I Married A Dead Man (3 page)

               
She stopped at last, and stayed where she'd stopped, for sheer inability to turn and go back again to where she'd come from. No use going any further. She could see to the end of the car, and there weren't any left.

               
She let her valise down parallel to the aisle, and tried to seat herself upon its upturned edge as she saw so many others doing. But she floundered badly for a moment, out of her own topheaviness, and almost tumbled in lowering herself. Then when she'd succeeded, she let her head settle back against the sideward edge of the seat she was adjacent to, and stayed that way. Too tired to know, too tired to care, too tired even to close her eyes.

               
What makes you stop, when you have stopped, just where you have stopped? What is it, what? Is it something, or is it nothing? Why not a yard short, why not a yard more? Why just there where you are, and nowhere else?

               
Some say: It's just blind chance, and if you hadn't stopped there, you would have stopped at the next place. Your story would have been different then. You weave your own story as you go along.

               
But others say: You could not have stopped any place else but this even if you had wanted to. It was decreed, it was ordered, you were meant to stop at this spot and no other. Your story is there waiting for you, it has been waiting for you there a hundred years, long before you were born, and you cannot change a comma of it. Everything you do, you have to do. You are the twig, and the water you float on swept you here. You are the leaf and the breeze you were borne on blew you here. This is your story, and you cannot escape it, you are only the player, not the stage manager. Or so some say.

               
On the floor before her downcast eyes, just over the rim of the seat-arm, she could see two pairs of shoes uptilted, side by side. On the inside, toward the window, a diminutive pair of pumps, pert, saucy, without backs, without sides, without toes, in fact with scarcely anything but dagger-like heels and a couple of straps. And on the outside, the nearer side to her,a pair of man's brogues, looking by comparison squat, bulky, and tremendously heavy. These hung one above the other, from legs coupled at the knee.

               
She did not see their faces and she did not want to. She did not want to see anyone's face. She did not want to see anything.

               
Nothing happened for a moment. Then one of the pumps edged slyly over toward one of the brogues, nudged gently into it, as if in a deft little effort to communicate something. The brogue remained oblivious; it didn't get the message. It got the feeling, but not the intent A large hand came down, and scratched tentatively at the sock just above the brogue, then went up again.

               
The pump, as if impatient at such obtuseness, repeated the effort. Only this time it delivered a good sharp dig, with a bite to it, and on the unprotected ankle, above the armorlike brogue.

               
That got results. A newspaper rattled somewhere above, as if it had been lowered out of the way, to see what all this unpleasant nipping was about.

               
A whispered remark was voiced above, spoken too low to be distinguishable by any but the ear for which it was intended.

               
An interrogative grunt, in masculine timbre, answered it

               
Both brogues came down even on the floor, as the legs above uncoupled. Then they swivelled slightly toward the aisle, as if their owner had turned his upper body to glance that way.

               
The girl on the valise closed her eyes wearily, to avoid the gaze that she knew must be on her.

               
When she opened them again, the brogues had come out through the seat-gap, and the wearer was standing full-height in the aisle, on the other side of her. A good height too, a six-foot height.

               
"Take my seat, miss," he invited. "Go ahead, take my place for awhile."

               
She tried to demur with a faint smile and a halfhearted shake of the head. But the velour back lopked awfully good.

               
The girl who had remained in it added her insistence to his. "Go ahead, honey, take it," she urged. "He wants you to. We want you to. You can't stay out there like that, where you are."

               
The velour back looked awfully good. She couldn't take her eyes off it. But she was almost too tired to stand up and effect the change. He had to reach down and take her by the arm and help her rise from the valise and shift over.

               
Her eyes closed again for a moment, in ineffable bliss, as she sank back.

               
"There you are," he said heartily. "Isn't that better?"

               
And the girl beside her, her new seat-mate, said: "Why, you are tired. I never saw anyone so all-in."

               
She smiled her thanks, and still tried to protest a little, though the act had already been completed, but they both overrode her remonstrances.

               
She looked at the two of them. Now she at least wanted to see their two faces, if no others, though only a few moments ago she hadn't wanted to see any faces, anywhere, ever again. But kindness is a form of restorative.

               
They were both young. Well, she was too. But they were both happy, gay, basking in the world's blessings, that was the difference between them and her. It stood out all over them. There was some sort of gilded incandescence alight within both of them alike, something that was more than mere good spirits, more than mere good fortune, and for the first few moments she couldn't tell what it was. Then in no time at all, their eyes, and every turn of their heads, and every move they made, gave it away: they were supremely, brimmingly in love with one another. It glowed out all over them, almost like phosphorus.

               
Young love. New untarnished love. That first love that comes just once to everyone and never comes back again.

               
But, conversationally, it expressed itself inversely, at least on her part if not his; almost every remark she addressed to him was a friendly insult, a gentle slur, an amiable depreciation. Not so much as a word of tenderness, or even ordinary human consideration, did she seem to have for him. Though her eyes belied her. And he understood. He had that smile for all her outrageous insolences, that worshipped, that adored, that understood so well.

               
"Well, go on," she said with a peremptory flick of her hand. "Don't stand there like a dope, breathing down the backs of our necks. Go and find something to do."

