The Blind Man's Eyes (July 1916)/Chapter 4
CHAPTER IV
TRUCE
THE Eastern Express, mantled in a seething whirl of snow, but still maintaining very nearly its scheduled time and even regaining a few lost minutes from hour to hour as, now well past the middle of the State, it sped on across the flatter country in its approach to the mountains, proceeded monotonously through the afternoon. Eaton watched the chill of the snow battle against the warmth of the double windows on the windward side of the car, until finally it conquered and the windows became—as he knew the rest of the outside of the cars must have been long before—merely a wall of white. This coating, thickening steadily with the increasing severity of the storm as they approached the Rockies, dimmed the afternoon daylight within the car to dusk.
Presently all became black outside the windows, and the passengers from the rear cars filed forward to the dining car and then back to their places again. Eaton took care to avoid the Dorne party in the diner. Soon the porter began making up the berths to be occupied that night; but as yet no one was retiring. The train was to reach Spokane late in the evening; there would be a stop there for half an hour; and after the long day on the train, every one seemed to be waiting up for a walk about the station before going to bed. But as the train slowed, and with a sudden diminishing of the clatter of the fishplates under its wheels and of the puffings of exhausted steam, slipped into the lighted trainsheds at the city, Eaton sat for some minutes in thought. Then he dragged his overcoat down from its hook, buttoned it tightly about his throat, pulled his traveling cap down on his head and left the car. All along the train, vestibule doors of the Pullmans had been opened, and the passengers were getting out, while a few others, snow-covered and with hand-luggage, came to board the train. Eaton, turning to survey the sleet-shrouded car he had left, found himself face to face with Miss Dorne, standing alone upon the station platform.
Her piquant, beautiful face was half hidden in the collar of the great fur coat she had worn on boarding the train, and her cheeks were ruddy with the bite of the crisp air.
"You see before you a castaway," she volunteered, smiling.
He felt it necessary to take the same tone. "A castaway?" he questioned. "Cast away by whom?"
"By Mr. Avery, if you must know, though your implication that anybody should have cast me away—anybody at all, Mr. Eaton—is unpleasant."
"There was no implication; it was simply inquiry."
"You should have put it, then, in some other form; you should have asked how I came to be in so surprising a position."
"'How,' in this part of the country, Miss Dorne, is not regarded as a question, but merely as a form of salutation," he bantered. "It was formerly employed by the Indian aborigines inhabiting these parts, who exchanged 'How's' when passing each other on the road. If I had said 'How,' you might simply have replied 'How,' and I should have been under the necessity of considering the incident closed."
She laughed. "You do not wish it to be closed."
"Not till I know more about it."
"Very well; you shall know more. Mr. Avery brought me out to take a walk. He remembered, after bringing me as far as this, that we had not asked my father whether he had any message to be sent from here or any commission to execute; so he went back to find out. I have now waited so many minutes that I feel sure it is my father who has detained him. The imperfectly concealed meaning of what I am telling you is that I consider that Mr. Avery, by his delay, has forfeited his right. The further implication—for I do imply things, Mr. Eaton—is that you cannot very well avoid offering to take the post of duty he has abandoned."
"You mean walk with you?"
"I do."
He slipped his hand inside her arm, sustaining her slight, active body against the wind which blew strongly through the station and scattered over them snow-flakes blown from the roofs of the cars, as they walked forward along the train. Her manner had told him that she meant to ignore her resentment of the morning; but as, turning, they commenced to walk briskly up and down the platform, he found he was not wholly right in this.
"You must admit, Mr. Eaton, that I am treating you very well."
"In pardoning an offense where no offense was meant?"
"It is partly that—that I realized no offense was meant. Partly it is because I do not pass judgment on things I do not understand. I could imagine no possible reason for your very peculiar refusal."
"Not even that I might be perhaps the sort of person who ought not to be introduced into your party in quite that way?"
"That least of all. Persons of that sort do not admit themselves to be such; and if I have lived for twen—I shall not tell you just how many years—the sort of life I have been obliged to live almost since I was born, without learning to judge men in that respect, I must have failed to use my opportunities."
"Thank you," he returned quietly; then, as he recollected his instinctive prejudice against Avery: "However, I am not so sure."
She plainly waited for him to go on, but he pretended to be concerned wholly with guiding her along the platform.
"Mr. Eaton!"
"Yes."
"Do you know that you are a most peculiar man?"
"Exactly in what way, Miss Dorne?"
"In this: The ordinary man, when a woman shows any curiosity about himself, answers with a fullness and particularity and eagerness which seems to say, 'At last you have found a subject which interests me!'"
"Does he?"
"Is that the only reply you care to make?"
"I can think of none more adequate."
