Lost Ecstasy/Chapter 22
IT was not until Tom joined her outside the cars that she realized that her wedding night was to be as strange as the day. When Tom came to speak to her he was awkward and self-conscious.
"There's a little complication about tonight, girl," he said, looking away from her. "The—married cars are kind of full up. They'll take care of you, you understand, but"
"I'm sure I'll manage very well." She heard her own voice, apparently composed.
But whatever Tom felt, she was secretly relieved. The terrible pitiless publicity of the show life had been gradually getting on her nerves all day, and now in the semi-darkness Tom himself seemed a stranger, a stranger who had the right to put his arms around her, and did so. He felt her recoil.
"Don't you want me to do that?"
"It's so public."
"Well, I'm not ashamed of loving you, if you are."
Sitting on the side of her berth later on, Tom told her his immediate plans. When the train pulled in in the morning he would take her to a hotel, and they would have two days' honeymoon. After that it would be time to think of the future.
But she was very tired. The closeness of the car made her dizzy; the narrow berth, a built-in box which held a hard mattress, was airless and uncomfortable. Girls in faded kimonos were sitting up, each in her tiny cubicle, sorting clothes, mending by the indifferent light, using cold cream, or putting their hair in order. Men wandered through, indifferent to the others but eying Tom and herself with humorous interest. Everything in her was crying out for privacy, for decent reserves, for quiet; even Tom's jubilant vitality seemed out of place.
"I've got it all fixed," he told her. "We're going to the Pelham. Nothing's too good for us the next few days." And when she only smiled. "Pretty tired, aren't you?"
"I feel a little crowded."
"You'll get over that. They're a fine lot; the best ever. And these girls are on the square, too," he added. "Don't you get any wrong ideas about them."
"You would like to stay on, wouldn't you?"
"It's the way I'm making a living. We've got to eat, you know."
She winced, but he did not notice it.
And she felt, when he finally went away, that she had been ridiculously cold to him. For him, the people around did not exist; for her, they formed a barrier she could not pass. If they could only have been alone together somewhere, anywhere, she felt that the barrier would have been swept away. But not alone in his sense of the word, in a hotel bedroom somewhere. Everything that was fastidious in her revolted at what seemed to her to amount to an assignation. But to be together, quite privately, in some quiet distant place, and there to make their readjustments, she craved that passionately that night.
The long train of yellow cars, with the flats carrying the great wagons protected by canvas, the animal cars, the crowded, cluttered sleeping coaches, got slowly under way. She lay back on her hard pillow, and after a while she reached into her dressing bag and found a cigarette. She thought it might quiet her. But the girl across, a kimono thrown casually over her shoulders while she mended a stocking, looked over quickly and then looked away again, with a shocked expression on her face.
It was indeed a new world.
Tom, too, was late in getting to sleep. He lay, his long body diagonally in the berth, his arms under his head, and tried to think out his new problem. He loved Kay; he felt now that he had always loved her. Mixed with that, however, was a sense of triumph over Herbert, over the Dowlings, over that mysterious life of hers which she had abandoned for him. He had no subtleties. He was physically rugged and mentally direct; his roots were deep in the soil. Vaguely he felt that Kay had been superficially rooted in something quite different. He called it society, but what he meant was something for which he had no words; cultures, conventions, traditions. And whatever they were he resented them.
"She's my wife now," he reflected. "She's got to forget the old stuff and begin all over."
So neither of them slept much. The train rocked along; the big wagons swayed in the cars, the tired show people snored and grunted in their narrow quarters.
But when Tom wakened Kay in the morning she gave him back smile for smile. He brightened perceptibly; ever after she was to realize, through all the difficulties to come, her power to depress or cheer him. Other power she certainly lacked. She could not force him to her way against his will, but she could make him happy or wretched as she chose. Later on she was to analyze that still further; when she met him on his own ground, conformed, agreed, he was happy. When she did not, when she opposed or disapproved, he was like a willful child, obstinate but wretched.
"Time to leave the bed grounds!" he told her, and then was queerly silent. There was something so virginal about her as she lay there, so almost childish in spite of her twenty-three years, that his heart swelled within him. He loved her, he adored her. He would always be good to her, always kind. With the curious eyes of the girl across on him, he bent down and kissed her awkwardly.
She dressed as best she could. The washroom was a litter of paper towels and the lock was broken; never before in her life had she put on in the morning clothing she had worn the day before, but now she did. She had hung up her dark suit the night before, and its fine white cuffs and collar were still fresh. But the matter of adequate clothing began to bother her. She must get some things somewhere, but she had only fifty dollars in her purse.
When she got out of the car she saw the Indian of the day before. He was lounging on the platform, and he leered at her, then turned and wandered off. But she was late, and there was a parade that morning. It added to the strangeness of everything that she had to go alone to the Pelham and there engage a room and bath. And when she was inside it, the door locked, to the sensation of strangeness was added one of dismay. The bleakness of the room, the two beds side by side, the frankness of the bathroom opening off it, shocked and revolted her. She was a wife, she told herself fiercely, not a mistress, but the sensation remained. The very bareness of the place, its reduction of life to its physical necessities added to it.
Never before had she occupied a hotel room in all its starkness. A trunkful of silk pillows, a bright slumber robe on a couch, little vases for flowers and family pictures in silver frames had always before created a temporary atmosphere of home. She could see Nora now, moving about, deftly pulling the chairs and putting out the luxurious trifles with which they had always traveled.
She could not bear it. After all, the room was a shrine; it must be, or she was all wrong. Everything was wrong. She set feverishly to work, placing the gold fittings from her bag on the dressing table, ordering flowers from the floristshop below, even finally going down herself and, fearful of being recognized, buying an armful of magazines from the news stand. And as she worked, she lost that early panic. She had achieved, not a shrine perhaps, but a bit of home.
Actually she was working against time to think. It must come, she knew. She could not fight down forever the recognition of what she had done; the scandal and talk, the stricken household, Herbert. That must come, but not now. Not yet. She lived feverishly in the present; she could look neither back nor ahead.
At something before noon she heard the sirens of fire engines, and went to her window to look out. But she could not see them. She had, standing there in that room that was to be a shrine, no idea that that sound was to alter the whole course of her life and Tom McNair's. She listened to them and then went back to her roses, ignorant that they had set in motion a small chain of events that was to lead to catastrophe.
It was not a great matter at the beginning. The leaders of one of the big six-horse hitches, driven by Overland Jim, had frightened and started to run, and in the resulting mix-up Overland was thrown and sprained his wrist. But Overland during the performance drove the prairie schooner during the Indian attack, and that day Tom McNair volunteered to take his place.
If he thought of Little Dog he put him out of his head. In all the weeks on the road the Indian had kept out of his way, had made no overt or covert move against him. And Tom believed in his star that day. He was recklessly happy, even boastful.
"Can I drive a six-horse hitch?" he said-to the Ring Stock Boss. "Man, where I come from it takes six horses to the family buggy to get to church!"
There was no time to see Kay before the performance; he had hoped she would come to the lot, and he kept a pair of keen eyes on the alert for her. He was disappointed and somewhat hurt when he did not see her, and he went into the arena with his heart only half in his work. And then it happened. The wagon circled the arena in a cloud of dust, followed by the yelling Indians on their ponies, firing their blank cartridges with deadly effect. When it finally came to a stop and the dust subsided, Tom was lying face down on the ground, not moving.
The grand-stand applauded cheerfully, and went on eating its peanuts and drinking its pop. It was the little Cossack who was the first to recognize a tragedy. He ran out into the arena and held up both hands.