MISS DORNE MEETS EATON
Dorne motioned Avery to the aisle, where already some of the
passengers, having settled their belongings in their sections, were
beginning to wander through the cars seeking acquaintances or players
to make up a card game. Eaton, however, was not among these. On the
contrary, when these approached him in his section, he frankly avoided
chance of their speaking to him, by an appearance of complete immersion
in his own concerns. The Englishman directly across the aisle from
Eaton clearly was not likely to speak to him, or to anybody else,
without an introduction; the red-haired man, "D. S.," however, seemed a
more expansive personality. Eaton, seeing "D. S." look several times
in his direction, pulled a newspaper from the pocket of his overcoat
and engrossed himself in it; the newspaper finished, he opened his
traveling bag and produced a magazine.
But as the train settled into the steady running which reminded of the
days of travel ahead during which the half-dozen cars of the train must
create a world in which it would be absolutely impossible to avoid
contact with other people, Eaton put the magazine into his traveling
bag, took from the bag a handful of cigars with which he filled a
plain, uninitialed cigar-case, and went toward the club and observation
car in the rear. As he passed through the sleeper next to him,--the
last one,--Harriet Dorne glanced up at him and spoke to her father;
Dorne nodded but did not look up. Eaton went on into the wide-windowed
observation-room beyond, which opened onto the rear platform protected
on three sides.
The observation-room was nearly empty. The sleet which had been
falling when they left Seattle had changed to huge, heavy flakes of
fast-falling snow, which blurred the windows, obscured the landscape
and left visible only the two thin black lines of track that, streaming
out behind them, vanished fifty feet away in the white smother. The
only occupants of the room were a young woman who was reading a
magazine, and an elderly man. Eaton chose a seat as far from these two
as possible.
He had been there only a few minutes, however, when, looking up, he saw
Harriet Dorne and Avery enter the room. They passed him, engaged in
conversation, and stood by the rear door looking out into the storm.
It was evident to Eaton, although he did not watch them, that they were
arguing something; the girl seemed insistent, Avery irritated and
unwilling. Her manner showed that she won her point finally. She
seated herself in one of the chairs, and Avery left her. He wandered,
as if aimlessly, to the reading table, turning over the magazines
there; abandoning them, he gazed about as if bored; then, with a wholly
casual manner, he came toward Eaton and took the seat beside him.
"Rotten weather, isn't it?" Avery observed somewhat ungraciously.
Eaton could not well avoid reply. "It's been getting worse," he
commented, "ever since we left Seattle."
"We're running into it, apparently." Again Avery looked toward Eaton
and waited.
"It'll be bad in the mountains, I suspect," Eaton said.
"Yes--lucky if we get through."
The conversation on Avery's part was patently forced; and it was
equally forced on Eaton's; nevertheless it continued. Avery introduced
the war and other subjects upon which men, thrown together for a time,
are accustomed to exchange opinions. But Avery did not do it easily or
naturally; he plainly was of the caste whose pose it is to repel, not
seek, overtures toward a chance acquaintance. His lack of practice was
perfectly obvious when at last he asked directly: "Beg pardon, but I
don't think I know your name."
Eaton was obliged to give it.
"Mine's Avery," the other offered; "perhaps you heard it when we were
getting our berths assigned."
And again the conversation, enjoyed by neither of them, went on.
Finally the girl at the end of the car rose and passed them, as though
leaving the car. Avery looked up.
"Where are you going, Harry?"
"I think some one ought to be with Father."
"I'll go in just a minute."
She had halted almost in front of them. Avery, hesitating as though he
did not know what he ought to do, finally arose; and as Eaton observed
that Avery, having introduced himself, appeared now to consider it his
duty to present Eaton to Harriet Dorne, Eaton also arose. Avery
murmured the names. Harriet Dorne, resting her hand on the back of
Avery's chair, joined in the conversation. As she replied easily and
interestedly to a comment of Eaton's, Avery suddenly reminded her of
her father. After a minute, when Avery--still ungracious and still
irritated over something which Eaton could not guess--rather abruptly
left them, she took Avery's seat; and Eaton dropped into his chair
beside her.
Now, this whole proceeding--though within the convention which,
forbidding a girl to make a man's acquaintance directly, says nothing
against her making it through the medium of another man--had been so
unnaturally done that Eaton understood that Harriet Dorne deliberately
had arranged to make his acquaintance, and that Avery, angry and
objecting, had been overruled.
She seemed to Eaton less alertly boyish now than she had looked an hour
before when they had boarded the train. Her cheeks were smoothly
rounded, her lips rather full, her lashes very long. He could not look
up without looking directly at her, for her chair, which had not been
moved since Avery left it, was at an angle with his own. A faint,
sweet fragrance from her hair and clothing came to him and made him
recollect how long it was--five years--since he had talked with, or
even been near, such a girl as this; and the sudden tumult of his
pulses which her nearness caused warned him to keep watch of what he
said until he had learned why she had sought him out.
To avoid the appearance of studying her too openly, he turned slightly,
so that his gaze went past her to the white turmoil outside the windows.
"It's wonderful," she said, "isn't it?"
"You mean the storm?" A twinkle of amusement came to Eaton's eyes.
