HENRY MILLICK CHESTER, rising early from intermittent slumbers, found
himself the first of the crowded Pullman to make a toilet in the men’s
smoke-and-wash-room, and so had the place to himself—an advantage of
high dramatic value to a person of his age and temperament, on account
of the mirrors which, set at various angles, afford a fine view of the
profile. Henry Millick Chester, scouring cinders and stickiness from his
eyes and rouging his ears with honest friction, enriched himself of this
too unfamiliar opportunity. He smiled and was warmly interested in the
results of his smile in reflection, particularly in some pleasant
alterations it effected upon an outline of the cheek usually invisible
to the bearer. He smiled graciously, then he smiled sardonically. Other
smiles he offered—the tender smile, the forbidding smile, the austere
and the seductive, the haughty and the pleading, the mordant and the
compassionate, the tolerant but incredulous smile of a man of the world,
and the cold, ascetic smile that shows a woman that her shallow soul has
been read all too easily—pastimes abandoned only with the purely
decorative application of shaving lather to his girlish chin. However,
as his unbeetling brow was left unobscured, he was able to pursue his
physiognomical researches and to produce for his continued enlightenment
a versatile repertory of frowns—the stern, the quizzical, the bitter,
the treacherous, the bold, the agonized, the inquisitive, the ducal, and
the frown of the husband who says: “I forgive you. Go!” A few minutes
later Mr. Chester, abruptly pausing in the operation of fastening his
collar, bent a sudden, passionate interest upon his right forearm,
without apparent cause and with the air of never having seen it until
that moment. He clenched his fingers tightly, producing a slight
stringiness above the wrist, then crooked his elbow with intensity,
noting this enormous effect in all the mirrors. Regretfully, he let his
shirtsleeves fall and veil the rare but private beauties just
discovered, rested his left hand negligently upon his hip, extended his
right in a gesture of flawlessly aristocratic grace, and, with a slight
inclination of his head, uttered aloud these simple but befitting words:
“I thank ye, my good people.” T’ yoong Maister was greeting the loyal
tenantry who acclaimed his return to Fielding Manor, a flowered progress
thoroughly incomprehensible to the Pullman porter whose transfixed
eye—glazed upon an old-gold face intruded through the narrow
doorway—Mr. Chester encountered in the glass above the nickeled
washbasins. The Libyan withdrew in a cloud of silence, and t’ yoong
Maister, flushing somewhat, resumed his toilet with annoyed precision
and no more embroidery. He had yesterday completed his sophomore year;
the brushes he applied to his now adult locks were those of a junior.
And with a man’s age had come a man’s cares and responsibilities.
Several long years had rolled away since for the last time he had made
himself sick on a train in a club-car orgy of cubebs and sarsaparilla
pop.
Zigzagging through shoe-bordered aisles of sleepers in morning
dishevelment, he sought the dining car, where the steward escorted him
to an end table for two. He would have assumed his seat with that air of
negligent hauteur which was his chosen manner for public appearances,
had not the train, taking a curve at high speed, heaved him into the
undesirable embrace of an elderly man breakfasting across the aisle.
“Keep your feet, sonny; keep your feet,” said this barbarian, little
witting that he addressed a member of the nineteen-something prom.
committee. People at the next table laughed genially, and Mr. Chester,
muttering a word of hostile apology, catapulted into his assigned place,
his cheeks hot with the triple outrage.
He relieved himself a little by the icy repulsion with which he
countered the cordial advances of the waiter, who took his order and
wished him a good morning, hoped he had slept well, declared the weather
delightful and, unanswered, yet preserved his beautiful courtesy
unimpaired. When this humble ambassador had departed on his mission to
the kitchen Henry Millick Chester, unwarrantably persuaded that all eyes
were searching his every inch and angle—an impression not
uncharacteristic of his years—gazed out of the window with an
indifference which would have been obtrusive if any of the other
breakfasters had happened to notice it. The chill exclusiveness of his
expression was a rebuke to such prying members of the proletariat as
might be striving to read his thoughts, and barred his fellow passengers
from every privilege to his consideration. The intensely reserved
gentleman was occupied with interests which were the perquisites of only
his few existing peers in birth, position, and intelligence, none of
whom, patently, was in that car.
