Читать книгу John Marvel, Assistant - Thomas Nelson Page - Страница 23

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When, a little later, my small charges were brought back to their mother (to whom I had explained their absence), it was by the young lady herself, and I never saw a more grateful picture than that young girl, in her fresh travelling costume, convoying those children down the car aisle. Her greeting of the tired mother was a refreshment, and a minute after she had gone the mother offered me a part of a substantial supply of sandwiches which she had brought her, so that I found myself not quite so much in sympathy as before with the criticism of the road that was now being freely bandied about the car, and which appeared to have made all the passengers as one.

Not long after this we dropped the private car at a station and proceeded on without it. We had, however, not gone far when we stopped and were run into a siding and again waited, and after a time, a train whizzed by us—a special train with but two private cars on it. It was going at a clipping rate, but it did not run so fast that we did not recognize the private car we had dropped some way back, and it soon became known throughout our train that we had been side-tracked to let a special with private cars have the right-of-way. I confess that my gorge rose at this, and when the man in front of me declared that we were the most patient people on earth to give public franchises, pay for travelling on trains run by virtue of them, and then stand being shoved aside and inconvenienced out of all reason to allow a lot of bloated dead-heads to go ahead of us in their special trains, I chimed in with him heartily.

"Well, the road belongs to them, don't it?" inquired a thin man with a wheezing voice. "That was Canter's private train, and he took on the Argand car at that station back there."

"'They own the road!' How do they own it? How did they get it?" demanded the first speaker warmly.

"Why, you know how they got it. They got it in the panic—that is, they got the controlling interest."

"Yes, and then ran the stock down till they had got control and then reorganized and cut out those that wouldn't sell—or couldn't—the widows and orphans and infants—that's the way they got it."

"Well, the court upheld it?"

"Yes, under the law they had had made themselves to suit themselves. You know how 'twas! You were there when 'twas done and saw how they flung their money around—or rather the Argand money—for I don't believe Canter and his set own the stock at all. I'll bet a thousand dollars that every share is up as collateral in old Argand's bank."

"Oh! Well, it's all the same thing. They stand in together. They run the bank—the bank lends money; they buy the stock and put it up for the loan, and then run the road."

"And us," chipped in the other; for they had now gotten into a high good-humor with each other—"they get our franchises and our money, and then side-track us without breakfast while they go sailing by—in cars that they call theirs, but which we pay for. I do think we are the biggest fools!"

"That's Socialistic!" said his friend again. "You've been reading that fellow's articles in the Sunday papers. What's his name?"

"No, I've been thinking. I don't care what it is, it's the truth, and I'm tired of it."

"They say he's a Jew," interrupted the former.

"I don't care what he is, it's the truth," asserted the other doggedly.

"Well, I rather think it is," agreed his friend; "but then, I'm hungry, and there isn't even any water on the car."

"And they guzzle champagne!" sneered the other, "which we pay for," he added.

"You're a stockholder?"

"Yes, in a small way; but I might as well own stock in a paving-company to Hell. My father helped to build this road and used to take great pride in it. They used to give the stockholders then a free ride once a year to the annual meeting, and it made them all feel as if they owned the road."

"But now they give free passes not to the stockholders, but to the legislators and the judges."

"It pays better," said his friend, and they both laughed. It appeared, indeed, rather a good joke to them—or, at least, there was nothing which they could do about it, so they might as well take it good-humoredly.

By this time I had learned that my neighbor with the five children was the wife of a man named McNeil, who was a journeyman machinist, but had been thrown out of work by a strike in another city, and, after waiting around for months, had gone North to find employment, and having at last gotten it, had now sent for them to come on. She had not seen him for months, and she was looking forward to it now with a happiness that was quite touching. Even the discomforts of the night could not dull her joy in the anticipation of meeting her husband—and she constantly enheartened her droopy little brood with the prospect of soon seeing their "dear Daddy."

Finally after midday we arrived.

