A TORN TELEGRAM
I lunched alone at the Gilmore house, and went back to the city at
once. The sun had lifted the mists, and a fresh summer wind had cleared
away the smoke pall. The boulevard was full of cars flying countryward
for the Saturday half-holiday, toward golf and tennis, green fields and
babbling girls. I gritted my teeth and thought of McKnight at Richmond,
visiting the lady with the geographical name. And then, for the first
time, I associated John Gilmore’s granddaughter with the “West” that
McKnight had irritably flung at me.
I still carried my traveling-bag, for McKnight’s vision at the window
of the empty house had not been without effect. I did not transfer the
notes to my pocket, and, if I had, it would not have altered the
situation later. Only the other day McKnight put this very thing up to
me.
“I warned you,” he reminded me. “I told you there were queer things
coming, and to be on your guard. You ought to have taken your
revolver.”
“It would have been of exactly as much use as a bucket of snow in
Africa,” I retorted. “If I had never closed my eyes, or if I had kept
my finger on the trigger of a six-shooter (which is novelesque for
revolver), the result would have been the same. And the next time you
want a little excitement with every variety of thrill thrown in, I can
put you by way of it. You begin by getting the wrong berth in a Pullman
car, and end—”
“Oh, I know how it ends,” he finished shortly. “Don’t you suppose the
whole thing’s written on my spinal marrow?”
But I am wandering again. That is the difficulty with the
unprofessional story-teller: he yaws back and forth and can’t keep in
the wind; he drops his characters overboard when he hasn’t any further
use for them and drowns them; he forgets the coffee-pot and the
frying-pan and all the other small essentials, and, if he carries a
love affair, he mutters a fervent “Allah be praised” when he lands
them, drenched with adventures, at the matrimonial dock at the end of
the final chapter.
I put in a thoroughly unsatisfactory afternoon. Time dragged eternally.
I dropped in at a summer vaudeville, and bought some ties at a
haberdasher’s. I was bored but unexpectant; I had no premonition of
what was to come. Nothing unusual had ever happened to me; friends of
mine had sometimes sailed the high seas of adventure or skirted the
coasts of chance, but all of the shipwrecks had occurred after a woman
passenger had been taken on. “_Ergo_,” I had always said “no women!” I
repeated it to myself that evening almost savagely, when I found my
thoughts straying back to the picture of John Gilmore’s granddaughter.
I even argued as I ate my solitary dinner at a downtown restaurant.
“Haven’t you troubles enough,” I reflected, “without looking for more?
Hasn’t Bad News gone lame, with a matinée race booked for next week?
Otherwise aren’t you comfortable? Isn’t your house in order? Do you
want to sell a pony in order to have the library done over in mission
or the drawing-room in gold? Do you want somebody to count the empty
cigarette boxes lying around every morning?”
Lay it to the long idle afternoon, to the new environment, to anything
you like, but I began to think that perhaps I did. I was confoundedly
lonely. For the first time in my life its even course began to waver:
the needle registered warning marks on the matrimonial seismograph,
lines vague enough, but lines.
My alligator bag lay at my feet, still locked. While I waited for my
coffee I leaned back and surveyed the people incuriously. There were
the usual couples intent on each other: my new state of mind made me
regard them with tolerance. But at the next table, where a man and
woman dined together, a different atmosphere prevailed. My attention
was first caught by the woman’s face. She had been speaking earnestly
across the table, her profile turned to me. I had noticed casually her
earnest manner, her somber clothes, and the great mass of odd,
bronze-colored hair on her neck. But suddenly she glanced toward me and
the utter hopelessness—almost tragedy—of her expression struck me with
a shock. She half closed her eyes and drew a long breath, then she
turned again to the man across the table.
Neither one was eating. He sat low in his chair, his chin on his chest,
ugly folds of thick flesh protruding over his collar. He was probably
fifty, bald, grotesque, sullen, and yet not without a suggestion of
power. But he had been drinking; as I looked, he raised an unsteady
hand and summoned a waiter with a wine list.
The young woman bent across the table and spoke again quickly. She had
unconsciously raised her voice. Not beautiful, in her earnestness and
stress she rather interested me. I had an idle inclination to advise
the waiter to remove the bottled temptation from the table. I wonder
what would have happened if I had? Suppose Harrington had not been
intoxicated when he entered the Pullman car Ontario that night!
