_ BOOK II. IN NEW YORK
CHAPTER II
Marie Louise tried all the next morning to telephone from New York to Washington, but it seemed that everybody on earth was making the same effort. It was a wire Babel.
Washington was suddenly America in the same way that London had long been England; and Paris France. The entire population was apparently trying to get into Washington in order to get out again. People wrote, telegraphed, radiographed, telephoned, and traveled thither by all the rail- and motor-roads. Washington was the narrow neck of the funnel leading to the war, and the sleepy old home of debate and administration was suddenly dumfounded to find itself treated to all the horrors of a boom-town--it was like San Francisco in '49.
Marie Louise, who had not yet recovered her American dialect, kept pleading with Long Distance:
"Oh, I say, cahn't you put me through to Washington? It's no end important, really! Rosslyn, seven three one two. I want to speak to Mrs. Widdicombe. I am Miss Webling. Thank you."
The obliging central asked her telephone number and promised to call her in a moment. Eternity is but a moment--to some centrals. Marie Louise, being finite and ephemeral, never heard from that central again. Later she took up the receiver and got another central, who had never heard her tale of woe and had to have it all over again. This central also asked her name and number and promised to report, then vanished into the interstellar limbo where busy centrals go.
Again and again Marie Louise waited and called, and told and retold her prayer till it turned to gibberish and she began to doubt her own name and to mix the telephone number hopelessly. Then she went into her hand-bag and pawed about in the little pocket edition of confusion till she found the note that Polly had sent her at once from Washington with the address, Grinden Hall, Rosslyn, and the telephone number and the message.
So glad you're on this side of the water, dear. Do run over and see us. Perfect barn of a house, and lost in the country, but there's always room--especially for you, dear. You'll never get in at a hotel.
Marie Louise propped this against the telephone and tried again.
The seventh central dazed her with, "We can take nothing but gov'ment business till two P.M."
Marie Louise rose in despair, searched in her bag for her watch, gasped, put the watch and the note back in her bag, snapped it, and rose to go.
She decided to send Polly a telegram. She took out the note for the address and telephoned a telegram, saying that she would arrive at five o'clock. The telegraph-operator told her that the company could not guarantee delivery, as traffic over the wires was very heavy. Marie Louise sighed and rose, worn out with telephone-fag.
She told the maid to ask the hall-boy to get her a taxi, and hastily made ready to leave. Her trunks had gone to the station an hour ago, and they had been checked through from the house.
Her final pick-up glance about the room did not pick up the note she had propped on the telephone-table. She left it there and closed the door on another chapter of her life.
She rode to the station, and, after standing in line for a weary while, learned that not a seat was to be had in a parlor-car to-day, to-morrow, or any day for two weeks. Berths at night were still more unobtainable.
She decided that she might as well go in a day-coach. Scores of people had had the same idea before her. The day-coaches were filled. She sidled through the crowded aisles and found no seat. She invaded the chair-cars in desperation.
In one of these she saw a porter bestowing hand-luggage. She appealed to him. "You must have one chair left."
He was hardly polite in his answer. "No, ma'am, I ain't. I ain't a single chair."
"But I've got to sit somewhere," she said.
The porter did not comment on such a patent fallacy. He moved back to the front to repel boarders. Several men stared from the depths of their dentist's chairs, but made no proffer of their seats. They believed that woman's newfangled equality included the privilege of standing up.
One man, however, gave a start as of recognition, real or pretended. Marie Louise did not know him, and said so with her eyes. His smile of recognition changed to a smile of courtesy. He proffered her his seat with an old-fashioned gesture. She declined with a shake of the head and a coldly correct smile.
He insisted academically, as much as to say: "I can see that you are a gentlewoman. Please accept me as a gentleman and permit me to do my duty." There was a brief, silent tug-of-war between his unselfishness and hers. He won. Before she realized it, she had dropped wearily into his place.
"But where will you sit?" she said.
"Oh, I'll get along."
He smiled and moved off, lugging his suit-case. He had the air of one who would get along. He had shown himself masterful in two combats, and compelled her to take the chair he had doubtless engaged with futile providence days before.
"Rahthah a decentish chap, with a will of his own," she thought.
