He looked freezingly upon the abashed landscape, which fled in shame; nor was that wintry stare relaxed when the steward placed someone opposite him at the little table. Nay, our frosty scholar now intensified the bleakness of his isolation, retiring quite to the pole in reproval of this too close intrusion. He resolutely denied the existence of his vis-à-vis, refused consciousness of its humanity, even of its sex, and then inconsistently began to perspire with the horrible impression that it was glaring at him fixedly. It was a dreadful feeling. He felt himself growing red, and coughed vehemently to afford the public an explanation of his change of colour. At last, his suffering grown unendurable, he desperately turned his eyes full upon the newcomer. She was not looking at him at all, but down at the edge of the white cloth on her own side of the table; and she was the very prettiest girl he had ever seen in his life.
She was about his own age. Her prettiness was definitely extreme, and its fair delicacy was complete and without any imperfection whatever. She was dressed in pleasant shades of tan and brown. A brown veil misted the rim of her hat, tan gloves were folded back from her wrists; and they, and all she wore, were fresh and trim and ungrimed by the dusty journey. She was charming. Henry Millick Chester’s first gasping appraisal of her was perfectly accurate, for she was a peach — or a rose, or anything that is dewy and fresh and delectable. She was indeed some smooth. She was the smoothest thing in the world, and the world knows it!
She looked up.
Henry Millick Chester was lost.
At the same instant that the gone feeling came over him she dropped her eyes again to the edge of the table. Who can tell if she knew what she had done?
The conversation began with appalling formalities, which preluded the most convenient placing of a sugar bowl and the replenishing of an exhausted salt cellar. Then the weather, spumed as the placative offering of the gentle waiter, fell from the lips of the princess in words of diamonds and rubies and pearls. Our Henry took up the weather where she left it; he put it to its utmost; he went forward with it, prophesying weather; he went backward with it, recalling weather; he spun it out and out, while she agreed to all he said, until this overworked weather got so stringy that each obscurely felt it to be hideous. The thread broke; fragments wandered in the air for a few moments, but disappeared; a desperate propriety descended, and they fell into silence over their eggs.
Frantically Mr. Chester searched his mind for some means to pursue the celestial encounter. According to the rules, something ought to happen that would reveal her as Patricia Beekman, the sister of his roommate, Schuyler Beekman, and to-night he should be handing the imperturbable Dawkins a wire to send:— “My dear Schuyler, I married your sister this afternoon.” But it seemed unlikely, because his roommate’s name was Jake Schmulze, and Jake lived in Cedar Rapids; and, besides, this train wasn’t coming from or going to Palm Beach — it was going to St. Louis eventually, and now hustled earnestly across the placid and largely unbutlered plains of Ohio.
Often — as everyone knows — people have been lost to each other forever through the lack of a word, and few have realized this more poignantly than our Henry, as he helplessly suffered the precious minutes to accumulate vacancy. True, he had thought of something to say, yet he abandoned it. Probably he was wiser to wait, as what he thought of saying was:— “Will you be my wife?”
It might seem premature, he feared.
The strain was relieved by a heavenly accident which saved the life of a romance near perishing at birth. That charming girl, relaxing slightly in her chair, made some small, indefinite, and entirely ladylike movement of restfulness that reached its gentle culmination upon the two feet of Mr. Chester which, obviously mistaken for structural adjuncts of the table, were thereby glorified and became beautiful on the mountains. He was not the man to criticise the remarkable ignorance of dining-car table architecture thus displayed, nor did he in any wise resent being mistaken up to the ankles for metal or wood. No. The light pressure of her small heels hardly indented the stout toes of his brown shoes; the soles of her slippers reposed upon his two insteps, and rapture shook his soul to its foundations, while the ineffable girl gazed lustrously out of the window, the clear serenity of her brilliant eyes making plain her complete unconsciousness of the nature of what added to her new comfort.
A terrific blush sizzled all over him, and to conceal its visible area he bent low to his coffee. She was unaware. He was transported, she — to his eyes — transfigured. Glamour diffused itself about her, sprayed about them both like showers of impalpable gold-dust, and filled the humble dining car — it filled the whole world. Transformed, seraphic waiters passed up and down the aisle in a sort of obscure radiance. A nimbus hovered faintly above the brown veil; a sacred luminosity was exhaled by the very tablecloth, where an angel’s pointed fingers drummed absently.
It would be uncharitable to believe that a spirit of retaliation inspired the elderly and now replete man across the aisle, and yet, when he rose, he fell upon the neck of Henry as Henry had fallen upon his, and the shock of it jarred four shoes from the acute neighbourliness of their juxtaposition. The accursed graybeard, giggling in his senility, passed on; but that angel leaped backward in her chair while her beautiful eyes, wide open, stunned, her beautiful mouth, wide open, incredulous, gave proof that horror can look bewitching.
“Murder!” she gasped. “Were those your feet?”