               
"Oh, pardon me," he said, and pretended to turn the back of his collar up, as if frozen out He looked vaguely up and down the aisle. "Guess I'll go out on the platform and smoke a cigarette."

               
"Smoke two," she said airily. "See if I care."

               
He turned and began to pick his way down the thronged aisle.

               
"That was nice of him," the newcomer said appreciatively, glancing after him.

               
"Oh, he's tolerable," her companion said. "He has his good points." She gave a shrug. But her eyes made a liar out of her.

               
She glanced around to make sure he'd gone out of earshot. Then she leaned slightly toward the other, dropped her voice confidentially. "I could tell right away," she said. "That's why I made him get up. About you, I mean."

               
The girl who'd been on the valise dropped her eyes for an instant, confused, deprecating. She didn't say anything.

               
"I am too. You're not the only one," her companion rushed on, with just a trace of vainglory, as if she couldn't wait to tell it quickly enough.

               
The girl said, "Oh." She didn't know what else to say. It sounded flat, superficial; the way you say "Is that so?" or "You don't say?" She tried to force a smile of sympathetic interest, but she wasn't very good at it. Out of practice at smiling, maybe.

               
"Seven months," the other added gratuitously.

               
The girl could feel her eyes on her, as though she expected some return in kind to be made, if only for the record.

               
"Eight," she said, half-audibly. She didn't want to, but she did.

               
"Wonderful," was her companion's praise for this arithmetical information. "Marvelous." As though there were some sort of a caste system involved in this, and she unexpectedly found herself speaking to one of the upper brackets of nobility: a duchess or a marquise, who outranked her by thirty days. And all around them, snobbishly ignored, the commonality of the female gender.

               
"Wonderful, marvelous," echoed the girl inwardly, and her heart gave a frightened, unheard sob.

               
"And your husband?" the other rushed on. "You going to meet him?"

               
"No," the girl said, looking steadily at the green velour of the seatback in front of them. "No."

               
"Oh. D'd you leave him back in New York?"

               
"No," the girl said. "No." She seemed to see it written on the seatback in transitory lettering, that faded again as soon as it was once read. "I've lost him."

               
"Oh, I'm sor--" Her vivacious companion seemed to know grief for the first time, other than just grief over a broken doll or a schoolgirl crush betrayed. It was like a new experience passing over her radiant face. And it was, even now, bound to be someone else's grief, not her own; that was the impression you had. That she'd never had any grief of her own, had none now, and never would have. One of those star-blessed rarities, glittering its way through the world's dark vale.

               
She bit off the rest of the ejaculation of sympathy, gnawed at her upper lip; reached out impulsively and placed her hand upon her companion's for a moment, then withdrew it again.

               
Then, tactfully, they didn't speak any more about such things. Such basic things as birth and death, that can give such joy and can give such pain.

               
She had corn-gold hair, this sun-kissed being. She wore it in a hazy aureole that fluffed out all over her head. She had freckles that were like little flecks of gold paint, spattered from some careless painter's brush all over her apricot cheeks, with a saddle across the bridge of her tiny, pert nose. It was her mouth that was the beautiful part of her. And if the rest of her face was not quite up to its matchless beauty, that mouth alone was sufficient to make her lovely-looking, unaided, drawing all notice to itself as it did. Just as a single light is enough to make a plain room bright, you don't have to have a whole chandelier. When it smiled, everything else smiled with it Her nose crinkled, and her eyebrows arched, and her eyes creased, and dimples showed up where there hadn't been any a minute before. She looked as though she smiled a lot. She looked as though she had a lot to smile about.

               
She continually toyed with a wedding-band on her third finger. Caressed it, so to speak, fondled it. She was probably unconscious of doing so by this time; it must have become a fixed habit by now. But originally, months ago, when it was first there, when it was new there, she must have taken such a fierce pride in it that she'd felt the need for continually displaying it to all the world--as if to say, "Look at me! Look what I've got! "--must have held such an affection for it that she couldn't keep her hands off it for very long. And now, though pride and affection were in nowise less, this had formed itself into a winning little habit that persisted. No matter what move her hands made, no matter what gesture they expressed, it always managed to come uppermost, to be foremost in the beholder's eye.

               
It had a row of diamonds, and then a sapphire at each end for a stop. She caught her new seat-mate's glance resting upon it, so then she turned it around her way a little more, so she could see it all the better, gave it a pert little brush-off with her fingers, as if to dispel the last, lingering, hypothetical grain of dust. A brush-off that pretended she didn't care any more about it just then. Just as her attitude toward him pretended she didn't care anything about him either. A brush-off that lied like the very devil.

               
They were both chatting away absorbedly, as new-found friends do, by the time he reappeared some ten minutes later. He came up to them acting secretive and mysterious in a rather conspicuous way. He looked cautiously left and right first, as if bearing tidings of highest secrecy. Then screened the side of his mouth with the edge of one hand. Then leaned down and whispered, "Pat, one of the porters just tipped me off. They're going to open up the dining-car in a couple of minutes. Special, inside, advance information. You know what that'll mean in this mob. I think we better start moving up that way if we want to get in under the rope on the first shift. There'll be a stampede under way as soon as word gets around."