"Meaning that after my altogether too open display of curiosity regarding you, I can still do nothing better than guess, without any expectation that you, on your part, will deign to tell me whether I am right or wrong. Very well; my first guess is that you have not done much walking with young women on station platforms—certainly not much of late."
"I'll try to do better, if you'll tell me how you know that?"
"You do very well. I was not criticising you, and I don't have to tell why. Ask no questions; it is a clairvoyant diviner who is speaking."
"Divinity?"
"Diviner only. My second guess is that you have been abroad in far lands."
"My railroad ticket showed as much as that."
"Pardon me, if it seriously injures your self-esteem; but I was not sufficiently interested in you when you came aboard the train, to observe your ticket. What I know is divined from the exceedingly odd and reminiscent way in which you look at all things about you—at this train, this station, the people who pass."
"You find nothing reminiscent, I suppose, in the way I look at you?"
"You do yourself injustice. You do not look at me at all, so I cannot tell; but there could hardly be any reminiscence extending beyond this morning, since you never saw me before then."
"No; this is all fresh experience."
"I hope it is not displeasing. My doubt concerning your evidently rather long absence abroad is as to whether you went away to get or to forget."
"I'm afraid I don't quite understand."
"Those are the two reasons for which young men go to Asia, are they not?—to get something or to forget something. At least, so I have been given to understand. Shall I go on?"
"Go on guessing, you mean? I don't seem able to prevent it."
"Then my third guess is this—and you know no one is ever allowed more than three guesses." She hesitated; when she went on, she had entirely dropped her tone of banter. "I guess, Mr. Eaton, that you have been—I think, are still—going through some terrible experience which has endured for a very long time—perhaps even for years—and has nearly made of you and perhaps even yet may make of you something far different and—and something far less pleasing than you—you must have been before. There! I have transcended all bounds, said everything I should not have said, and left unsaid all the conventional things which are all that our short acquaintance could have allowed. Forgive me—because I'm not sorry."
He made no answer. They walked as far as the rear of the train, turned and came back before she spoke again:
"What is it they are doing to the front of our train, Mr. Eaton?"
He looked. "They are putting a plow on the engine."
"Oh!"
"That seems to be only the ordinary push-plow, but if what I have been overhearing is correct, the railroad people are preparing to give you one of the minor exhibitions of that everyday courage of which you spoke this morning, Miss Dorne."
"In what particular way?"
"When we get across the Idaho line and into the mountains, you are to ride behind a double-header driving a rotary snow-plow."
"A double-header? You mean two locomotives?"
"Yes; the preparation is warrant that what is ahead of us in the way of travel will fully come up to anything you may have been led to expect." They stood a minute watching the trainmen; as they turned, his gaze went past her to the rear cars. "Also," he added, "Mr. Avery, with his usual gracious pleasure at my being in your company, is hailing you from the platform of your car."
She looked up at Eaton sharply, seemed about to speak, and then checked what was upon her tongue. "You are going into your own car?" She held out to him her small gloved hand. "Good-by, then—until we see one another again."
"Good night, Miss Dorne."
He took her hand and retaining it hardly the fraction of an instant, let it go. Was it her friendship she had been offering him? Men use badinage without respect to what their actual feelings may be; women—some memory from the past in which he had known such girls as this, seemed to recall—use it most frequently when their feelings, consciously or unconsciously, are drawing toward a man.
Eaton now went into the men's compartment of his car, where he sat smoking till after the train was under way again. The porter looked in upon him there to ask if he wished his berth made up now; Eaton nodded assent, and fifteen minutes later, dropping the cold end of his cigar and going out into the car, he found the berth ready for him. "D. S.'s" section, also made up but with the curtains folded back displaying the bedding within, was unoccupied; jerkings of the curtains, and voices and giggling in the two berths at the end of the car, showed that Amy and Constance were getting into bed; the Englishman was wide awake in plain determination not to go to bed until his accustomed Nottingham hour. Eaton, drawing his curtains together and buttoning them from the inside, undressed and went to bed. A half-hour later the passage of some one through the aisle and the sudden dimming of the crack of light which showed above the curtains told him that the lights in the car had been turned down. Eaton closed his eyes, but sleep was far from him.
Presently he began to feel the train beginning to labor with the increasing grade and the deepening snow. It was well across the State line and into Idaho; it was nearing the mountains, and the weather was getting colder and the storm more severe. Eaton lifted the curtain from the window beside him and leaned on one elbow to look out. The train was running through a bleak, white desolation; no light and no sign of habitation showed anywhere. Eaton lay staring out, and now the bleak world about him seemed to assume toward him a cruel and merciless aspect. The events of the day ran through his mind again with sinister suggestion. He had taken that train for a certain definite, dangerous purpose which required his remaining as obscure and as inconspicuous as possible; yet already he had been singled out for attention. So far, he was sure, he had received no more than that—attention, curiosity concerning him. He had not suffered recognition; but that might come at any moment. Could he risk longer waiting to act?
