She hastened to freshen herself with cold water, and they were presently eating a hasty meal at a crowded table. Then they were out side by side to pace the platform briskly.
There was green about the station, where water had taught the desert to relent, but beyond this oasis the sand sea stretched far and flat to murky foothills. Above these they could see a range of sharp-peaked mountains that still caught the sunlight, some crystal white with snow, others m.u.f.fled by clouds turned to iris-hued scarfs of filmiest gauze.
"El Dorado is beyond those hills," said the youth fervently.
"It looks accessible from here," she answered, "but----"
"You"re warning me again. You"re afraid I"ll be discouraged by the hills."
"Not discouraged, but there are resting places on the way. They hold the bulk of the pilgrims, I fear."
"I shall go on; not even you could stop me."
She caught a glint in his fierce young eyes that she thought he must be unconscious of.
"I? Oh, I shall spur you--if you need spurring."
"I know; I"m only beginning to realize how much I owe you; I mean to repay you, though."
There was an intimation of remoteness in his tone, as if he saw himself removed from her, mounting solitary to his dream city, a free-necked, well-weaponed pilgrim, sufficient unto himself. It was as if he had put distance between them the moment he crossed the threshold of the world.
She drew a full breath. It came to her, as the upflashing of some submerged memory, that all his frank adoration of her had been quite impersonal. He had regarded her as a bit of line and color. It was amazing to remember that he had made no effort to know her, save with his eyes. She divined that she had stopped short of being human to him, while he to her had been, more than anything else, a human creature of freshness and surprises. Whatever difficulties might be in the way of an easy friendliness between them, they would not be of his own making. She was sure she felt a great relief.
Ewing awoke in the night at some jolting halt of the train, to feel an exciting thrill of luxury as he stretched in his berth. Here was no stumbling about in the dark to search for a lost trail; nor must he rise in the chill dawn to worry a blaze from overnight embers, cook a discouraging breakfast, catch horses, and lade unwilling beasts with packs. Things would be done for him; and the trail was wide and level as befits the approach to the world. He dozed royally off feeling that he had bitten into the heart of his wonder at last.
The following day they sped through a land whose kind he knew, but after another night he awoke to find their train breasting the brown waves of a sea that rolled lazily to far horizons. No longer was there one of his beloved mountain peaks to be a landmark: only an endless, curving lowness, as of land that had once tried to lash itself into the fury of mountain and crag, and then ceased all effort--to lie forever impotent and sad.
He thought of Ben amid this disconsolate welter. Ben had beheld this sight years ago, and had described it with aversion, as one relating a topographical scandal. Ewing favored his companion with heartfelt dispraise of this landscape, applauding the suggestion of a woman she laughingly quoted that "there should be a tuck taken in the continent."
He was sure nothing would be lost by it.
The lady beguiled him over the inadequacies of Kansas by promising a better land farther on. He gladly turned from the car window to watch the pretty play of her mouth as she talked.
But the next day--they steamed out of St. Louis in the morning--he scanned several hundred square miles of excellent farming land with sheer dismay. From morning till night they ran through what, to Ewing, was a dead, depressing flatness, a vast and clumsy jest of a checkerboard, with cornfields for squares. The tiny groves of oak at long intervals seemed only to satirize the monotony. The rolling plains of the day before had been vivacious beside this flatness, and there had been a certain mournful dignity in their solitude. But this endless level lacked even solitude. To Ewing, indeed, the mystery of it lay in its well-peopled towns. He wondered how men kept sane there. Mrs. Laithe insisted that it was an important stretch of our country, that it fed thousands and made useful objects in its tall-chimneyed factories (things like wagons and watches and boots, she believed), and that it ought not to be discountenanced. But he could feel nothing for it, save an unconfessed pity that it would sleep that night in ignorance of his glorious transit. He had never suspected there could be so many thousands of people who took the world as a tame affair and slept indifferent to young men with great things before them.
"If New York is like this," he said, with a flash of his old boyish excitement, "what can I ever do without you?"
"But it isn"t at all like this, and you"ll do big things without me--or with me, if I can help you."
"You will have to help me. Now that I"ve seen the beginning of the world, I"m depending on you more than I thought I should when we started."
"You will lose that."
"Will I? But it will be queer to see you as part of the world--no longer the whole of it; to see how you stand out from the others. Perhaps the rest of the world will be only a dingy background for you--you are all color and life."
"You"ve made me feel like a lay figure," she laughed. Then, in a flash of womanish curiosity, she ventured, "Have you ever thought me anything but a sh.e.l.l of color?"
He stammered, blushing painfully.
"Oh, a real person--of course, certainly! A woman, yes--but when I think of you as a woman, I"m scared, like those first times I saw you. I can"t help it. You may not believe it," he concluded with a burst of candor, "but the truth is, I don"t know women."
He was again embarra.s.sed when she retorted, with her laugh:
"O youth! May you always know so much!"
"Well, to-morrow afternoon we shall be in New York," he said briskly, when she had shut the deeps of her eyes from him. He had felt the need to show that there were matters upon which he could speak with understanding.
CHAPTER IX
A DINNER AT SEVEN-THIRTY
By five o"clock the next afternoon Ewing had ended his journey in an upper room of the Stuyvesant Hotel. This hostelry flaunts an outworn magnificence. Its hangings are dingy, its plenteous gilt is tarnished; and it seems to live on memories of a past when fashion splendidly thronged its corridors. But peace lies beyond the gloom of its portals, and Ewing was glad to be housed from the dazing tumult outside. Nothing reached him now but the muted rhythm of horses" feet on the asphalt below, and this but recalled agreeably to him that his solitude was an artificial thing of four walls. He had no wish to forget that the world waited beyond his door.
