The stop awakened Jay and he lay, pleasantly drowsy, not remembering yesterday nor trying to recall it. Indeed, he vaguely was warned against any effort to deal further with that day. It had dealt with him. Here he was in a Pullman berth aboard the Century, westbound. Well enough—but behind the train was New York.
In New York was Lida; so there he was again, alone with her in her mother's apartment on Park Avenue where she had told him, calmly at first and then crying, what had happened to her.
He stood staring at her, with fury flaming in him against Nucast and because of his accountability for Nucast. Then he had Lida in his arms, clinging to him and crying. She was soft and little and warm, and so young and so frightened, not like herself at all. Nineteen only, she was. So, never minding the cost to himself, he had offered to take Nucast's place.
"I won't let you. I won't think of it!"
"You have to let me," he pleaded with her.
"I haven't."
Finally he asked her, direct: "Then what are you going to do?"
That halted her heart. The straight question scared her and also brought to him, bluntly, the alternative. Yet she stuck to her refusal; he stuck by his proffer. So the matter remained between them when, at last, he left her.
How was it this morning with her?
Jay turned upon his side and closed his eyes in endeavor to put it out of his mind. No use. The train started and he lifted the window blind, which disclosed to him a station roof dimly etched before a gray dawn and a platform aswirl with snow which made big, gleaming balls of the street lamps.
The city must be Elkhart, two hours east of Chicago. He drew down the blind, packed his pillow to his best position for sleeping and closed his eyes only to hear his name repeated in the aisle:
"Mr. Rountree . . . Mr. J. A. Rountree . . ."
The man, speaking the name, went past. He was the stenographer who yesterday afternoon had asked Jay, when making the same request of other passengers, to give his name and berth number in case telegrams were expected. Jay had replied that no messages would come for him; but it must be that one had been handed aboard at Elkhart.
He looked between the curtains and saw the man with telegrams halt at the end of the car. Jay did not call because the idea had seized him that it was from Lida; and if it was, he wanted a minute or so to think before taking it. The morning on the train was not like yesterday forenoon with her in his arms. He required a bit of preparation.
The man disappeared; but he would return after a while or could be hunted up. Likely, Jay thought, the telegram was not from Lida at all. Probably it was from his father. Most telegrams were. The words of a recent one ran in Jay's mind, as he let the curtains close. He repacked his pillow and shut his eyes. No hurry about that telegram and no use thinking what it meant to him, if it was from Lida. He lay very still, not sleeping and he tried not to think.
"Jay!" Ben spoke to him from the aisle. "Jay; are y'wake?"
Ben was his nearest substitute for a brother. All his life he had known Ben; and through boarding school and college, they had been separated for but one year due to the fact that, when Ben went to Harvard, Jay had failed the entrance examinations and so had dropped back a class. But the next fall, Jay had got in and they had been room-mates at Cambridge for the last year and a half.
Until day before yesterday, there never had been an affair of any importance to Jay which Ben had not known.
Jay, pretending sleep, expected Ben to arouse him. Ben always was up early but he seldom was irritating because of this good habit. Qualities of regularity were inborn in him and Jay appreciated them and depended upon them.
"Y'wake?" whispered Ben again; and went away.
He had the telegram and Jay did not think of that. Ben supposed that it was a dispatch from Jay's father and he had seen many of the sort. In fact, he had seen a few which Jay never had read because Ben had thrown them away. There simply had been no use in letting Jay have some of them; and this, likely, was another.
Accordingly Ben took it to his own place in the next car, and after thinking it over, he pulled out the message, folded so that it displayed, first, a date line at New York at three o'clock that morning and the address to Jay on the fourth section of the 20th Century train, Elkhart, Indiana.
Ben jerked up and reddened before the message. He knew the girl who signed it. That was, if Lida was Lida Haige of Miss Willett's School. Probably she was, for Lida was not a usual name, and it was unlikely to be repeated even among Jay's surprising acquaintance.
Ben did not hold against Jay either the number or the intimacy of this acquaintance. Ben, plain enough himself, yet had sufficient personal experience with girls in this age of unblushing pursuit of man by woman to appreciate Jay's extraordinary position.
Ben replaced the message in the envelope and returned to Jay's berth, where again he looked in.
Jay had fallen asleep with the serenity in which he always dreamed. What went on in his dream world, he never knew when he awoke. Ben often had asked him; for so evidently it was pleasant. Nearly always Jay smiled when touched; and he did so now.
"Hello," he said, smiling up at Ben.
"Hello," said Ben. "You lazy hat, we're past Elkhart. Telegram came on for you."
"Oh, yes," said Jay. "Heard it. Was awake then."
"Why didn't you ask for it?" asked Ben, blaming him.
"Plenty of time. I guess it's just a welcome to our city from father."
"That's what I figured," said Ben, grateful for this help. "So I took it; told the man I was you. Then I read it for you," he added, defending himself with another offensive. "The devil of a thing to have sent you aboard a train. I've read it."
"Why shouldn't you read it?" asked Jay.