He looked freezingly upon the abashed landscape, which fled in shame;
nor was that wintry stare relaxed when the steward placed someone
opposite him at the little table. Nay, our frosty scholar now
intensified the bleakness of his isolation, retiring quite to the pole
in reproval of this too close intrusion. He resolutely denied the
existence of his vis-à-vis, refused consciousness of its humanity, even
of its sex, and then inconsistently began to perspire with the horrible
impression that it was glaring at him fixedly. It was a dreadful
feeling. He felt himself growing red, and coughed vehemently to afford
the public an explanation of his change of colour. At last, his
suffering grown unendurable, he desperately turned his eyes full upon
the newcomer. She was not looking at him at all, but down at the edge of
the white cloth on her own side of the table; and she was the very
prettiest girl he had ever seen in his life.
She was about his own age. Her prettiness was definitely extreme, and
its fair delicacy was complete and without any imperfection whatever.
She was dressed in pleasant shades of tan and brown. A brown veil misted
the rim of her hat, tan gloves were folded back from her wrists; and
they, and all she wore, were fresh and trim and ungrimed by the dusty
journey. She was charming. Henry Millick Chester’s first gasping
appraisal of her was perfectly accurate, for she _was_ a peach—or a
rose, or anything that is dewy and fresh and delectable. She was indeed
some smooth. She was the smoothest thing in the world, and the world
knows it!
She looked up.
Henry Millick Chester was lost.
At the same instant that the gone feeling came over him she dropped her
eyes again to the edge of the table. Who can tell if she knew what she
had done?
The conversation began with appalling formalities, which preluded the
most convenient placing of a sugar bowl and the replenishing of an
exhausted salt cellar. Then the weather, spurned as the placative
offering of the gentle waiter, fell from the lips of the princess in
words of diamonds and rubies and pearls. Our Henry took up the weather
where she left it; he put it to its utmost; he went forward with it,
prophesying weather; he went backward with it, recalling weather; he
spun it out and out, while she agreed to all he said, until this
overworked weather got so stringy that each obscurely felt it to be
hideous. The thread broke; fragments wandered in the air for a few
moments, but disappeared; a desperate propriety descended, and they fell
into silence over their eggs.
Frantically Mr. Chester searched his mind for some means to pursue the
celestial encounter. According to the rules, something ought to happen
that would reveal her as Patricia Beekman, the sister of his roommate,
Schuyler Beekman, and to-night he should be handing the imperturbable
Dawkins a wire to send: “My dear Schuyler, I married your sister this
afternoon.” But it seemed unlikely, because his roommate’s name was Jake
Schmulze, and Jake lived in Cedar Rapids; and, besides, this train
wasn’t coming from or going to Palm Beach—it was going to St. Louis
eventually, and now hustled earnestly across the placid and largely
unbutlered plains of Ohio.
Often—as everyone knows—people have been lost to each other forever
through the lack of a word, and few have realized this more poignantly
than our Henry, as he helplessly suffered the precious minutes to
accumulate vacancy. True, he had thought of something to say, yet he
abandoned it. Probably he was wiser to wait, as what he thought of
saying was: “Will you be my wife?” It might seem premature, he feared.
The strain was relieved by a heavenly accident which saved the life of a
romance near perishing at birth. That charming girl, relaxing slightly
in her chair, made some small, indefinite, and entirely ladylike
movement of restfulness that reached its gentle culmination upon the two
feet of Mr. Chester which, obviously mistaken for structural adjuncts of
the table, were thereby glorified and became beautiful on the mountains.
He was not the man to criticise the remarkable ignorance of dining car
table architecture thus displayed, nor did he in any wise resent being
mistaken up to the ankles for metal or wood. No. The light pressure of
her small heels hardly indented the stout toes of his brown shoes; the
soles of her slippers reposed upon his two insteps, and rapture shook
his soul to its foundations, while the ineffable girl gazed lustrously
out of the window, the clear serenity of her brilliant eyes making plain
her complete unconsciousness of the nature of what added to her new
comfort.
