Читать книгу The Professor's Mystery - Hastings Wells - Страница 4

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"Has the two-forty-five for Boston gone yet?"

The train announcer looked at me a long time; then he shifted his plug of tobacco to the other cheek and drawled:

"Naouw. Reported forty minutes late."

At this point I believe I swore. At least I have no recollection of not doing so, and I should hardly have forgotten so eminent an act of virtue under such difficult circumstances. It was not only that I had worked myself into a heat for nothing. But the train could hardly fail of losing yet more time on its way to Boston, and my chances of making the steamer were about one in three. My trunk would go to Liverpool without me, a prey to the inquisitive alien; and as for me I was at the mercy of the steamship company. For a moment I wondered how I could possibly have doubted my desire to go abroad that summer and to go on that boat though the heavens fell. I thought insanely of automobiles and special trains. Then came the reaction and I settled back comfortably hopeless into the hands of fate. After all I did not care an improper fraction whether I stayed or went: let the gods decide. Only I wished something would happen. The shining rails reached away to lose themselves in a haze of heat. Somewhere a switching engine was puffing like a tired dog. Knots of listless humanity stood about under the dingy roof of the platform; and the wind across the harbor brought a refreshing aroma of tidal mud and dead clams. It occurred to me that my collar was rather sticky on the inside.

I walked the platform fanning myself with my hat. I bought cigarettes, magazines and a shine. I explored the station, scrutinizing faces and searching vainly for matters of interest. I exhausted my resources in filling up fifteen minutes, and the hand of the electric clock seemed as tremulous with indecision as it had before been jerky with haste. Nothing happened. Nothing would happen or could happen anywhere. Romance was dead.

Feet scraped; a bell chattered; then breathing flame and smoke, and with a shriek that would have put Saint George to utter rout, the down express rumbled between me and the sky, and ground heavily to a standstill. And there, framed in the wide Pullman window, was a face that altered all the colors of the day, and sent me back among sleigh-bells and holly. Not that I had known her well; but the week of intimate gaiety at a Christmas house party had shown her so sweetly merry, so well fashioned in heart and brain and body that the sight of her renewed pleasant memories, like the reopening of a familiar book. She was smiling now; not at me, but with the same humorously pensive little smile that I remembered, that seemed to come wholly from within and to summarize her outlook upon the world. Her dark brows were lifted in cool and friendly interest as she glanced over the comfortless crowd; and although I was now somewhat more at peace with the world, and no longer hot nor hurried, she seemed to me to sit there in the window of her sweltering car a thing aloof and apart, the embodiment of all unruffled daintiness.

Her eyes found me and she nodded, smiling. I went forward eagerly. Here, at least, in a stuffy and uninteresting world was somebody cool, somebody amusing, somebody I knew. I picked up my bag and ran up the steps of her car. As I came down the aisle she half rose and stretched out a welcoming slim hand. I dropped into the chair beside her.

"Well, this is luck," I said. "But what are you doing here in the world in July? You belong to Christmas in a setting of frosty white and green. You're out of season now."

She laughed. "Surely I have as much right in July as you have, Mr. Crosby. You are only a sort of yule-tide phantom yourself."

"Wasn't it a jolly week?" I asked.

Miss Tabor's smile answered me. Then turning half away with a face grown suddenly and strangely bleak: "I think it was the best Christmas of my life," she said mechanically. And then with a sudden return to sunshine: "I suppose I see the professor starting on his learned pilgrimage. Is it Europe this summer, or the great libraries of America?"

She had twitted me before upon my lack of scholarly bearing which, as I had always explained, was but a mask to unsuspected profundity.

"Well,"—I began, deliberately groping for a decision among the tangled fates of the afternoon, my doubtful steamer and my grudging plans, "to tell you the truth, Miss Tabor—"

She touched my arm and pointed out of the window. "Look," she said, "you haven't nearly time enough for that now. Do hurry—you mustn't take chances."

The platform was slipping by faster and faster, and with it sobriety and common sense and the wisdom of the beaten path. On the other hand lay the comedy of the present and that flouting of one's own arrangements which is the last word of freedom. I glanced down at her ticket, where it lay face upward on the window-sill.

"To tell you the truth, Miss Tabor," I finished, "I am on my way to Stamford," and I settled back comfortably into my seat.

Miss Tabor regarded me tolerantly, with the air of a collector examining a doubtful specimen: one eyebrow a trifle raised, and an adorable twist at the corners of her mouth. As for me, I tried to look innocently unconcerned. It may be possible to do this; but no one is ever conscious of success at the time.

"I'm going there myself," she said suddenly. "Isn't this a coincidence?"

"Easily that. Let me amend the word and call it a dispensation. But appearances are against you. You ought to be going to a lawn party—in a dog-cart."

