The World Of Chance. William Dean Howells
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" He said, this train doesn't stop till it gets to Jersey City."
The young woman said, " Oh! " and she and the other sat down again, and she stretched across the fretful child which clung to her, and tried to open her window. She could not raise it, and the old man who had answered her question lifted it for her. Then she sank back in her seat, and her sister, if it was her sister, leaned forward, and seemed to whisper to her. She put up her hand and thrust the loosened wisp of her hair back into the knot. To do this she gave the child the pocketbook which she seemed to have been holding, and she did not take it away again. The child stopped fretting, and began to pull at its plaything to get it open; then it made aimless dabs with it at the back of the car seat and at its mother's face. She moved her head patiently from side to side to escape the blows; and the child entered with more zest into the sport, and began to laugh and strike harder. Suddenly, mid-way of the long trestlework, the child turned towards the window and made a dab at the sail of a passing sloop. The pocketbook flew from its hand, and the mother sprang to her feet again with a wail that filled the car.
" Oh, what shall I do! He's thrown my pocketbook out of the window, and it's got every cent of my money in it. Oh, couldn't they stop the train? "
The child began to cry. The passengers all looked out of the windows on that side of the aisle; and Ray could see the pocketbook drifting by in the water. A brakeman whom the young woman's lamentation had called to the rescue, passed through the car with a face of sarcastic compassion, and spoke to the conductor entering from the other end. The conductor shook his head; the train kept moving slowly on. Of course it was impossible and useless to stop. The young women leaned forward and talked anxiously together, as Ray could see from his distant seat; they gave the conductor their tickets, and explained to him what had happened; he only shook his head again.
When he came to get Ray's ticket, the young fellow tried to find out something about them from him.
" Yes, I guess she told the truth. She had all her money, ten dollars and some change, in that pocketbook, and of course she gave it to her baby to play with right by an open window. Just like a woman! They're just about as Jit as babies to handle money. If they had to earn it, they'd be different. Some poor fellow's week's work was in that pocketbook, like as not. They don't look like the sort that would have a great deal of money to throw out of the window, if they were men."
" Do you know where they're going? " Ray asked. " Are they going on any further? "
" Oh, no. They live in New York. 'Way up on the East Side somewhere."
" But how will they get there with those two babies? They can't walk."
The conductor shrugged. "Guess they'll have to try it."
" Look here! " said Ray. He took a dollar note out of his pocket, and gave it to the conductor. " Find out whether they've got any change, and if they haven't, tell them one of the passengers wanted them to take this for car fares. Don't tell them which one."
" All right," said the conductor.
He passed into the next car. When he came back Ray saw him stop and parley with the young women. He went through the whole train again before he stopped for a final word with Ray, who felt that he had entered into the poetry of his intentions towards the women, and had made these delays and detours of purpose. He bent over Ray with a detached and casual air, and said:
" Every cent they had was in that pocket-book. Only wonder is they hadn't their tickets there, too. They didn't want to take the dollar, but I guess they had to. They live 'way up on Third Avenue about Hundred and First Street; and the one that gave her baby her money to hold looks all played out. They couldn't have walked it. I told 'em the dollar was from a lady passenger. Seemed as if it would make it kind of easier for 'em."
" Yes, that was right," said Ray.
III.
When they stopped in Jersey City, Kay made haste out of the car to see what became of his beneficiaries, and he followed closely after them, and got near them on the ferry-boat They went forward out of the cabin and stood among the people at the bow who were eager to get ashore first They each held her heavy baby, and silently watched the New York shore, and scarcely spoke.
Ray looked at it too, with a sense of the beauty struggling through the grotesqueness of the huge panorama, and evoking itself somehow from the grossest details. The ferry-boats coming and going; the great barges with freight trains in sections on them; the canal-boats in tow of the river steamers; the shabby sloops slouching by with their sails half-filled by the flagging breeze; the ships lying at anchor in the stream, and wooding the shore with their masts, which the coastwise steamboats stared out of like fantastic villas, all window-shutters and wheel-houses; the mean, ugly fronts and roofs of the buildings beyond, and hulking high overhead in the further distance in vast bulks and clumsy towers, the masses of those ten-storied edifices which are the necessity of commerce and the despair of art, all helped to compose the brutal and stupid body of the thing, whose soul was collectively expressed in an incredible picturesqueness. -Ray saw nothing amiss in it. This agglomeration of warring forms, feebly typifying the ugliness of the warring interests within them, did not repulse him. He was not afraid. He took a new grip of the travelling-bag where he had his manuscript, so that he should not be parted from it for a moment till it went into some publisher's keeping. He would not trust it to the trunk which he had checked at Midland, and which he now recognized among the baggage piled on a truck near him. He fingered the outside of his bag to make sure by feeling its shape that his manuscript was all right within. All the time he was aware of those two young women, each with her baby in her arms, which they amused with various devices, telling them to look at the water, the craft going by, and the horses in the wagon-way of the ferry-boat The children fretted, and pulled the women's hair, and clawed their hats; and the passengers now and then looked censoriously at them. From time to time the young women spoke to each other spiritlessly. The one whose child had thrown her pocketbook away never lost a look of hopeless gloom, as she swayed her body half round and back, to give some diversion to the baby. Both were pretty, but she had the paleness and thinness of young motherhood; the other, though she was thin too, had the fresh color and firm texture of a young girl; she was at once less tragic and more serious than her sister, if it was her sister.
When she found Ray gazing fixedly at her, she turned discreetly away, after a glance that no doubt took in the facts of his neat, slight, rather undersized person; his regular face, with its dark eyes and marked brows; his straight fine nose and pleasant mouth; his sprouting black moustache, and his brown tint, flecked with a few browner freckles.
He was one of those men who have no vanity concerning their persons; he knew he was rather handsome, but he did not care; his mind was on other things. When he found those soft woman-eyes lingering a moment on him he had the wish to please their owner, of course, but he did not think of his looks, or the effect they might have with her. He fancied knowing her well enough to repeat poetry to her, or of reading some favorite author aloud with her, and making her sympathize in his admiration of the book. He permitted his fancy this liberty because, although he supposed her married, his fancy safely operated their intellectual intimacy in a region as remote from experience as the dreamland of sleep. She and her sister had both a sort of refinement; they were ladies, he felt, although they were poorly dressed, and they somehow did not seem as if they had ever been richly dressed. They had not the New Yorkeress air; they had nothing of the stylishness which Ray saw in the other women about him, shabby or splendid; their hats looked as if they had been trimmed at home, and their simple gowns as if their wearers had invented and made them up themselves, after no decided fashion, but after a taste of their own, which he thought good. He began to make phrases about them to himself, and he said there was something pathetically idyllic about them. The phrase was indefinite, but it was sufficiently clear for his purpose. The baby which had thrown away the pocket-book began to express its final dissatisfaction with the prospect, and its mother turned distractedly about for some new diversion, when there came from the ladies' cabin a soft whistle, like the warbling of a bird, low and rich and full, which possessed itself of the sense