A terrific blush sizzled all over him, and to conceal its visible area
he bent low to his coffee. She was unaware. He was transported, she—to
his eyes—transfigured. Glamour diffused itself about her, sprayed about
them both like showers of impalpable gold-dust, and filled the humble
dining car—it filled the whole world. Transformed, seraphic waiters
passed up and down the aisle in a sort of obscure radiance. A nimbus
hovered faintly above the brown veil; a sacred luminosity was exhaled by
the very tablecloth, where an angel’s pointed fingers drummed absently.
It would be uncharitable to believe that a spirit of retaliation
inspired the elderly and now replete man across the aisle, and yet, when
he rose, he fell upon the neck of Henry as Henry had fallen upon his,
and the shock of it jarred four shoes from the acute neighbourliness of
their juxtaposition. The accursed graybeard, giggling in his senility,
passed on; but that angel leaped backward in her chair while her
beautiful eyes, wide open, stunned, her beautiful mouth, wide open,
incredulous, gave proof that horror can look bewitching.
“Murder!” she gasped. “Were those your _feet_?”
And as he could compass no articulate reply, she grew as pink as he,
murmured inaudibly, and stared at him in wider and wilder amazement.
“It—it didn’t hurt,” he finally managed to stammer.
At this she covered her blushes with her two hands and began to gurgle
and shake with laughter. She laughed and laughed and laughed. It became
a paroxysm. He laughed, too, because she laughed. Other passengers
looked at them and laughed. The waiters laughed; they approved—coloured
waiters always approve of laughter—and a merry spirit went abroad in
the car.
At last she controlled herself long enough to ask:
“But what did you think of me?”
“It—it didn’t hurt,” he repeated idiotically, to his own mortification,
for he passionately aspired to say something airy and winsome; but, as
he couldn’t think of anything like that, he had to let it go. “Oh, not
at all,” he added feebly.
However, “though not so deep as a well,” it served, ’twas enough, for
she began to laugh again, and there loomed no further barrier in the way
of acquaintance. Therefore it was pleasantly without constraint, and
indeed as a matter of course, that he dropped into a chair beside her
half an hour later, in the observation car; and something in the way she
let the _Illustrated London News_ slide into the vacant chair on the
other side of her might have suggested that she expected him.
“I was still wondering what you must have thought of me.”
This gave him an opportunity, because he had thought out a belated reply
for the first time she had said it. Hence, quick as a flash, he made the
dashing rejoinder:
“It wasn’t so much what I thought of you, but what I thought of
myself—I thought I was in heaven!”
She must have known what pretty sounds her laughter made. She laughed a
great deal. She even had a way of laughing in the middle of some of her
words, and it gave them a kind of ripple. There are girls who naturally
laugh like that; others learn to; a few won’t, and some can’t. It isn’t
fair to the ones that can’t.
“But you oughtn’t to tell me that,” she said.
It was in the middle of “oughtn’t” that she rippled. A pen cannot
express it, neither can a typewriter, and no one has yet invented a way
of writing with a flute; but the effect on Henry shows what a wonderful
ripple it was. Henry trembled. From this moment she had only to ripple
to make Henry tremble. Henry was more in love than he had been at
breakfast. Henry was a Goner.
“Why oughtn’t I to?” he demanded with white intensity. “If anything’s
true it’s right to tell it, isn’t it? I believe that everybody has a
right to tell the truth, don’t you?”
“Ye-es——”
“You take the case of a man that’s in love,” said this rather
precipitate gentleman; “isn’t it right for him to——”
“But suppose,” she interrupted, becoming instantly serious with the
introduction of the great topic—“Suppose he isn’t _really_ in love.
Don’t you think there are very few cases of people truly and deeply
caring for each other?”
