“Oh, I'll git yer there,” came a voice from inside the fur overcoat.
“Darter wanted to go, but I said 'twarn't no night to go nowhars. Got to
see a man who owes me some money, or I'd stay home myself. Git up, Joe.”
It was marvellous, the intelligence of this man. More than marvellous
when my again blinded eyes--the red flannel in the lamp helped--began to
take in the landscape. Fences were evidently of no use to him; clumps of
trees didn't count. If he had a compass anywhere about his clothes,
he never once consulted it. Drove right on--across trackless Siberian
steppes; by the side of endless glaciers, and through primeval forests,
his voice keeping up its volume of sound, as he laid bare for me the
scandals of the village--particularly the fight going on between the two
churches--one hard and one soft--this lecture course being one of the
bones of contention.
I saved my voice and kept quiet. If a runner did not give out or
“Joe” break a leg, we would reach the hall in time; half an hour late,
perhaps--but in time; the man beside me had said so--and the man beside
me knew.
With a turn of the fence--a new one had thrust its hands out of a
drift--a big building--big in the white waste--loomed up. My companion
flapped the reins the whole length of Joe's back.
“Git up! No, by gosh!--they ain't tired yet;--they're still a-waitin'.
See them lights--that's the hall.”
I gave a sigh of relief. The ambitious young man with one ear open for
stellar voices, and the overburdened John Bunyan, and any number of
other short-winded pedestrians, could no longer monopolize the upward
and onward literature of our own or former times. I too had arrived.
Another jerk to the right--a trot up an incline, and we stopped at a
steep flight of steps--a regular Jacob's-ladder flight--leading to
a corridor dimly lighted by the flare of a single gas jet. Up this I
stumbled, lugging the bags once more, my whole mind bent on reaching the
platform at the earliest possible moment--a curious mental attitude, I
am aware, for a man who had eaten nothing since noon, was still wet
and shivering inside, and half frozen outside--nose, cheeks, and
fingers---from a wind that cut like a circular saw.
As I landed the last bag on the top step--the fog-horn couldn't leave
his horse--I became conscious of the movements of a short, rotund,
shad-shaped gentleman in immaculate white waistcoat, stiff choker and
wide expanse of shirt front. He was approaching me from the door of the
lecture hall in which sat the audience; then a clammy hand was thrust
out--and a thin voice trickled this sentence:
“You're considerable late sir--our people have been in their--”
“I am _what!_” I cried, straightening up.
“I said you were forty minutes late, sir. We expect our lecturers to be
on--”
That was the fulminate that exploded the bomb. Up to now I had held
myself in hand. I was carrying, I knew, 194 pounds of steam, and I also
knew that one shovel more of coal would send the entire boiler into
space, but through it all I had kept my hand on the safety-valve. It
might have been the white waistcoat or the way the curved white collar
cupped his billiard-ball of a chin, or it might have been the slight
frown about his eyebrows, or the patronizing smile that drifted over his
freshly laundered face; or it might have been the deprecating gesture
with which he consulted his watch: whatever it was, out went the boiler.
“Late! Are you the man that's running this lecture course?”
“Well, sir, I have the management of it.”
“You have, have you? Then permit me to tell you right here, my friend,
that you ought to sublet the contract to a five-year-old boy. You let me
get out in the cold--send no conveyance as you agreed--”
“We sent our wagon, sir, to the station. You could have gone in
and warmed yourself, and if it had not arrived you could have
telephoned--the station is always warm.”
“You have the impudence to tell me that I don't know whether a station
is closed or not, and that I can't see a wagon when it is hauled up
alongside a depot?”
The clammy hands went up in protest: “If you will listen, sir, I will--”
“No, sir, I will listen to nothing.” and I forged ahead into a small
room where five or six belated people were hanging up their coats and
hats.
But the Immaculate still persisted:
“This is not where--Will you come into the dressing-room, sir? We have a
nice warm room for the lecturers on the other side of the--”
“No--sir; I won't go another step, except on to that platform, and I'm
not very anxious now to get there--not until I put something inside
of me--” (here I unstrapped my bag) “to save me from an attack of
pneumonia.” (I had my flask out now and the cup filled to the brim.)
“When I think of how hard I worked to get here and how little you--”
(and down it went at one gulp).
The expression of disgust that wrinkled the placid face of the
Immaculate as the half-empty flask went back to its place, was
pathetic--but I wouldn't have given him a drop to have saved his life.