The train started, left the station twilight, plunged into the tunnel of gloom and made the dip under the Hudson River. People felt their ears buzz and smother. Wise ones swallowed hard. The train came back to the surface and the sunlight, and ran across New Jersey.
Marie Louise decided to take her luncheon early, to make sure of it. Nearly everybody else had decided to do the same thing. At this time all the people in America seemed to be thinking
en masse. When she reached the dining-car every seat was taken and there was a long bread-line in the narrow corridor.
The wilful man was at the head. He fished for her eye, caught it, and motioned to her to take his place. She shook her head. But it seemed to do no good to shake heads at him; he came down the corridor and lifted his hat. His voice and words were pleading, but his tone was imperative.
"Please take my place."
She shook her head, but he still held his hand out, pointing. She was angry at being bossed even for her own benefit. Worse yet, by the time she got to the head of the line the second man had moved up to first. He stared at her as if he wondered what she was doing there. She fell back, doubly vexed, but That Man advanced and gave the interloper a look like a policeman's shove. The fellow backed up on the next man's toes. Then the cavalier smiled Miss Webling to her place and went back to the foot of the class without waiting for her furious thanks.
She wanted to stamp her foot. She had always hated to be cowed or compelled to take chairs or money. People who had tried to move her soul or lend her their experience or their advantages had always aroused resentment.
Before long she had a seat. The man opposite her was just thumbing his last morsel of pie. She supposed that when he left That Man would take the chair and order her luncheon for her. But it was not so to be. She passed him still well down the line. He had probably given his place to other women in succession. She did not like that. It seemed a trifle unfaithful or promiscuous or something. The rescuer owes the rescuee a certain fidelity. He did not look at her. He did not claim even a glance of gratitude.
It was so American a gallantry that she resented it. If he had seemed to ask for the alms of a smile, she would have insulted him. Yet it was not altogether satisfactory to be denied the privilege. She fumed. Everything was wrong. She sat in her cuckoo's nest and glared at the reeling landscape.
Suddenly she began pawing through that private chaos, looking for Polly Widdicombe's letter. She could not find it. She found the checks for her trunks, a handkerchief, a pair of gloves, and various other things, but not the letter. This gave her a new fright.
She remembered now that she had left it on the telephone-table. She could see it plainly as her remembered glance took its last survey of the room. The brain has a way of developing occasional photographs very slowly. Something strikes our eyes, and we do not really see it till long after. We hear words and say, "How's that?" or, "I beg your pardon!" and hear them again before they can be repeated.
This belated feat of memory encouraged Miss Webling to hope that she could remember a little farther back to the contents of the letter and the telephone number written there. But her memory would not respond. The effort to cudgel it seemed to confuse it. She kept on forgetting more and more completely.
All she could remember was what Polly Widdicombe had said about there being no chance to get into a hotel--"an hotel," Marie Louise still thought it.
It grew more and more evident that the train would be hours late. People began to worry audibly about the hotels that would probably refuse them admission. At length they began to stroll toward the dining-car for an early dinner.
Marie Louise, to make sure of the meal and for lack of other employment, went along. There was no queue in the corridor now. She did not have to take That Man's place. She found one at a little empty table. But by and by he appeared, and, though there were other vacant seats, he sat down opposite her.
She could hardly order the conductor to eject him. In fact, seeing that she owed him for her seat-- It suddenly smote her that he must have paid for it. She owed him money! This was unendurable!
He made no attempt to speak to her, but at length she found courage to speak to him.
"I beg your pardon--"
He looked up and about for the salt or something to pass, but she went on:
"May I ask you how much you paid for the seat you gave me?"
He laughed outright at this unexpected demand:
"Why, I don't remember, I'm sure."
"Oh, but you must, and you must let me repay it. It just occurred to me that I had cheated you out of your chair, and your money, too."
"That's mighty kind of you," he said.
He laughed again, but rather tenderly, and she was grateful to him for having the tact not to be flamboyant about it and not insisting on forgetting it.
"I'll remember just how much it was in a minute, and if you will feel easier about it, I'll ask you for it."
"I could hardly rob a perfect stranger," she began.