“There are men,” he said firmly, “who know how to love truly and deeply,
and could never in their lives care for anybody but the one woman they
have picked out. I don’t say all men feel that way; I don’t think they
do. But there are a few that are capable of it.” The seats in an
observation car are usually near neighbours, and it happened that the
brown cuff of a tan sleeve, extended reposefully on the arm of her
chair, just touched the back of his hand, which rested on the arm of
his. This ethereally light contact continued. She had no apparent
cognizance of it, but a vibrant thrill passed through him, and possibly
quite a hearty little fire might have been built under him without his
perceiving good cause for moving. He shook, gulped, and added: “I am!”
“But how could you be sure of that,” she said thoughtfully, “until you
tried?” And as he seemed about to answer, perhaps too impulsively, she
checked him with a smiling, “At your age!”
“You don’t know how old I am. I’m older than you!”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-one next March.”
“What day?”
“The seventh.”
“That is singular!”
“Why?”
“Because,” she began in a low tone and with full recognition of the
solemn import of the revelation—“Because my birthday is only one day
after yours. I was twenty years old the eighth of last March.”
“By George!” The exclamation came from him, husky with awe.
There was a fateful silence.
“Yes, I was born on the eighth,” she said slowly.
“And me on the seventh!” At such a time no man is a purist.
“It is strange,” she said.
“Strange! I came into the world just one day before you did!”
They looked at each other curiously, deeply stirred. Coincidence could
not account for these birthdays of theirs, nor chance for their meeting
on a train “like this.” Henry Millick Chester was breathless. The
mysteries were glimpsed. No doubt was possible—he and the wondrous
creature at his side were meant for each other, intended from the
beginning of eternity.
She dropped her eyes slowly from his, but he was satisfied that she had
felt the marvel precisely as he had felt it.
“Don’t you think,” she said gently, “that a girl has seen more of the
world at twenty than a man?”
Mr. Chester well wished to linger upon the subject of birthdays;
however, the line of original research suggested by her question was
alluring also. “Yes—and no,” he answered with admirable impartiality.
“In some ways, yes. In some ways, no. For instance, you take the case of
a man that’s in love——”
“Well,” interrupted the lady, “I think, for instance, that a girl
understands men better at twenty than men do women.”
“It may be,” he admitted, nodding. “I like to think about the deeper
things like this sometimes.”
“So do I. I think they’re interesting,” she said with that perfect
sympathy of understanding which he believed she was destined to extend
to him always and in all things. “Life itself is interesting. Don’t you
think so?”
“I think it’s the most interesting subject there can be. Real life, that
is, though—not just on the surface. Now, for instance, you take the
case of a man that’s in——”
“Do you go in much for reading?” she asked.
“Sure. But as I was saying, you take——”
“I think reading gives us so many ideas, don’t you?”
“Yes. I get a lot out of it. I——”
“I do, too. I try to read only the best things,” she said. “I don’t
believe in reading everything, and there’s so much to read nowadays that
isn’t really good.”
“Who do you think,” he inquired with deference, “is the best author
now?”
It was not a question to be settled quite offhand; she delayed her
answer slightly, then, with a gravity appropriate to the literary
occasion, temporized: “Well, since Victor Hugo is dead, it’s hard to say
just who is the best.”
“Yes, it is,” he agreed. “We get that in the English course in college.
There aren’t any great authors any more. I expect probably Swinburne’s
the best.”
She hesitated. “Perhaps; but more as a poet.”
He assented. “Yes, that’s so. I expect he would be classed more as a
poet. Come to think of it, I believe he’s dead, too. I’m not sure,
though; maybe it was Beerbohm Tree—somebody like that. I’ve forgotten;
but, anyway, it doesn’t matter. I didn’t mean poetry; I meant who do you
think writes the best books? Mrs. Humphry Ward?”
“Yes, she’s good, and so’s Henry James.”
“I’ve never read anything by Henry James. I guess I’ll read some of his
this summer. What’s the best one to begin on?”
The exquisite pink of her cheeks extended its area almost imperceptibly.
“Oh, any one. They’re all pretty good. Do you care for Nature?”
“Sure thing,” he returned quickly. “Do you?”