"It would be more interesting if it allowed a little more to be seen.
At present there is nothing visible but snow."
"Is that the only way it affects you?" She turned to him, apparently a
trifle disappointed.
"I don't exactly understand."
"Why, it must affect every man most as it touches his own interests.
An artist would think of it as a background for contrasts--a thing to
sketch or paint; a writer as something to be written down in words."
Eaton understood. She could not more plainly have asked him what he
was.
"And an engineer, I suppose," he said, easily, "would think of it only
as an element to be included in his formulas--an _x_, or an _a_, or a
_b_, to be put in somewhere and square-rooted or squared so that the
roof-truss he was figuring should not buckle under its weight."
"Oh--so that is the way you were thinking of it?"
"You mean," Eaton challenged her directly, "am I an engineer?"
"Are you?"
"Oh, no; I was only talking in pure generalities, just as you were."
"Let us go on, then," she said gayly. "I see I can't conceal from you
that I am doing you the honor to wonder what you are. A lawyer would
think of it in the light of damage it might create and the subsequent
possibilities of litigation." She made a little pause. "A business
man would take it into account, as he has to take into account all
things in nature or human; it would delay transportation, or harm or
aid the winter wheat."
"Or stop competition somewhere," he observed, more interested.
The flash of satisfaction which came to her face and as quickly was
checked and faded showed him she thought she was on the right track.
"Business," she said, still lightly, "will--how is it the newspapers
put it?--will marshal its cohorts; it will send out its generals in
command of brigades of snowplows, its colonels in command of regiments
of snow-shovelers and its spies to discover and to bring back word of
the effect upon the crops."
"You talk," he said, "as if business were a war."
"Isn't it?--like war, but war in higher terms."
"In higher terms?" he questioned, attempting to make his tone like
hers, but a sudden bitterness now was betrayed by it. "Or in lower?"
"Why, in higher," she declared, "demanding greater courage, greater
devotion, greater determination, greater self-sacrifice."
"What makes you say that?"
"Soldiers themselves say it, Mr. Eaton, and all the observers in this
horrible war say it when they say that they find almost no cowards and
very few weaklings among all the millions of every sort of men at the
front. They could not say the same of those identical millions under
the normal conditions of everyday business life."
He remained silent, though she waited for him to reply.
"You know that is so, Mr. Eaton," she said. "One has only to look on
the streets of any great city to find thousands of men who have not had
the courage and determination to carry on their share of the ordinary
duties of life. Recruiting officers can pick any man off the streets
and make a good soldier of him, but no one could be so sure of finding
a satisfactory employee in that way. Doesn't that show that daily
life, the everyday business of earning a living and bearing one's share
in the workaday world, demands greater qualities than war?"
Her face had flushed eagerly as she spoke; a darker, livid flush
answered her words on his.
"But the opportunities for evil are greater, too," he asserted almost
fiercely.
"What do you mean?"
"For deceit, for lies, for treachery, Miss Dorne! Violence is the evil
of war, and violence is the evil most easily punished, even if it does
not bring its own punishment upon itself. But how many of those men
you speak of on the streets have been deliberately, mercilessly, even
savagely sacrificed to some business expediency, their future
destroyed, their hope killed!" Some storm of passion, whose meaning
she could not divine, was sweeping him.
"You mean," she asked after an instant's silence, "that you, Mr. Eaton,
have been sacrificed in such a way?"
"I am still talking in generalities," he denied ineffectively.
He saw that she sensed the untruthfulness of these last words. Her
smooth young forehead and her eyes were shadowy with thought. Eaton
was uneasily silent. The train roared across some trestle, giving a
sharp glimpse of gray, snow-swept water far below. Finally Harriet
Dorne seemed to have made her decision.
"I think you should meet my father, Mr. Eaton," she said. "Would you
like to?"
He did not reply at once. He knew that his delay was causing her to
study him now with greater surprise.
"I would like to meet him, yes," he said, "but,"--he hesitated, tried
to avoid answer without offending her, but already he had affronted
her,--"but not now, Miss Dorne."
She stared at him, rebuffed and chilled.
"You mean--" The sentence, obviously, was one she felt it better not
to finish. As though he recognized that now she must wish the
conversation to end, he got up. She rose stiffly.
"I'll see you into your car, if you're returning there," he offered.
Neither spoke, as he went with her into the next car; and at the
section where her father sat, Eaton bowed silently, nodded to Avery,
who coldly returned his nod, and left her. Eaton went on into his own
car and sat down, his thoughts in mad confusion.
How near he had come to talking to this girl about himself, even
though, he had felt from the first that that was what she was trying to
make him do! Was he losing his common sense? Was the self-command on
which he had so counted that he had dared to take this train deserting
him? He felt that he must not see Harriet Dorne again alone. At first
this was all he felt; but as he sat, pale and quiet, staring vacantly
at the snow-flakes which struck and melted on the window beside him,
his thoughts grew more clear. In Avery he had recognized, by that
instinct which so strangely divines the personalities one meets, an
enemy from the start; Dorne's attitude toward him, of course, was not
yet defined; as for Harriet Dorne--he could not tell whether she was
prepared to be his enemy or friend.