Ben tossed it down and dropped the curtains, leaving Jay with his message. As with Ben, the date line and address first appeared; next, Jay read:
"I had to tell them I guess I've got to ask you to go through with it sorry sorryLida."
He held it steadily, without surprise, his eyes traveling from end to end of the double line. "Lyda," he repeated to himself, "Leeda," he tried the name with inflection used by others. He looked up at the date line: 3 a. m.
She had sent it fifteen hours after yesterday noon, when he had left her. What else had happened? When had she had to tell "them"? Just before 3 a. m., or had that been merely the hour when she decided to telegraph him upon the train?
He considered the address to him on the fourth section of the Century and recollected how she had asked him not only the train but the section on which he would travel. Yet he had not expected a telegram from her; not on the train. She had said she only wanted to know where he was.
She had wanted, also, to know where he would go from the train; and he had promised to tell her where he would be every day.
Every day for how long? Throughout his life? Did this mean that now he must tell her every day throughout his whole life? Perspiration dampened his hands in spite of the cold draft blowing in the screen of the opened window. "Lyda; Leeda," he tried her name again. Which way would he like it best—throughout his whole life?
"I guess I've got to ask you to go through with it."
He had not expected this on the train; nevertheless he had expected it, he told himself. What else could she do? He had made his offer, meaning it; he had begged her to take it. Well, she had.
He shut the window and threw up the blind so that he could watch the storm while he dressed. He liked the swirl and violence of the wind; it met his mood this morning. Quarter to eight. So the Century, in spite of the snow, was on time. People talked about it as they passed in the aisle. On time!
Jay cared nothing at all about arriving on time except, since his father was expecting him, he might borrow a bit of the virtue of promptness from the train which, in spite of the storm, was on time.
How little avail would be his bit of promptness this morning when he was to tell to his father what was to be believed of him hereafter. That was the meaning of going "through with it": to take Nucast's offense upon himself and tell no one, not even his father, the truth—nor Ben.
Jay went to the next car and, not finding Ben, passed to the diner where Ben was at a table with a Yale man and a couple of girls from Vassar who had been in New York before starting for home. At other tables were college people homeward bound for the Christmas vacation. In contrast to them, business men breakfasted by twos and fours. Some had their wives along.
Jay looked for a seat at a college table but none was vacant. He dropped into a chair back of Ben, wondering what Ben must be thinking of him—Ben, who knew him so well and knew a little about Lida and how well he had liked Lida, and who had read Lida's telegram.
Jay forced his attention to the talk at his own table. The man beside him, pouring syrup over corncakes, talked business to a husband and wife, opposite. Mrs. Diblon was the wife and the husband was "Diblon" to the man beside Jay who was, importantly, "Mr. Polk" to them both.
He was no more than thirty, rather younger than Diblon; but Diblon was playing up to him, constantly, and so was Mrs. Diblon, who was hardly older than the college girls. There was not enough difference in the ages of these three, compared to the college people, to account for the difference in the feeling of this table. It was because it was business here.
To say that, thought Jay as he ordered, was merely to make a name. What was it about business which made the air of this table so uneasy and unnatural and patronizing and patronized?
Diblon was a seller of something; and Mr. Polk purchased huge quantities of that same thing. This became plain; this was the trouble with the table. Mr. Polk held the fate—at least, the present prosperity—of the Diblons in his important hands; so they, husband and wife, yessed him, smiled, laughed, listened and agreed and praised to flatter him.
Last week, or even two days ago, Jay Rountree would never have bothered about this; or noticed it. It would have been nothing in his life; he would have ignored it to listen to the talk at the college tables and to cut in where no one bore with any one else or laughed or agreed with or praised any one, unless he liked to; and where no one, man or girl, was afraid of any one else. But Jay noticed it this morning; for to-day he was taking upon himself a consequence of business—a consequence of Nucast's having held the business fate of others in his important hands.
"Cornell?" said Diblon to Mr. Polk. "Yes; I went there. My wife went to Wells."
"I'm from Dartmouth," announced Mr. Polk; and Jay almost shivered. These had been college people and not so long ago had sat as these others at the next tables, laughing at what they liked, joshing and calling down each other and being called down, fairly and freely. By God, something got them quick in business; and Jay Rountree was to leave college, where no one controlled his fate, and enter . . . business. That was sure; that was another meaning of going "through with it."
"Lyda; Leeda," he whispered to himself. Which way would he say it throughout his life? He must tell her, throughout his life, where he would be every day? Why no; most days they would be together—throughout his life. No use thinking of that now. A mile nearer each minute, was his father; and he would be wise to prepare exactly what he was to say to him.
Not that there would be difficulty in making his father believe that he had acted badly. It was the sort of thing his father was ready to believe of him. No; convincing his father would not be the difficulty. It lay within himself; it was his own rebellion, his own recoil from that which he had promised, for Lida's sake, to take upon himself; and which his father would believe.
And Ellen Powell would learn. Suddenly he thought of her hearing it; and the shock to himself, as he imagined her, surprised him. And yet it was the first moment, since he had awakened, that he had thought of her at all.