“I love it!”
“So do I. I can’t do much for mathematics, though.”
“Br-r!” She shivered prettily. “I hate it!”
“So do I. I can’t give astronomy a whole lot, either.”
She turned a softly reproachful inquiry upon him. “Oh, don’t you love to
look at the stars?”
In horror lest the entrancing being think him a brute, he responded with
breathless haste: “Oh, rath-er-r! To look at ’em, sure thing! I meant
astronomy in college; that’s mostly math, you know—just figures. But
stars to look at—of course that’s different. Why, I look up at ’em for
hours sometimes!” He believed what he was saying. “I look up at ’em, and
think and think and think——”
“So do I.” Her voice was low and hushed; there was something almost holy
in the sound of it, and a delicate glow suffused her lovely, upraised
face—like that picture of Saint Cecilia, he thought. “Oh, I love the
stars! And music—and flowers——”
“And birds,” he added automatically in a tone that, could it by some
miracle have been heard at home, would have laid his nine-year-old
brother flat on the floor in a might-be mortal swoon.
A sweet warmth centred in the upper part of his diaphragm and softly
filtered throughout him. The delicious future held no doubts or shadows
for him. It was assured. He and this perfect woman had absolutely
identical tastes; their abhorrences and their enthusiasms marched
together; they would never know a difference in all their lives to come.
Destiny unrolled before him a shining pathway which they two would walk
hand-in-hand through the summer days to a calm and serene autumn,
respected and admired by the world, but finding ever their greatest and
most sacred joy in the light of each other’s eyes—that light none other
than the other could evoke.
Could it be possible, he wondered, that he was the same callow boy who
but yesterday pranced and exulted in the “pee-rade” of the new juniors!
How absurd and purposeless that old life seemed; how far away, how
futile, and how childish! Well, it was over, finished. By this time
to-morrow he would have begun his business career.
Back in the old life, he had expected to go through a law school after
graduating from college, subsequently to enter his father’s office. That
meant five years before even beginning to practice, an idea merely
laughable now. There was a men’s furnishing store on a popular corner at
home; it was an establishment which had always attracted him, and what
pleasanter way to plow the road to success than through acres of
variously woven fabrics, richly coloured silks, delicate linens, silver
mountings and odorous leathers, in congenial association with neckties,
walking-sticks, hosiery, and stickpins? He would be at home a few hours
hence, and he would not delay. After lunch he would go boldly to his
father and say: “Father, I have reached man’s estate and I have put away
childish things. I have made up my mind upon a certain matter and you
will only waste time by any effort to alter this, my firm determination.
Father, I here and now relinquish all legal ambitions, for the reason
that a mercantile career is more suited to my inclinations and my
abilities. Father, I have met the one and only woman I can ever care
for, and I intend to make her my wife. Father, you have always dealt
squarely with me; I will deal squarely with you. I ask you the simple
question: Will you or will you not advance me the funds to purchase an
interest in Paul H. Hoy & Company’s Men’s Outfitting Establishment? If
you will not, then I shall seek help elsewhere.”
Waking dreams are as swift, sometimes, as the other kind—which, we
hear, thread mazes so labyrinthine “between the opening and the closing
of a door”; and a twenty-year-old fancy, fermenting in the inclosure of
a six-and-seven-eighth plaid cap, effervesces with a power of sizzling
and sparkling and popping.
“I believe I love music best of all,” said the girl dreamily.
“Do you play?” he asked, and his tone and look were those of one who
watches at the sick-bed of a valued child.
“Yes, a little.”
“I love the piano.” He was untroubled by any remorse for what he and
some of his gang had done only two days since to a previously fine
instrument in his dormitory entry. He had forgotten the dead past in his
present vision, which was of a luxurious room in a spacious mansion, and
a tired man of affairs coming quietly into that room—from a conference
at which he had consolidated the haberdashery trade of the world—and
sinking noiselessly upon a rich divan, while a beautiful woman in a
dress of brown and tan, her hair slightly silvered, played to him
through the twilight upon a grand piano, the only other sound in the
great house being the softly murmurous voices of perfectly trained
children being put to bed in a distant nursery upstairs.