"I wonder where you ought to be going," she mused. "Probably to the British museum to dig up a lot of dead authors that everybody ought to know about and nobody reads."

This was altogether too near the truth. "I didn't know you lived in Stamford," I said. "You appeared last Christmas in a character of the daughter of Gotham. Wasn't there an ancestor of yours who went to sea in a bowl?"

Her smile faded as if a light had gone out in her. After a pause she answered rather wearily, "We've only been in Stamford a few months. We had always lived in town before."

We looked out of the window for a few moments in silence, while I formulated a hasty hypothesis of financial reverses which had driven the family from their city home, and registered a resolution to avoid the uncomfortable subject. Still, I reflected, the lower shore of the Sound is not precisely the resort of impoverished pride. Had I touched upon some personal sorrow of her own? She was not in mourning. Yet as she lay back in the green chair, one hand listless in her lap, the other twisting at the slender chain that ran about her neck and lost itself in the bosom of her gown, the fringe of her eyelid clear against the soft shadows of her profile, I imagined in her something of the enchanted princess bound by evil spells in some dark castle of despair. And immediately, with a surge of absurd valor, I saw myself striding, sword in hand, across the drawbridge to blow the brazen horn and do battle with the enchanter. The next moment she routed my imagination by returning lightly to the subject.

"It's a lovely place. I'm out of doors the whole time, and I'm so well I get positively bored trying to work off energy. I can't get tired enough to sit still and improve my uneducated mind. Ever so many nice people, too. By the way, whom do you know there?"

I was on the defensive again. "Why—I don't know anybody exactly there—but there are some friends of mine down at one of those beach-places in the neighborhood—the Ainslies. Bob was in my class."

She resumed the air of the connoisseur. "Why, I know them. I'm going to visit Mrs. Ainslie myself over the week-end. Do they know you're coming?"

"I'm not going to them," I said desperately. "That is, I may while I'm near by, but I haven't any definite plans. For once in my life I'm not going to have any definite plans, but just start out and see what happens to me. For six months I've been telling things I care about to a lot of kids that aren't old enough to care about anything; and now I want adventures. I went down to the station to take the first train that came along, go wherever it took me and let things happen."

"You might have gone to some romantic place," she suggested. "Three months would hardly be time enough for the Far East, but you might have tried Russia or the Mediterranean."

"That's just the point," I returned. "Romance and adventure don't depend on time; they only depend on people. If you're the kind of person things happen to you can have adventures on Fifth Avenue. If you're not, you might walk through all the Arabian Nights and only feel bored and uncomfortable. It all depends upon turning out of your way to pick up surprises. You're walking in the wood and you see something that looks like a root peeping out from between the rocks. Well, if you're the right kind of person you'll catch hold of it and pull. It may be only a root; or it may be the tail of a dragon. And in that case you ought to thank Heaven for excitement, even if you're scared to death."

By this time I almost believed in my own explanation. But Miss Tabor did not seem particularly impressed.

She put on the voice and manner of a child of ten. "You must be awfully brave to like being afraid of things," she lisped; then with a sudden change of tone, "Mr. Crosby, suppose—only for the sake of argument—that you're making this up as you go along and that you did know perfectly well where you were going, where do you think you would have gone?"

Then I gave up and explained, "I was going to Europe to study," I said, "for no better reason than that I had nothing more interesting to do. Then my train was late and I should have missed my steamer anyway and—and then you came along and I thought I might just as well make the most of the situation. Now I can go down and tell the Ainslies they want to see me and all will be well."

After some meditating she said, "Are you as irresponsible as that about everything?"

"I don't see where all the irresponsibility comes in," I protested. "It isn't a sacred and solemn duty to follow out one's own plans, especially when they were only made to fill up the want of anything more worth while, and have fallen through already. I didn't care about going to Europe in the first place; then I couldn't—at least not at once; then I found something else that I did care about doing."

"Men," said Miss Tabor, "usually find a logical reason for what they do on impulse, without any reason at all."

"And the proof that women always act reasonably," I retorted, "is that they never give you the reason."

Instead of taking that for the flippancy it was, she thought about it for some minutes; or else it reminded her of something.

"Besides," I went on, "this is an adventure, as far as it goes; a little one, if you like, but still with all the earmarks of romance. It was unexpected, and it fits into itself perfectly—all the parts of the scene match like a picture-puzzle—and it happened through a mixture of chance and the taking of chances. It's just that snatching at casual excitement that makes things happen to people."

"Don't things enough happen to people without their seeking them out?" she asked.

