The Man in Lower Ten | Page 5

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 matinee 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