“I like the stage, too,” she said. “Don’t you?”
“You know! Did you see The Tinkle-Dingle Girl?”
“Yes. I liked it.”
“It’s a peach show.” He spoke with warranted authority. During the
university term just finished he had gone eight times to New York, and
had enriched his critical perceptions of music and the drama by ten
visits to The Tinkle-Dingle Girl, two of his excursions having fallen on
matinée days. “Those big birds that played the comedy parts were funny
birds, weren’t they?”
“The tramp and the brewer? Yes. Awfully funny.”
“We’ll go lots to the theatre!” He spoke eagerly and with superb
simplicity, quite without consciousness that he was skipping much that
would usually be thought necessarily intermediate. An enchanting vision
engrossed his mind’s eye. He saw himself night after night at The
Tinkle-Dingle Girl, his lovely wife beside him—growing matronly,
perhaps, but slenderly matronly—with a grace of years that only added
to her beauty, and always wearing tan gloves and a brown veil.
The bewilderment of her expression was perhaps justified.
“What!”
At this he realized the import of what he had said and what, in a
measure, it did assume. He became pinkish, then pink, then more pink;
and so did she. Paralyzed, the blushing pair looked at each other
throughout this duet in colour, something like a glint of alarm
beginning to show through the wide astonishment in her eyes; and with
the perception of this he was assailed by an acute perturbation. He had
spoken thoughtlessly, even hastily, he feared; he should have given her
more time. Would she rise now with chilling dignity and leave him, it
might be forever? Was he to lose her just when he had found her? He
shuddered at the ghastly abyss of loneliness disclosed by the
possibility. But this was only the darkest moment before a radiance that
shot heavenward like the flaming javelins of an equatorial sunrise.
Her eyes lowered slowly till the long, brown lashes shadowed the
rose-coloured cheek and the fall of her glance came to rest upon the
arms of their two chairs, where the edge of her coat sleeve just touched
the knuckle of his little finger. Two people were passing in front of
them; there was no one who could see; and with a lightning-swift impulse
she turned her wrist and for a half second, while his heart stopped
beating, touched all his fingers with her own, then as quickly withdrew
her hand and turned as far away from him as the position of her chair
permitted.
It was a caress of incredible brevity, and so fleeting, so airy, that it
was little more than a touch of light itself, like the faint quick light
from a flying star one might just glimpse on one’s hand as it passed.
But in our pleasant world important things have resulted from touches as
evanescent as that. Nature has its uses for the ineffable.
Blazing with glory, dumb with rapture, Henry Millick Chester felt his
heart rebound to its work, while his withheld breath upheaved in a gulp
that half suffocated him. Thus, blinded by the revelation of the
stupefying beauty of life, he sat through a heaven-stricken interval,
and time was of no moment. Gradually he began to perceive, in the midst
of the effulgence which surrounded the next chair like a bright mist,
the adorable contour of a shoulder in a tan coat and the ravishing
outline of a rosy cheek that belonged to this divine girl who was his.
By and by he became dreamily aware of other objects beyond that cheek
and that shoulder, of a fat man and his fat wife on the opposite side of
the car near the end. Unmistakably they were man and wife, but it seemed
to Henry that they had no reason to be—such people had no right to be
married. They had no obvious right to exist at all; certainly they had
no right whatever to exist in that car. Their relation to each other had
become a sickening commonplace, the bleakness of it as hideously evident
as their overfed convexity. It was visible that they looked upon each
other as inevitable nuisances which had to be tolerated. They were
horrible. Had Love ever known these people? It was unthinkable! For lips
such as theirs to have pronounced the name of the god would have been
blasphemy; for those fat hands ever to have touched, desecration! Henry
hated the despicable pair.
All at once his emotion changed: he did not hate them, he pitied them.
From an immense height he looked down with compassion upon their
wretched condition. He pitied everybody except himself and the roseate
being beside him; they floated together upon a tiny golden cloud, alone
in the vast sky at an immeasurable altitude above the squalid universe.