"Not to most people; and not nowadays, if they ever did. Do you remember Humpty Dumpty's objection to Alice's face, that it was just like other faces—two eyes above, nose in the middle, mouth under? Well, that's the only objection I have to life; days and doings are too regular, too much according to schedule. Why is a train less romantic than a stage-coach? Because it runs on time and on a track; it can't do anything but be late. But the stage-coach dallies along through the countryside, with inns and highwaymen, and pretty girls driving geese to market, and all the chances of the open road. The horse of the knight-errant was better still, and for the same reason."

"I don't think anything very much has ever happened to you," she said slowly.

"Well," said I, "I'm not pretending to be Ulysses; and you've reminded me of my tender age so often that I can hardly forget it in your presence. But I have had a few exciting moments, and I want more. I don't care whether they are pleasant or not, so long as I come safe out of them somehow. They'll pay for themselves with the gold of memory."

"That's just what I mean," she returned. "You talk about things as if the only question of importance were whether they are exciting. One looks at books that way, and pictures, and things that are not real. A moment ago, you put highwaymen in the same class with inns and goose-girls. Do you suppose any one that was actually held up and robbed of his fortune would think of the robber as merely a pleasant thrill?"

"I'd rather be robbed by a highwayman than by a railroad, anyway. At the worst, I'd have had a run for my money."

She went on without smiling: "And even trains run off the track sometimes. Do you think you would enjoy the memory of a railroad accident—even if you weren't hurt yourself?"

"Perhaps not. But there's another disadvantage of the train. It's so regular and mechanical that if anything does go wrong there is an ugly smash. It's the same way with modern people. Most of us live such an ordinary habitual life that if we get thrown off the track we're likely to break up altogether."

I had struck the wrong note again. The light went out in her face, as a cloud-shadow darkens a sunny field, and she looked away without answering. Not to make my mistake worse by taking notice of it, I said, "After all, what should we do if things always went smoothly and there weren't any adventures?"

She said quietly, "We might be normal and wholesome and comfortable," and continued looking out of the window and toying with her chain, while I cursed myself for a tactless clodhopper without the sense to avoid a danger sign. Then I found myself wondering what this trouble could be that by the mere touch of an accidental allusion could strike the joy out of a creature so naturally radiant. Whatever it was, it had come upon her within the last six months, or the chances of our Christmas week had been singularly free from reminders of it. Could there be possibly any connection between it and that chain with its hidden pendant? Or was it only by accident that her hand went to it in her moments of brooding? I seemed to have noticed the chain before, and her habit of playing with it in idleness, but I could not be sure.

She roused herself presently, and the talk went on, though with an undercurrent of discomfort. For my part, I was still repenting my clumsiness; and she, I suppose, felt annoyed at having shown so palpably an emotion which she had not intended for my eyes. So that, in spite of regret for the approaching end of the adventure, I was hardly sorry when our arrival at Stamford supplemented speech with action.

"Are you expecting any one to meet you?" I asked, as the platform emptied and left us standing alone.

"No, they didn't know what train I was coming on. But there's the trolley now. And it's your car, too, that is, if you're still going to the Ainslies'."

A short open car, with an air of putting its wheels close together in order to buck, squeaked around the curve and took us aboard. When we were well under way a short, heavy man came around the corner of the station on an unsteady run and pursued a little distance with inarticulate shoutings and violent gestures. We were too far off to see him very distinctly, but I thought he had somehow a foreign look; and unless my ears were at fault he was cursing us in Italian. We left him standing in the middle of the road, shaking his fist and mopping his face with a red handkerchief.

There was only one other passenger on the car, a fattish woman with blonde hair, who sat at the farther end; but for all that, it could hardly be called either a private or a comfortable conveyance. There was a badly flattened wheel forward, which banged and jolted abominably; and the motorman, instead of running slowly on that account, seemed possessed of a speed mania induced by artificial happiness. He bumped over crossings and rocked around curves at an alarming rate, accompanying the performance with occasional snatches of song; while the conductor, balanced on the back platform, read a newspaper and chewed a toothpick without paying the slightest attention. Where we ran for a long stretch along the highway, an automobile came along and proceeded to have fun with us after the manner of joyous automobiles. It ran languidly beside us until we were at our best speed; then with a derisive toot, buzzed half a mile ahead. Then it waited for us to come up, and repeated the evolution, "barking" at us with the engine. The motorman's songs turned to muttered anathemas. And as we turned from the roadside along a low embankment of sand across the meadows we held to a rate of speed that was really exciting.

"Are we making up time?" I asked. "Or is it only the festive motorman?"

Miss Tabor shook her head. "I never went so fast before. The man must be—"

Just then we struck a curve. I had one instant's sickening sense of danger as the front wheels bumped and thudded over the ties. Miss Tabor caught at my arm with a smothered cry. Then the car lurched drunkenly to the edge of the embankment and slowly rolled over.