He fell back on the sofa, a once lordly thing of yellow satin, now frayed and faded, to eye the upper reaches of the room. The high, blue-tinted ceiling was scarred and cracked. Depending from its center a huge chandelier dangled glittering prisms of gla.s.s. An immense mirror in a gilt frame, lavishly rococo, rested on the mantel of carved white marble. Heavy lace curtains, shrouding the two broad windows, made a restful half light.
He had awakened to hills that morning, wooded hills and well towned.
Then had come veritable cities, rich to him with all romance under their angular, smoky ugliness. And at last had come the real city--the end of the world and its center. He discovered it beyond a stretch of white-flecked water alive with strange craft. Its clean, straight, myriad-windowed towers glowed under a slanting sun in an air as crystal clear as that of his own hills. A vista of heart-shaking surprises unfolded ahead of the great boat they boarded, a boat with a heart strongly beating in tune with his own. Too soon it nosed its way, with a sort of clumsy finesse, into a pile-walled pocket. There followed the keen, quick rattling of a cogged wheel and a rush of people who seemed insufficiently impressed by the magnitude of the event. Then they entered a cab, to be driven from a throng of other cabs and jostling pedestrians through the maze of a dream come true. He tried not to ignore his companion for glimpses of that strange life through the cab window.
Very casually she had said at parting, "Thank you so much for all your care of me--and dine with us at seven-thirty, won"t you? I shall try to have a friend here that I think may help you."
A long time he lay, reviewing that chaotic first hour in the world.
Everything throbbed here, it seemed. One lived more quickly. And how long could the body endure it? Suddenly he felt his own pulses beating at a rate to terrify. He caught his breath and listened. He could hear the monstrous beats--they were actually shaking the sofa on which he lay. He thought of heart disease. He might be dying there--and they would wait dinner for him. He sprang up desperately. The sinister beating ceased. He put his hand to his heart, listened tensely, and heard again that which had alarmed him, the pulsing beat of a steam pump somewhere far below. In his relief he laughed aloud.
As he set about opening his trunks he was marveling at clothes lines he had seen stretched high between the rear walls of houses. How did people ever hang clothes on lines fifty feet from the ground? Truly it was a city of wonders.
He took out a suit of evening clothes that had been his father"s. He had found that the suit fitted him, and he and Ben had a.s.sured themselves by reference to the pictured heroes in magazine advertis.e.m.e.nts that its cut was nearly enough in the prevailing mode. Ewing had also found some cards of his father"s which would convey his own name to all who might care to read it.
As he sauntered out at the dinner hour he wished that Ben could be watching him. The Bartell house was in Ninth Street, less than a long block from his hotel, a broad, plain-fronted, three-story house of red brick trimmed with white marble. Caught in a little eddy from the stream heading in Washington Square and sweeping north, it had kept an old-time air of dignity and comfort. Ewing observed a cheering glow through the muslin curtains at the windows as he ascended the three marble steps.
The old white door, crowned with a fanlight and retaining its bra.s.s knocker, had suffered the indignity of an electric bell, but this was obscurely placed at the side, and he lifted the knocker"s lion head. As no bell rang, he dropped it, and was dismayed by its metallic clamor. He swiftly meditated flight, thinking to return for a seemlier demonstration. But the door swung back and a person in evening dress stood aside to bow him in.
"Ah, good evening!" exclaimed Ewing cordially. Then, embarra.s.sed, he felt for a card, recalling that he was in a land where, probably, one could not be cordial to persons who opened doors.
"For Mrs. Laithe," he said, in grave tones, eying the man"s bluntly cut features with a severity meant to dispel any wrong impression. The person received the card on a tiny silver plate, relieved him of hat and coat with what seemed to Ewing an uncanny deftness, bowed him to the gloom of a large apartment on the left, and vanished. An instant later he reappeared, drew portieres aside, revealing another warmly lighted room, and Ewing beheld a white vision of his hostess.
"I"m glad to have a word with you," she began. "Sit here. You"re to meet a friend, Ned Piersoll, who will tell you a lot of things. I telephoned him directly I came in, and he found he could come, though he must run when he"s eaten--some affair with his mother. But he"ll have found out about you."
"I"m much obliged to you," he stammered, having caught little of her speech.
"Ned will tell you what to do. He knows everybody. He"s on the staff of the Knickerbocker magazine, and he had a novel out last spring, "The Promotion of Fools," that you must have seen advertised everywhere, like a medicine."
"Yes, I"ve read that book."
"You must tell him if you liked it--they all care to hear that--and he"ll see that you meet men of your own kind." For looking at her he had been able to give her words little attention. She had revealed herself anew in the dull white of a gown that brought out the elusive glow of her face. Her eyes were deep wells, shaded but luminous, under the l.u.s.terless dark of her hair, and her smile flashed a girlish benignity upon him. Acutely alive was he to the line of neck and shoulder and arm, a slender, supple neck, set on shoulders superbly but lightly modeled, the small collarbone exquisitely m.u.f.fled but not lost, and the little hollow at the base of her throat prettily definite. And all was white and l.u.s.terless save the warning dusk of her eyes and the flash from her parting lips.
With such cold pa.s.sion for line did his artist"s eye wreak its joy upon her that, as she talked, she found herself thinking him curiously dull to the prospect she opened. It was the impersonal look she had come to know; and his replies were languid, as if he thought of other matters.
It might have pa.s.sed for the bored ease of a man of the world had she not known him to be amid novel surroundings.