For they were about to make a journey, I gathered, and the young woman
wished to go alone. I drank three cups of coffee, which accounted for
my wakefulness later, and shamelessly watched the tableau before me.
The woman’s protest evidently went for nothing: across the table the
man grunted monosyllabic replies and grew more and more lowering and
sullen. Once, during a brief unexpected _pianissimo_ in the music, her
voice came to me sharply:
“If I could only see him in time!” she was saying. “Oh, it’s terrible!”
In spite of my interest I would have forgotten the whole incident at
once, erased it from my mind as one does the inessentials and
clutterings of memory, had I not met them again, later that evening, in
the Pennsylvania station. The situation between them had not visibly
altered: the same dogged determination showed in the man’s face, but
the young woman—daughter or wife? I wondered—had drawn down her veil
and I could only suspect what white misery lay beneath.
I bought my berth after waiting in a line of some eight or ten people.
When, step by step, I had almost reached the window, a tall woman whom
I had not noticed before spoke to me from my elbow. She had a ticket
and money in her hand.
“Will you try to get me a lower when you buy yours?” she asked. “I have
traveled for three nights in uppers.”
I consented, of course; beyond that I hardly noticed the woman. I had a
vague impression of height and a certain amount of stateliness, but the
crowd was pushing behind me, and some one was standing on my foot. I
got two lowers easily, and, turning with the change and berths, held
out the tickets.
“Which will you have?” I asked. “Lower eleven or lower ten?”
“It makes no difference,” she said. “Thank you very much indeed.”
At random I gave her lower eleven, and called a porter to help her with
her luggage. I followed them leisurely to the train shed, and ten
minutes more saw us under way.
I looked into my car, but it presented the peculiarly unattractive
appearance common to sleepers. The berths were made up; the center
aisle was a path between walls of dingy, breeze-repelling curtains,
while the two seats at each end of the car were piled high with
suitcases and umbrellas. The perspiring porter was trying to be six
places at once: somebody has said that Pullman porters are black so
they won’t show the dirt, but they certainly show the heat.
Nine-fifteen was an outrageous hour to go to bed, especially since I
sleep little or not at all on the train, so I made my way to the smoker
and passed the time until nearly eleven with cigarettes and a magazine.
The car was very close. It was a warm night, and before turning in I
stood a short time in the vestibule. The train had been stopping at
frequent intervals, and, finding the brakeman there, I asked the
trouble.
It seemed that there was a hot-box on the next car, and that not only
were we late, but we were delaying the second section, just behind. I
was beginning to feel pleasantly drowsy, and the air was growing cooler
as we got into the mountains. I said good night to the brakeman and
went back to my berth. To my surprise, lower ten was already occupied—a
suit-case projected from beneath, a pair of shoes stood on the floor,
and from behind the curtains came the heavy, unmistakable breathing of
deep sleep. I hunted out the porter and together we investigated.
“Are you asleep, sir?” asked the porter, leaning over deferentially. No
answer forthcoming, he opened the curtains and looked in. Yes, the
intruder was asleep—very much asleep—and an overwhelming odor of whisky
proclaimed that he would probably remain asleep until morning. I was
irritated. The car was full, and I was not disposed to take an upper in
order to allow this drunken interloper to sleep comfortably in my
berth.
“You’ll have to get out of this,” I said, shaking him angrily. But he
merely grunted and turned over. As he did so, I saw his features for
the first time. It was the quarrelsome man of the restaurant.
I was less disposed than ever to relinquish my claim, but the porter,
after a little quiet investigation, offered a solution of the
difficulty. “There’s no one in lower nine,” he suggested, pulling open
the curtains just across. “It’s likely nine’s his berth, and he’s made
a mistake, owing to his condition. You’d better take nine, sir.”
I did, with a firm resolution that if nine’s rightful owner turned up
later I should be just as unwakable as the man opposite. I undressed
leisurely, making sure of the safety of the forged notes, and placing
my grip as before between myself and the window.
Being a man of systematic habits, I arranged my clothes carefully,
putting my shoes out for the porter to polish, and stowing my collar
and scarf in the little hammock swung for the purpose.
At last, with my pillows so arranged that I could see out comfortably,
and with the unhygienic-looking blanket turned back—I have always a
distrust of those much-used affairs—I prepared to wait gradually for
sleep.
