clenching her small hand hard. "It's so
wrong of you to think of it, even. I could never permit it. It's
your duty to keep yourself alive at all hazards as long as ever
you can. You should remember your mother, your sisters, your family."
"Why, that's just it," Cyril answered, a little crestfallen, and
feeling he had done quite a wicked thing in venturing to suggest
that his companion should have every chance for her own life. "I've
got no mother, you see, no sisters, no family. Nobody on earth
would ever be one penny the worse if _I_ were to die, except my
twin brother; he's the only relation I ever had in my life; and
even HE, I dare say, would very soon get over it. Whereas YOU"--he
paused and glanced at her compassionately--"there are probably
many to whom the loss would be a very serious one. If I could do
anything to save you---" He broke off suddenly, for Elma looked
up at him once more with a little burst of despair.
"If you talk like that," she cried, with a familiarity that comes
of association in a very great danger, "I don't know what I shall
do; I don't know what I shall say to you. Why, I couldn't bear to
be left alone here to die by myself. If only for MY sake, now we're
boxed up here together, I think you ought to wait and do the best
you can for yourself."
"Very well," Cyril answered once more, in a most obedient tone. "If
you wish me to live to keep you company in the tunnel, I'll live
while I may. You have only to say what you wish. I'm here to wait
upon you."
In any other circumstances, such a phrase would have been a mere
piece of conversational politeness. At that critical moment, Elma
knew it for just what it was--a simple expression of his real
feeling.