He dropped on his back upon the bed and lay with his hands clasped under his head, his eyes staring up at the roof of the car.
In the card-room of the observation car, playing and conversation still went on for a time; then it diminished as one by one the passengers went away to bed. Connery, looking into this car, found it empty and the porter cleaning up; he slowly passed on forward through the train, stopping momentarily in the rear Pullman opposite the berth of the passenger whom President Jarvis had commended to his care. His scrutiny of the car told him all was correct here; the even breathing within the berth assured him the passenger slept.
Connery went on through to the next car and paused again outside the berth occupied by Eaton. He had watched Eaton all day with results that still he was debating with himself; he had found in a newspaper the description of the man who had waited at Warden's, and he reread it, comparing it with Eaton. It perfectly confirmed Connery's first impression; but the more Connery had seen of Eaton, and the more he had thought over him during the day, the more the conductor had become satisfied that either Eaton was not the man described or, if he was, there was no harm to come from it. After all, was not all that could be said against Eaton—if he was the man—simply that he had not appeared to state why Warden was befriending him? Was it not possible that he was serving Warden in some way by not appearing? Certainly Mr. Dorne, who was the man most on the train to be considered, had satisfied himself that Eaton was fit for an acquaintance; Connery had seen what was almost a friendship, apparently, spring up between Eaton and Dorne's daughter during the day.
The conductor went on, his shoulders brushing the buttoned curtains on both sides of the narrow aisle. Except for the presence of the passenger in the rear sleeper, this inspection was to the conductor the uttermost of the commonplace; in its monotonous familiarity he had never felt any strangeness in this abrupt and intimate bringing together of people who never had seen one another before, who after these few days of travel together, might probably never see one another again, but who now slept separated from one another and from the persons passing through the cars by no greater protection than these curtains designed only to shield them from the light and from each other's eyes. He felt no strangeness in this now. He merely assured himself by his scrutiny that within his train all was right. Outside—
Connery was not so sure of that; rather, he had been becoming more certain hour by hour all through the evening, that they were going to have great difficulty in getting the train through. Though he knew by President Jarvis' note that the officials of the road must be watching the progress of this especial train with particular interest, he had received no train-orders from the west for several hours. His inquiry at the last stop had told him the reason for this; the telegraph wires to the west had gone down. To the east, communication was still open, but how long it would remain so he could not guess. Here in the deep heart of the great mountains—they had passed the Idaho boundary-line into Montana—they were getting the full effect of the storm; their progress, increasingly slow, was broken by stops which were becoming more frequent and longer as they struggled on. As now they fought their way slower and slower up a grade, and barely topping it, descended the opposite slope at greater speed as the momentum of the train was added to the engine-power, Connery's mind went back to the second sleeper with its single passenger, and he spoke to the Pullman conductor, who nodded and went toward that car. The weather had prevented the expected increase of their number of passengers at Spokane; only a few had got aboard there; there were worse grades ahead, in climbing which every pound of weight would count; so Connery—in the absence of orders and with Jarvis' note in his pocket—had resolved to drop the second sleeper.
At Fracroft—the station where he was to exchange the ordinary plow which so far had sufficed, and couple on the "rotary" to fight the mountain drifts ahead—he swung himself down from the train, looked in at the telegraph office and then went forward to the two giant locomotives, on whose sweating, monstrous backs the snow, suddenly visible in the haze of their lights, melted as it fell. He waited on the station platform while the second sleeper was cut out and the train made up again. Then, as they started, he swung aboard and in the brightly lighted men's compartment of the first Pullman checked up his report-sheets with a stub of pencil. They had stopped again, he noticed; now they were climbing a grade, more easily because of the decrease of weight; now a trestle rumbled under the wheels, telling him just where they were. Next was the powerful, steady push against opposition—the rotary was cutting its way through a drift.
Again they stopped—once more went on. Connery, having put his papers into his pocket, dozed, awoke, dozed again. The snow was certainly heavy, and the storm had piled it up across the cuts in great drifts which kept the rotary struggling almost constantly now. The progress of the train halted again and again; several times it backed, charged forward again—only to stop, back and charge again and then go on. But this did not disturb Connery. Then something went wrong.
All at once he found himself, by a trainman's instinctive and automatic action, upon his feet; for the shock had been so slight as barely to be felt, far too slight certainly to have awakened any of the sleeping passengers in their berths. He went to the door of the car, lifted the platform stop, threw open the door of the vestibule and hanging by one hand to the rail, swung himself out from the side of the car to look ahead. He saw the forward one of the two locomotives wrapped in clouds of steam, and men arm-deep in snow wallowing forward to the rotary still further to the front, and the sight confirmed fully his apprehension that this halt was more important and likely to last much longer than those that had gone before.