He broke in: "They say nobody is perfect, and I'm not a perfect stranger. I've met you before, Miss Webling."
"Not rilly! Wherever was it? I'm so stupid not to remember--even your name."
He rather liked her for not bluffing it through. He could understand her haziness the better from the fact that when he first saw her in the chair-car and leaped to his feet it was because he had identified her once more with the long-lost, long-sought beauty of years long gone--the girl he had seen in the cheap vaudeville theater. This slip of memory had uncovered another memory. He had corrected the palimpsest and recalled her as the Miss Webling whom he had met in London. She had given him the same start then as now, and, as he recalled it, she had snubbed him rather vigorously. So he had kept his distance. But the proffer of the money for the chair-car chair broke the ice a little. He said at last:
"My name is Ross Davidge. I met you at your father's house in London."
This seemed to agitate her peculiarly. She trembled and gasped:
"You don't mean it. I-- Oh yes, of course I remember--"
"Please don't lie about it," he pleaded, bluntly, "for of course you don't."
She laughed, but very nervously.
"Well, we did give very large dinners."
"It was a very large one the night I was there. I was a mile down the street from you, and I said nothing immortal. I was only a business acquaintance of Sir Joseph's, anyway. It was about ships, of course."
He saw that her mind was far away and under strange excitation. But she murmured, distantly:
"Oh, so you are--interested in ships?"
"I make 'em for a living."
"Rilly! How interesting!"
This constraint was irksome. He ventured:
"How is the old boy? Sir Joseph, I mean. He's well, I hope."
Her eyes widened. "Didn't you know? Didn't you read in the papers--about their death together?"
"Theirs? His wife and he died together?"
"Yes."
"In a submarine attack?"
"No, at home. It was in all the papers--about their dying on the same night, from--from ptomaine poisoning."
"No!"
He put a vast amount of shock and regret in the mumbled word. He explained: "I must have been out in the forest or in the mines at the time. Forgive me for opening the old wound. How long ago was it? I see you're out of mourning."
"Sir Joseph abominated black; and besides, few people wear mourning in England during the war."
"That's so. Poor old England! You poor Englishwomen--mothers and daughters! My God! what you've gone through! And such pluck!"
Before he realized what he was doing his hand went across and touched hers, and he clenched it for just a moment of fierce sympathy. She did not resent the message. Then he muttered:
"I know what it means. I lost my father and mother--not at once, of course--years apart. But to lose them both in one night!"
She made a sharp attempt at self-control:
"Please! I beg you--please don't speak of it."
He was so sorry that he said nothing more. Marie Louise was doubly fascinating to him because she was in sorrow and afraid of something or somebody. Besides, she was inaccessible, and Ross Davidge always felt a challenge from the impossible and the inaccessible.
She called for her check and paid it, and tipped the waiter and rose. She smiled wretchedly at him as he rose with her. She left the dining-car, and he sat down and cursed himself for a brute and a blunderer.
He kept in the offing, so that if she wanted him she could call him, but he thought it the politer politeness not to italicize his chivalry. He was so distressed that he forgot that she had forgotten to pay him for the chair.
It was good and dark when the train pulled into Washington at last. The dark gave Marie Louise another reason for dismay. The appearance of a man who had dined at Sir Joseph's, and the necessity for telling him the lie about that death, had brought on a crisis of nerves. She was afraid of the dark, but more afraid of the man who might ask still more questions. She avoided him purposely when she left the train.
A porter took her hand-baggage and led her to the taxi-stand. Polly Widdicombe's car was not waiting. Marie Louise went to the front of the building to see if she might be there. She was appalled at the thought of Polly's not meeting her. She needed her blessed giggle as never before.
It was a very majestic station. Marie Louise had heard people say that it was much too majestic for a railroad station. As if America did not owe more to the iron god of the rails than to any of her other deities!
Before her was the Capitol, lighted from below, its dome floating cloudily above the white parapets as if mystically sustained. The superb beauty of it clutched her throat. She wanted to do something for it and all the holy ideals it symbolized.
Evidently Polly was not coming. The telegram had probably never reached her. The porter asked her, "Was you thinkin' of a taxi?" and she said, "Yes," only to realize that she had no address to give the driver. _