But sleep did not visit me. The train came to frequent, grating stops,
and I surmised the hot box again. I am not a nervous man, but there was
something chilling in the thought of the second section pounding along
behind us. Once, as I was dozing, our locomotive whistled a shrill
warning—“You keep back where you belong,” it screamed to my drowsy
ears, and from somewhere behind came a chastened “All-right-I-will.”
I grew more and more wide-awake. At Cresson I got up on my elbow and
blinked out at the station lights. Some passengers boarded the train
there and I heard a woman’s low tones, a southern voice, rich and full.
Then quiet again. Every nerve was tense: time passed, perhaps ten
minutes, possibly half an hour. Then, without the slightest warning, as
the train rounded a curve, a heavy body was thrown into my berth. The
incident, trivial as it seemed, was startling in its suddenness, for
although my ears were painfully strained and awake, I had heard no step
outside. The next instant the curtain hung limp again; still without a
sound, my disturber had slipped away into the gloom and darkness. In a
frenzy of wakefulness, I sat up, drew on a pair of slippers and fumbled
for my bath-robe.
From a berth across, probably lower ten, came that particular
aggravating snore which begins lightly, delicately, faintly soprano,
goes down the scale a note with every breath, and, after keeping the
listener tense with expectation, ends with an explosion that tears the
very air. I was more and more irritable: I sat on the edge of the berth
and hoped the snorer would choke to death. He had considerable
vitality, however; he withstood one shock after another and survived to
start again with new vigor. In desperation I found some cigarettes and
one match, piled my blankets over my grip, and drawing the curtains
together as though the berth were still occupied, I made my way to the
vestibule of the car.
I was not clad for dress parade. Is it because the male is so
restricted to gloom in his every-day attire that he blossoms into gaudy
colors in his pajamas and dressing-gowns? It would take a Turk to feel
at home before an audience in my red and yellow bathrobe, a Christmas
remembrance from Mrs. Klopton, with slippers to match.
So, naturally, when I saw a feminine figure on the platform, my first
instinct was to dodge. The woman, however, was quicker than I; she gave
me a startled glance, wheeled and disappeared, with a flash of two
bronze-colored braids, into the next car.
Cigarette box in one hand, match in the other, I leaned against the
uncertain frame of the door and gazed after her vanished figure. The
mountain air flapped my bath-robe around my bare ankles, my one match
burned to the end and went out, and still I stared. For I had seen on
her expressive face a haunting look that was horror, nothing less.
Heaven knows, I am not psychological. Emotions have to be written large
before I can read them. But a woman in trouble always appeals to me,
and this woman was more than that. She was in deadly fear.
If I had not been afraid of being ridiculous, I would have followed
her. But I fancied that the apparition of a man in a red and yellow
bath-robe, with an unkempt thatch of hair, walking up to her and
assuring her that he would protect her would probably put her into
hysterics. I had done that once before, when burglars had tried to
break into the house, and had startled the parlor maid into bed for a
week. So I tried to assure myself that I had imagined the lady’s
distress—or caused it, perhaps—and to dismiss her from my mind. Perhaps
she was merely anxious about the unpleasant gentleman of the
restaurant. I thought smugly that I could have told her all about him:
that he was sleeping the sleep of the just and the intoxicated in a
berth that ought, by all that was fair and right, to have been mine,
and that if I were tied to a man who snored like that I should have him
anæsthetized and his soft palate put where it would never again flap
like a loose sail in the wind.
We passed Harrisburg as I stood there. It was starlight, and the great
crests of the Alleghanies had given way to low hills. At intervals we
passed smudges of gray white, no doubt in daytime comfortable farms,
which McKnight says is a good way of putting it, the farms being a lot
more comfortable than the people on them.
I was growing drowsy: the woman with the bronze hair and the horrified
face was fading in retrospect. It was colder, too, and I turned with a
shiver to go in. As I did so a bit of paper fluttered into the air and
settled on my sleeve, like a butterfly on a gorgeous red and yellow
blossom. I picked it up curiously and glanced at it. It was part of a
telegram that had been torn into bits.
There were only parts of four words on the scrap, but it left me
puzzled and thoughtful. It read, “—ower ten, car seve—.”
“Lower ten, car seven,” was my berth—the one I had bought and found
preempted.