A wave of pity for the rest of mankind flooded over him, but most of all
he pitied that miserable, sodden, befleshed old married couple.
He was dimly aware of a change that came over these fat people, a
strangeness; but he never did realize that at this crisis his eyes,
fixed intently upon them and aided by his plastic countenance, had
expressed his feelings and sentiments regarding them in the most lively
and vivid way. For at the moment when the stout gentleman laid his paper
down, preparatory to infuriated inquiry, both he and his wife were
expunged from Henry’s consciousness forever and were seen of him
thenceforth no more than if they had been ether and not solid flesh. The
exquisite girl had been pretending to pick a thread out of her left
sleeve with her right hand—but now at last she leaned back in her chair
and again turned her face partly toward Henry. Her under lip was caught
in slightly beneath her upper teeth, as if she had been doing something
that possibly she oughtn’t to be doing, and though the pause in the
conversation had been protracted—it is impossible to calculate how
long—her charming features were still becomingly overspread with rose.
She looked toward her rapt companion, not at him, and her eyes were
preoccupied, tender, and faintly embarrassed.
The pause continued.
He leaned a little closer to her. And he looked at her and looked at her
and looked at her. At intervals his lips moved as if he were speaking,
and yet he was thinking wordlessly. Leaning thus toward her, his gaze
and attitude had all the intensity of one who watches a ninth-inning tie
in the deciding game of a championship series. And as he looked and
looked and looked, the fat man and his wife, quite unaware of their
impalpability, also looked and looked and looked in grateful
fascination.
“Did you——” Henry Millick Chester finally spoke these words in a voice
he had borrowed, evidently from a stranger, for it did not fit his
throat and was so deep that it disappeared—it seemed to fall down a
coal-hole and ended in a dusty choke. “Did you——” he began again, two
octaves higher, and immediately squeaked out. He said “Did you” five
times before he subjugated the other two words.
“Did you—mean that?”
“What?” Her own voice was so low that he divined rather than heard what
she said. He leaned even a little closer—and the fat man nudged his
wife, who elbowed his thumb out of her side morbidly: she wasn’t missing
anything.
“Did you—did you mean that?”
“Mean what?”
“That!”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“When you—when you—oh, you know!”
“No, I don’t.”
“When you—when you took my hand.”
“I!”
With sudden, complete self-possession she turned quickly to face him,
giving him a look of half-shocked, half-amused astonishment.
“When I took your hand?” she repeated incredulously. “What are you
saying?”
“You—you know,” he stammered. “A while ago when—when—you—you——”
“I didn’t do anything of the kind!” Impending indignation began to cloud
the delicate face ominously. “Why in the world should I?”
“But you——”
“I didn’t!” She cut him off sharply. “I couldn’t. Why, it wouldn’t have
been nice! What made you dream I would do a thing like that? How dare
you imagine such things!”
At first dumfounded, then appalled, he took the long, swift, sickening
descent from his golden cloud with his mouth open, but it snapped tight
at the bump with which he struck the earth. He lay prone, dismayed,
abject. The lovely witch could have made him believe anything; at least
it is the fact that for a moment she made him believe he had imagined
that angelic little caress; and perhaps it was the sight of his utter
subjection that melted her. For she flashed upon him suddenly with a
dazing smile, and then, blushing again but more deeply than before, her
whole attitude admitting and yielding, she offered full and amazing
confession, her delicious laugh rippling tremulously throughout every
word of it.
“It must have been an accident—partly!”
“I love you!” he shouted.
The translucent fat man and his wife groped for each other feverishly,
and a coloured porter touched Henry Millick Chester on the shoulder.
“Be in Richmon’ less’n fi’ minutes now,” said the porter. He tapped the
youth’s shoulder twice more; it is his office to awaken the rapt
dreamer. “Richmon,’ In’iana, less’n fi’ minutes now,” he repeated more
slowly.
Henry gave him a stunned and dishevelled “What?”
“You get off Richmon’, don’t you?”