And as he could compass no articulate reply, she grew as pink as he, murmured inaudibly, and stared at him in wider and wilder amazement.
“It — it didn’t hurt,” he finally managed to stammer.
At this she covered her blushes with her two hands and began to gurgle and shake with laughter. She laughed and laughed and laughed. It became a paroxysm. He laughed, too, because she laughed. Other passengers looked at them and laughed. The waiters laughed; they approved — coloured waiters always approve of laughter — and a merry spirit went abroad in the car.
At last she controlled herself long enough to ask:
“But what did you think of me?”
“It — it didn’t hurt,” he repeated idiotically, to his own mortification, for he passionately aspired to say something airy and winsome; but, as he couldn’t think of anything like that, he had to let it go. “Oh, not at all,” he added feebly.
However, “though not so deep as a well,” it served, ’twas enough, for she began to laugh again, and there loomed no further barrier in the way of acquaintance. Therefore it was pleasantly without constraint, and indeed as a matter of course, that he dropped into a chair beside her half an hour later, in the observation car; and something in the way she let the Illustrated London News slide into the vacant chair on the other side of her might have suggested that she expected him.
“I was still wondering what you must have thought of me.”
This gave him an opportunity, because he had thought out a belated reply for the first time she had said it. Hence, quick as a flash, he made the dashing rejoinder:
“It wasn’t so much what I thought of you, but what I thought of myself — I thought I was in heaven!”
She must have known what pretty sounds her laughter made. She laughed a great deal. She even had a way of laughing in the middle of some of her words, and it gave them a kind of ripple. There are girls who naturally laugh like that; others learn to; a few won’t, and some can’t. It isn’t fair to the ones that can’t.
“But you oughtn’t to tell me that,” she said.
It was in the middle of “oughtn’t” that she rippled. A pen cannot express it, neither can a typewriter, and no one has yet invented a way of writing with a flute; but the effect on Henry shows what a wonderful ripple it was. Henry trembled. From this moment she had only to ripple to make Henry tremble. Henry was more in love than he had been at breakfast. Henry was a Goner.
“Why oughtn’t I to?” he demanded with white intensity. “If anything’s true it’s right to tell it, isn’t it? I believe that everybody has a ri
ght to tell the truth, don’t you?”
“Ye-es—”
“You take the case of a man that’s in love,” said this rather precipitate gentleman; “isn’t it right for him to—”
“But suppose,” she interrupted, becoming instantly serious with the introduction of the great topic— “Suppose he isn’t really in love. Don’t you think there are very few cases of people truly and deeply caring for each other?”
“There are men,” he said firmly, “who know how to love truly and deeply, and could never in their lives care for anybody but the one woman they have picked out. I don’t say all men feel that way; I don’t think they do. But there are a few that are capable of it.” The seats in an observation car are usually near neighbours, and it happened that the brown cuff of a tan sleeve, extended reposefully on the arm of her chair, just touched the back of his hand, which rested on the arm of his. This ethereally light contact continued. She had no apparent cognizance of it, but a vibrant thrill passed through him, and possibly quite a hearty little fire might have been built under him without his perceiving good cause for moving. He shook, gulped, and added:— “I am!”
“But how could you be sure of that,” she said thoughtfully, “until you tried?” And as he seemed about to answer, perhaps too impulsively, she checked him with a smiling, “At your age!”
“You don’t know how old I am. I’m older than you!”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-one next March.”
“What day?”
“The seventh.”
“That is singular!”
“Why?”
“Because,” she began in a low tone and with full recognition of the solemn import of the revelation— “Because my birthday is only one day after yours. I was twenty years old the eighth of last March.”
“By George!” The exclamation came from him, husky with awe.
There was a fateful silence.
“Yes, I was born on the eighth,” she said slowly.
“And me on the seventh!” At such a time no man is a purist.
“It is strange,” she said.
“Strange! I came into the world just one day before you did!”
They looked at each other curiously, deeply stirred. Coincidence could not account for these birthdays of theirs, nor chance for their meeting on a train “like this.” Henry Millick Chester was breathless. The mysteries were glimpsed. No doubt was possible — he and the wondrous creature at his side were meant for each other, intended from the beginning of eternity.
She dropped her eyes slowly from his, but he was satisfied that she had felt the marvel precisely as he had felt it.
“Don’t you think,” she said gently, “that a girl has seen more of the world at twenty than a man?”
Mr. Chester well wished to linger upon the subject of birthdays; however, the line of original research suggested by her question was alluring also. “Yes — and no,” he answered with admirable impartiality. “In some ways, yes. In some ways, no. For instance, you take the case of a man that’s in love—”
“Well,” interrupted the lady, “I think, for instance, that a girl understands men better at twenty than men do women.”
“It may be,” he admitted, nodding. “I like to think about the deeper things like this sometimes.”
“So do I. I think they’re interesting,” she said with that perfect sympathy of understanding which he believed she was destined to extend to him always and in all things. “Life itself is interesting. Don’t you think so?”
