THE TRAIN WRECKER
The train-butcher, entering the Observation Room, found only a loving
couple. He took in at a glance their desire for solitude. A large part
of his business was the forcing of wares on people who did not want
them.
His voice and his method suggested the mosquito. Seeing Mallory and
Marjorie mutually absorbed in reading each other's eyes, and evidently
in need of nothing on earth less than something else to read, the
train-butcher decided that his best plan of attack was to make himself
a nuisance. It is a plan successfully adopted by organ-grinders,
street pianists and other blackmailers under the guise of art, who
have nothing so welcome to sell as their absence.
Mallory and Marjorie heard the train-boy's hum, but they tried to
ignore it.
"Papers, gents and ladies? Yes? No? Paris fashions, lady?"
He shoved a large periodical between their very noses, but Marjorie
threw it on the floor, with a bitter glance at her own borrowed
plumage:
"Don't show me any Paris fashions!" Then she gave the boy his congé by
resuming her chat with Mallory: "How long do we stop at Ogden?"
The train-boy went right on auctioning his papers and magazines, and
poking them into the laps of his prey. And they went right on talking
to one another and pushing his papers and magazines to the floor.
"I think I'd better get off at Ogden, and take the next train back.
That's just what I'll do. Nothing, thank you!" this last to the
train-boy.
"But you can't leave me like this," Mallory urged excitedly, with a
side glance of "No, no!" to the train-boy.
"I can, and I must, and I will," Marjorie insisted. "I'll go pack my
things now."
"But, Marjorie, listen to me."
"Will you let me alone!" This to the gadfly, but to Mallory a dejected
wail: "I--I just remembered. I haven't anything to pack."
"And you'll have to give back that waist to Mrs. Temple. You can't get
off at Ogden without a waist."
"I'll go anyway. I want to get home."
"Marjorie, if you talk that way--I'll throw you off the train!"
She gasped. He explained: "I wasn't talking to you; I was trying to
stop this phonograph." Then he rose, and laid violent hands on the
annoyer, shoved him to the corridor, seized his bundle of papers from
his arm, and hurled them at his head. They fell in a shower about the
train-butcher, who could only feel a certain respect for the one man
who had ever treated him as he knew he deserved. He bent to pick up
his scattered merchandise, and when he had gathered his stock
together, put his head in, and sang out a sincere:
"Excuse me."
But Mallory did not hear him, he was excitedly trying to calm the
excited girl, who, having eloped with him, was preparing now to elope
back without him.
"Darling, you can't desert me now," he pleaded, "and leave me to go on
alone?"
"Well, why don't you do something?" she retorted, in equal
desperation. "If I were a man, and I had the girl I loved on a train,
I'd get her married if I had to wreck the----" she caught her breath,
paused a second in intense thought, and then, with sudden radiance,
cried: "Harry, dear!"
"Yes, love!"
"I have an idea--an inspiration!"
"Yes, pet," rather dubiously from him, but with absolute exultation
from her: "Let's wreck the train!"
"I don't follow you, sweetheart."
"Don't you see?" she began excitedly. "When there are train wrecks a
lot of people get killed, and things. A minister always turns up to
administer the last something or other--well----"
"Well?"
"Well, stupid, don't you see? We wreck a train, a minister comes, we
nab him, he marries us, and--there we are! Everything's lovely!"
He gave her one of those looks with which a man usually greets what a
woman calls an inspiration. He did not honor her invention with
analysis. He simply put forward an objection to it, and, man-like,
chose the most hateful of all objections:
"It's a lovely idea, but the wreck would delay us for hours and hours,
and I'd miss my transport----"
"Harry Mallory, if you mention that odious transport to me again, I
know I'll have hydrophobia. I'm going home."
"But, darling," he pleaded, "you can't desert me now, and leave me to
go on alone?" She had her answer glib:
"If you really loved me, you'd----"
"Oh, I know," he cut in. "You've said that before. But I'd be
court-martialled. I'd lose my career."
"What's a career to a man who truly loves?"
"It's just as much as it is to anybody else--and more."
She could hardly controvert this gracefully, so she sank back with
grim resignation. "Well, I've proposed my plan, and you don't like
it. Now, suppose you propose something."
The silence was oppressive. They sat like stoughton bottles. There the
conductor found them some time later. He gave them a careless look,
selected a chair at the end of the car, and began to sort his tickets,
spreading them out on another chair, making notes with the pencil he
took from atop his ear, and shoved back from time to time.
Ages seemed to pass, and Mallory had not even a suggestion. By this
time Marjorie's temper had evaporated, and when he said: "If we could
only stop at some town for half an hour," she said: "Maybe the
conductor would hold the train for us."
"I hardly think he would."
"He looks like an awfully nice man. You ask him."
"Oh, what's the use?"
Marjorie was getting tired of depending on this charming young man
with the very bad luck. She decided to assume command herself. She
took recourse naturally to the original feminine methods: "I'll take
care of him," she said, with resolution. "A woman can get a man to do
almost anything if she flirts a little with him."
"Marjorie!"
"Now, don't you mind anything I do. Remember, it's all for love of
you--even if I have to kiss him."
"Marjorie, I won't permit----"
"You have no right to boss me--yet. You subside." She gave him the
merest touch, but he fell backward into a chair, utterly aghast at the
shameless siren into which desperation had altered the timid little
thing he thought he had chosen to love. He was being rapidly initiated
into the complex and versatile and fearfully wonderful thing a woman
really is, and he was saying to himself, "What have I married?"
forgetting, for the moment, that he had not married her yet, and that
therein lay the whole trouble.