“What of it? We haven’t passed Dayton yet.”
“Yessuh, long ’go. Pass’ Dayton eight-fifty. Be in Richmon’ mighty quick
now.”
The porter appeared to be a malicious liar. Henry appealed pitifully to
the girl.
“But we haven’t passed Dayton?”
“Yes, just after you sat down by me. We stopped several minutes.”
“Yessuh. Train don’t stop no minutes in Richmon’ though,” said the
porter with a hard laugh, waving his little broom at some outlying
freight cars they were passing. “Gittin’ in now. I got you’ bag on
platfawm.”
“I don’t want to be brushed,” Henry said, almost sobbing. “For heaven’s
sake, get out!”
Porters expect anything. This one went away solemnly without even
lifting his eyebrows.
The brakes were going on.
One class of railway tragedies is never recorded, though it is the most
numerous of all and fills the longest list of heartbreaks; the statics
ignore it, yet no train ever leaves its shed, or moves, that is not
party to it. It is time and overtime that the safety-device inventors
should turn their best attention to it, so that the happy day may come
at last when we shall see our common carriers equipped with something to
prevent these lovers’ partings.
The train began to slow down.
Henry Millick Chester got waveringly to his feet; she rose at the same
time and stood beside him.
“I am no boy,” he began, hardly knowing what he said, but automatically
quoting a fragment from his forthcoming address to his father. “I have
reached man’s estate and I have met the only——” He stopped short with
an exclamation of horror. “You—you haven’t even told me your name!”
“My name?” the girl said, a little startled.
“Yes! And your address!”
“I’m not on my way home now,” she said. “I’ve been visiting in New York
and I’m going to St. Louis to make another visit.”
“But your name!”
She gave him an odd glance of mockery, a little troubled.
“You mightn’t like my name!”
“Oh, please, please!”
“Besides, do you think it’s quite proper for me to——”
“Oh, please! To talk of that now! Please!” The train had stopped.
The glint of a sudden decision shone in the lovely eyes. “I’ll write it
for you so you won’t forget.”
She went quickly to the writing desk at the end of the compartment, he
with her, the eyes of the fat man and his wife following them like two
pairs of searchlights swung by the same mechanism.
“And where you live,” urged Henry. “I shall write to you every day.” He
drew a long, deep breath and threw back his head. “Till the day—the day
when I come for you.”
“Don’t look over my shoulder.” She laughed shyly, wrote hurriedly upon a
loose sheet, placed it in an envelope, sealed the envelope, and then, as
he reached to take it, withheld it tantalizingly. “No. It’s my name and
where I live, but you can’t have it. Not till you’ve promised not to
open it until the train is clear out of the station.”
Outside the window sounded the twice-repeated “Awl aboh-oh,” and far
ahead a fatal bell was clanging.
“I promise,” he gulped.
“Then take it!”
With a strange, new-born masterfulness he made a sudden impetuous
gesture and lifted both the precious envelope and the fingers that
inclosed it to his lips. Then he turned and dashed to the forward end of
the car where a porter remained untipped as Henry leaped from the
already rapidly moving steps of the car to the ground. Instantly the
wonderful girl was drawn past him, leaning and waving from the railed
rear platform whither she had run for this farewell. And in the swift
last look that they exchanged there was in her still-flushing, lovely
face a light of tenderness and of laughter, of kindness and of something
like a fleeting regret.
The train gained momentum, skimming onward and away, the end of the
observation car dwindling and condensing into itself like a magician’s
disappearing card, while a white handkerchief, waving from the platform,
quickly became an infinitesimal shred of white—and then there was
nothing. The girl was gone.
Probably Henry Millick Chester owes his life to the fact that there are
no gates between the station building and the tracks at Richmond. For
gates and a ticket-clipping official might have delayed Henry’s father
in the barely successful dash he made to drag from the path of a backing
local a boy wholly lost to the outward world in a state of helpless
puzzlement, which already threatened to become permanent as he stared
and stared at a sheet of railway notepaper whereon was written in a
charming hand:
Mary Smith
Chicago
Ill.