The Torrents of Spring (1987)/Part 1/Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
Where was Scripps now? Walking in the night in the storm, he had become confused. He had started Chicago after that dreadful night when he had found his home was a home no longer. Why had Lucy left? What had become of Lousy? He, Scripps, did not know. Not that he cared. That was all behind him. There was none of that now. He was standing knee-deep in snow in front of a railway station. On the railway station was written in big letters:
PETOSKEY
There were a pile of deer shipped down by hunters from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, lying piled the one on the other, dead and stiff and drifted half over with snow on the station platform. Scripps read the sign again. Could this be Petoskey?
A man was inside the station, tapping something back of a wicketed window. He looked out at Scripps. Could he be a telegrapher? Something told Scripps that he was.
He stepped out of the snow-drift and approached the window. Behind the window the man worked busily away at his telegrapher's key.
"Are you a telegrapher?" asked Scripps.
"Yes, sir," said the man. "I'm a telegrapher."
"How wonderful!"
The telegrapher eyed him suspiciously. After all, what was this man to him?
"Is it hard to be a telegrapher?" Scripps asked. He wanted to ask the man outright if this was Petoskey. He did not know this great northern section of America, though, and he wished to be polite.
The telegrapher looked at him curiously.
"Say," he asked, "are you a fairy?"
"No," Scripps said. "I don't know what being a fairy means."
"Well," said the telegrapher, "what do you carry a bird around for?"
"Bird?" asked Scripps. "What bird?"
"That bird that's sticking out of your shirt." Scripps was at a loss. What sort of chap was this telegrapher? What sort of men went in for telegraphy? Were they like composers? Were they like artists? Were they like writers? Were they like the advertising men who write the ads in our national weeklies? Or were they like Europeans, drawn and wasted by the war, their best years behind them? Could he tell this telegrapher the whole story? Would he understand?
"I started home," he began. "I passed the Mancelona High School—"
"I knew a girl in Mancelona," the telegrapher said. "Maybe you knew her. Ethel Enright."
It was no good going on. He would cut the story sort. He would give the bare essentials. Besides, it was beastly cold. It was cold standing there on the wind-swept station platform. Something told him it was useless to go on. He looked over at the deer lying there in a pile, stiff and cold. Perhaps they, too, had been lovers. Some were bucks and some were does. The bucks had horns. That was how you could tell. With cats it is more difficult. In France they geld the cats and do not geld the horses. France was a long way off.
"My wife left me," Scripps said abruptly.
"I don't wonder if you go around with a damn bird sticking out of your shirt," the telegrapher said.
"What town is this?" Scripps asked. The single moment of spiritual communion they had had, had been dissipated. They had never really had it. But they might have. It was no use now. It was no use trying to capture what had gone. What had fled.
"Petoskey," the telegrapher replied.
"Thank you," Scripps said. He turned and walked into the silent, deserted Northern town. Luckily, he had four hundred and fifty dollars in his pocket. He had sold a story to George Horace Lorimer just before he had started out with his old woman on that drinking trip. Why had he gone at all? What was it all about, anyway?
Coming toward him down the street came two Indians. They looked at him, but their faces did not change. Their faces remained the same. They went into McCarthy's barber shop.