White Ashes | Page 7

returning from the Hurds' to his boarding house,
opened the front door with his latch key and stepped into the dingy hall.
On a small table beside the hatrack lay the boarders' mail. He picked
out three envelopes addressed to him, walked upstairs, and entered his
room. Seating himself in the only comfortable chair the apartment
afforded, he gloomily regarded the three missives.
The first bore on its upper left-hand corner the mark of his tailor, a
chronic creditor, once patient, then consecutively surprised, annoyed,
amazed, and of late showing signs of extreme exasperation
accompanied by threats; at the end of the gamut the contents of this
would be more vivacious reading than merely the monotonous and
colorless repetition of an account rendered. The second was from his
dentist, a man spurred to fury, whose extraction of two wisdom teeth
had been of trifling difficulty in comparison with the task of extracting
from his patient the amount named in his bill, and who had found in
Wilkinson's mouth no cavity comparable in gravity with that apparently
existing in his bank balance. The third envelope carried the name of a
firm of lawyers not unknown to the man addressed--a firm that
specialized in the collection of bad debts; Wilkinson looked at this
longer than at either of the others, for he was ignorant of its contents.
Then, without opening any one of the three, he thoughtfully took out
his fountain pen.
Crossing out his own Mount Vernon Place address from all three
envelopes, he readdressed the tailor's communication in an alien hand
to the Hotel Bon Air, Augusta, Georgia. On the dentist's missive he
inscribed "Auditorium Annex, Chicago, Illinois." Over the lawyer's
letter he hesitated a moment, and then boldly wrote "Chateau Frontenac,
Quebec, P. Q." This would at least be a grateful reprieve. After five
days all these epistles would be returned to their senders, who would
probably not question the fact that their failure to reach him had not
been purely accidental. Moreover his credit with this trio would

positively be improved by the impression that his resources were at any
rate sufficient to enable him to travel far and to stop at well-known
hotels.
After he had dropped the three envelopes into the post-box it occurred
to him that he might just as well--perhaps even better--have sent all
three to the same place, but even allowing liberally for the
incorrectness of this detail, Mr. Hurd's opinion of his step-nephew
seemed in a fair way of being justified.
CHAPTER II
It occurred to Mr. Smith that no one has ever determined the precise
idea upon which the Boston and Manhattan Railroad bases its
schedules with its infrequent adherence thereto and customary
deviation therefrom. Numberless ingenious theories have been
advanced from time to time by untold thousands of exasperated patrons
of the line; opinions of all colors, all temperatures, all degrees of light
and shade have been volunteered, many with a violence that lends
conviction, but all in vain. The thing remains as secret, as recondite, as
baffling as ever. Good Bostonians regard attempts to solve the problem
as not only futile but impertinent--almost blasphemous--accepting it as
a factor in the general inscrutability which veils the world, and are
content to let it remain such.
From these reflections it is patent that this large patience, this Oriental
calm, had not yet come to Mr. Richard Smith of New York, who felt a
certain irritation somewhat modified by amusement as he sat looking
out of the car window at an apathetic brakeman who languidly gazed
down the shining rails. For no cause that could be guessed, the train
had now been resting nearly half an hour. The colored porter had
ceased to perform prodigies by shutting between the upper berth and
the wall three times as many blankets, mattresses, board partitions, and
other paraphernalia as one would have thought the space could possibly
contain, and was sitting in the corner section reflectively chewing a
toothpick. There appeared to be a distressing lack of interest in the train
on the part of all its proximate officials; no one seemed ready to alter

the status quo.
Only a few miles to the eastward the roofs of Boston and the golden
dome of the Capitol glittered in the morning sun, and there were the
bright rails stretching clean and straight up to the very gates of the city.
Railroading was a silly business anyway, thought Smith. An express
train should be consistent, and not suddenly decide to become a
landmark instead of a mobile and dynamic agent. He almost wished he
had taken his ticket by the Fall River boat--as he probably would have
done had he been a Bostonian.
"Without reference to its political aspect," he reflected, "I believe
strongly in water. I might have