I shall never forget the sight and smells of that station, if I live to be a thousand years old. It seemed to me a sort of temporary resting-place for lost souls—and I was one of them. Had Dante known it, he must have pictured it, with its reek and grime. The procession of tired, bedraggled travellers that streamed in through the black gateways to meet worn watchers with wan smiles on their tired faces, or to look anxiously and in vain for friends who had not come, or else who had come and gone. And outside the roar of the grimy current that swept through the black street.

I had no one to look for; so, after helping my neighbor and her frowsy little brood off, I sauntered along with Dix at my heel, feeling about as lonely as a man can feel on this populated earth. After gazing about and refusing sternly to meet the eye of any of the numerous cabmen who wildly waved their whips toward me, shouting: "Kebsuh—kebsuh—keb—keb—keb?" with wearying iteration, I had about made up my mind to take the least noisy of them, when I became conscious that my fellow-traveller, Mrs. McNeil with her little clan, was passing out of the station unescorted and was looking about in a sort of lost way. On my speaking to her, her face brightened for a moment, but clouded again instantly, as she said, "Oh! sir, he's gone! He came to meet me this morning; but the train was late and he couldn't wait or he'd lose his job, so he had to go, and the kind man at the gate told me he left the message for me. But however shall I get there with all the children, for I haven't a cent left!"

The tears welled up in her eyes as she came to her sad little confession. And I said, "Oh! Well, I think we can manage it somehow. You have his address?"

"Oh! yes, sir, I have it here," and she pulled out an empty little pocket-book from the breast of her worn frock, and while she gave the baby to the eldest girl to hold, tremblingly opened the purse. In it was only a crumpled letter and, besides this, a key—these were all. She opened the letter tenderly and handed it to me. I read the address and fastened it in my memory.

"Now," I said, "we'll straighten this out directly." I turned and called a hackman. "I want a carriage."

There was a rush, but I was firm and insisted on a hack. However, as none was to be had, I was fain to content myself with a one-horse cab of much greater age than dimension.

Bundling them in and directing the driver to go around and get the trunk from the baggage-room, I mounted beside him and took Dix between my feet and one of the children in my arms, and thus made my entry into the city of my future home. My loneliness had somehow disappeared.

My protégée's destination turned out to be a long way off, quite in one of the suburbs of the city, where working people had their little homes—a region I was to become better acquainted with later. As we began to pass bakeries and cook-shops, the children began once more to clamor to their mother for something to eat, on which the poor thing tried to quiet them with promises of what they should have when they reached home. But I could perceive that her heart was low within her, and I stopped at a cook-shop and bought a liberal allowance of bread and jam and cookies, on which the young things fell to like famished wolves, while their mother overwhelmed me with blessings.

We had not gone far, and were still in the centre of the city, when a handsome open carriage drove by us, and as it passed, there sat in it the young lady I had seen on the train, with a pleasant looking elderly man, whom I conjectured to be her father, and who appeared in a very good-humor with her or himself. As I was gazing at them, her eyes fell full into mine, and after a half-moment's mystification, she recognized me as I lifted my hat, and her face lit up with a pleasant smile of recognition. I found my feelings divided between pleasure at her sweet return of my bow and chagrin that she should find me in such a predicament; for I knew what a ridiculous figure I must cut with the dog between my feet and a frowsy child, thickly smeared with jam, in my arms. In fact, I could see that the girl was talking and laughing spiritedly with her father, evidently about us. I confess to a feeling of shame at the figure I must cut, and I wondered if she would not think I had lied to her in saying that I had never met them before. I did not know that the smile had been for Dix.

When we reached, after a good hour's drive, the little street for which we were bound, I found my forecast fairly correct. The dingy little house, on which was the rusted number given Mrs. McNeil in her husband's letter, was shut up and bore no evidence of having been opened, except a small flower-pot with a sprig of green in it in a dusty, shutterless window. It was the sort of house that is a stove in summer and an ice-box in the winter. And there was a whole street of them. After we had knocked several times and I had tried to peep over the fence at the end of the street, the door of an adjoining tenement opened, and a slatternly, middle-aged woman peeped out.