“I think it’s the most interesting subject there can be. Real life, that is, though — not just on the surface. Now, for instance, you take the case of a man that’s in—”
“Do you go in much for reading?” she asked.
“Sure. But as I was saying, you take—”
“I think reading gives us so many ideas, don’t you?”
“Yes. I get a lot out of it. I — —”
“I do, too. I try to read only the best things,” she said. “I don’t believe in reading everything, and there’s so much to read nowadays that isn’t really good.”
“Who do you think,” he inquired with deference, “is the best author now?”
It was not a question to be settled quite offhand; she delayed her answer slightly, then, with a gravity appropriate to the literary occasion, temporized: “Well, since Victor Hugo is dead, it’s hard to say just who is the best.”
“Yes, it is,” he agreed. “We get that in the English course in college. There aren’t any great authors any more. I expect probably Swinburne’s the best.”
She hesitated. “Perhaps; but more as a poet.”
He assented. “Yes, that’s so. I expect he would be classed more as a poet. Come to think of it, I believe he’s dead, too. I’m not sure, though; maybe it was Beerbohm Tree — somebody like that. I’ve forgotten; but, anyway, it doesn’t matter. I didn’t mean poetry; I meant who do you think writes the best books? Mrs. Humphry Ward?”
“Yes, she’s good, and so’s Henry James.”
‘I’ve never read anything by Henry James. I guess I’ll read some of his this summer. What’s the best one to begin on?”
The exquisite pink of her cheeks extended its area almost imperceptibly. “Oh, any one. They’re all pretty good. Do you care for Nature?”
“Sure thing,” he returned quickly. “Do you?”
“I love it!”
“So do I. I can’t do much for mathematics, though.”
“Br-r!” She shivered prettily. “I hate it!”
“So do I. I can’t give astronomy a whole lot, cither.”
She turned a softly reproachful inquiry upon him. “Oh, don’t you love to look at the stars?”
In horror lest the entrancing being think him a brute, he responded with breathless haste:— “Oh, rath-er-r! To look at ’em, sure thing! I meant astronomy in college; that’s mostly math, you know — just figures. But stars to look at — of course that’s different. Why, I look up at ’em for hours sometimes!” He believed what he was saying. “I look up at ’em, and think and think and think—”
“So do I.” Her voice was low and hushed; there was something almost holy in the sound of it, and a delicate glow suffused her lovely, upraised face — like that picture of Saint Cecilia, he thought. “Oh, I love the stars! And music — and flowers—”
“And birds,” he added automatically in a tone that, could it by some miracle have been heard at home, would have laid his nine-year-old brother flat on the floor in a might-be mortal swoon.
A sweet warmth centred in the upper part of his diaphragm and softly filtered throughout him. The delicious future held no doubts or shadows for him. It was assured. He and this perfect woman had absolutely identical tastes; their abhorrences and their enthusiasms marched together; they would never know a difference in all their lives to come. Destiny unrolled before him a shining pathway which they two would walk hand-in-hand through the summer days to a calm and serene autumn, respected and admired by the world, but finding ever their greatest and most sacred joy in the light of each other’s eyes — that light none other than the other could evoke.
Could it be possible, he wondered, that he was the same callow boy who but yesterday pranced and exulted in the, “pee-rade” of the new juniors! How absurd and purposeless that old life seemed; how far away, how futile, and how childish! Well, it was over, finished. By this time to-morrow he would have begun his business career.
Back in the old life, he had expected to go through a law school after graduating from college, subsequently to enter his father’s office. That meant five years before even beginning to practice, an idea merely laughable now. There was a men’s furnishing store on a popular corner at home; it was an establishment which had always attracted him, and what pleasanter way to plow the road to success than through acres of variously woven fabrics, richly coloured silks, delicate linens, silver mountings and odorous leathers, in congenial association with necktie
s, walking-sticks, hosiery, and stickpins? He would be at home a few hours hence, and he would not delay. After lunch he would go boldly to his father and say:— “Father, I have reached man’s estate and I have put away childish things. I have made up my mind upon a certain matter and you will only waste time by any effort to alter this, my firm determination. Father, I here and now relinquish all legal ambitions, for the reason that a mercantile career is more suited to my inclinations and my abilities. Father, I have met the one and only woman I can ever care for, and I intend to make her my wife. Father, you have always dealt squarely with me; I will deal squarely with you. I ask you the simple question: Will you or will you not advance me the funds to purchase an interest in Paul H. Hoy & Company’s Men’s Outfitting Establishment? If you will not, then I shall seek help elsewhere.”
Waking dreams are as swift, sometimes, as the other kind — which, we hear, thread mazes so labyrinthine “between the opening and the closing of a door”; and a twenty-year-old fancy, fermenting in the inclosure of a six-and-seven-eighth plaid cap, effervesces with a power of sizzling and sparkling and popping.
“I believe I love music best of all,” said the girl dreamily.
Collected Works of Booth Tarkington Page 519