CHAPTER XXV
THE TRAIN WRECKER
The train-butcher, entering the Observation Room, found only a lovingcouple. He took in at a glance their desire for solitude. A large partof his business was the forcing of wares on people who did not wantthem.
His voice and his method suggested the mosquito. Seeing Mallory andMarjorie mutually absorbed in reading each other's eyes, and evidentlyin need of nothing on earth less than something else to read, thetrain-butcher decided that his best plan of attack was to make himselfa nuisance. It is a plan successfully adopted by organ-grinders,street pianists and other blackmailers under the guise of art, whohave nothing so welcome to sell as their absence.
Mallory and Marjorie heard the train-boy's hum, but they tried toignore it.
"Papers, gents and ladies? Yes? No? Paris fashions, lady?"
He shoved a large periodical between their very noses, but Marjoriethrew it on the floor, with a bitter glance at her own borrowedplumage:
"Don't show me any Paris fashions!" Then she gave the boy his conge byresuming her chat with Mallory: "How long do we stop at Ogden?"
The train-boy went right on auctioning his papers and magazines, andpoking them into the laps of his prey. And they went right on talkingto one another and pushing his papers and magazines to the floor.
"I think I'd better get off at Ogden, and take the next train back.That's just what I'll do. Nothing, thank you!" this last to thetrain-boy.
"But you can't leave me like this," Mallory urged excitedly, with aside glance of "No, no!" to the train-boy.
"I can, and I must, and I will," Marjorie insisted. "I'll go pack mythings now."
"But, Marjorie, listen to me."
"Will you let me alone!" This to the gadfly, but to Mallory a dejectedwail: "I--I just remembered. I haven't anything to pack."
"And you'll have to give back that waist to Mrs. Temple. You can't getoff at Ogden without a waist."
"I'll go anyway. I want to get home."
"Marjorie, if you talk that way--I'll throw you off the train!"
She gasped. He explained: "I wasn't talking to you; I was trying tostop this phonograph." Then he rose, and laid violent hands on theannoyer, shoved him to the corridor, seized his bundle of papers fromhis arm, and hurled them at his head. They fell in a shower about thetrain-butcher, who could only feel a certain respect for the one manwho had ever treated him as he knew he deserved. He bent to pick uphis scattered merchandise, and when he had gathered his stocktogether, put his head in, and sang out a sincere:
"Excuse me."
But Mallory did not hear him, he was excitedly trying to calm theexcited girl, who, having eloped with him, was preparing now to elopeback without him.
"Darling, you can't desert me now," he pleaded, "and leave me to go onalone?"
"Well, why don't you do something?" she retorted, in equaldesperation. "If I were a man, and I had the girl I loved on a train,I'd get her married if I had to wreck the----" she caught her breath,paused a second in intense thought, and then, with sudden radiance,cried: "Harry, dear!"
"Yes, love!"
"I have an idea--an inspiration!"
"Yes, pet," rather dubiously from him, but with absolute exultationfrom her: "Let's wreck the train!"
"I don't follow you, sweetheart."
"Don't you see?" she began excitedly. "When there are train wrecks alot of people get killed, and things. A minister always turns up toadminister the last something or other--well----"
"Well?"
"Well, stupid, don't you see? We wreck a train, a minister comes, wenab him, he marries us, and--there we are! Everything's lovely!"
He gave her one of those looks with which a man usually greets what awoman calls an inspiration. He did not honor her invention withanalysis. He simply put forward an objection to it, and, man-like,chose the most hateful of all objections:
"It's a lovely idea, but the wreck would delay us for hours and hours,and I'd miss my transport----"
"Harry Mallory, if you mention that odious transport to me again, Iknow I'll have hydrophobia. I'm going home."
"But, darling," he pleaded, "you can't desert me now, and leave me togo on alone?" She had her answer glib:
"If you really loved me, you'd----"
"Oh, I know," he cut in. "You've said that before. But I'd becourt-martialled. I'd lose my career."
"What's a career to a man who truly loves?"
"It's just as much as it is to anybody else--and more."
She could hardly controvert this gracefully, so she sank back withgrim resignation. "Well, I've proposed my plan, and you don't likeit. Now, suppose you propose something."
The silence was oppressive. They sat like stoughton bottles. There theconductor found them some time later. He gave them a careless look,selected a chair at the end of the car, and began to sort his tickets,spreading them out on another chair, making notes with the pencil hetook from atop his ear, and shoved back from time to time.
Ages seemed to pass, and Mallory had not even a suggestion. By thistime Marjorie's temper had evaporated, and when he said: "If we couldonly stop at some town for half an hour," she said: "Maybe theconductor would hold the train for us."
"I hardly think he would."
"He looks like an awfully nice man. You ask him."
"Oh, what's the use?"
Marjorie was getting tired of depending on this charming young manwith the very bad luck. She decided to assume command herself. Shetook recourse naturally to the original feminine methods: "I'll takecare of him," she said, with resolution. "A woman can get a man to doalmost anything if she flirts a little with him."
"Marjorie!"
"Now, don't you mind anything I do. Remember, it's all for love ofyou--even if I have to kiss him."
"Marjorie, I won't permit----"
"You have no right to boss me--yet. You subside." She gave him themerest touch, but he fell backward into a chair, utterly aghast at theshameless siren into which desperation had altered the timid littlething he thought he had chosen to love. He was being rapidly initiatedinto the complex and versatile and fearfully wonderful thing a womanreally is, and he was saying to himself, "What have I married?"forgetting, for the moment, that he had not married her yet, and thattherein lay the whole trouble.
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