The Blind Man's Eyes (July 1916)/Chapter 3
CHAPTER III
MISS DORNE MEETS EATON
DORNE motioned Avery to the aisle, where already some of the passengers, having settled their belongings in their sections, were beginning to wander through the cars seeking acquaintances or players to make up a card game. Eaton, however, was not among these. On the contrary, when these approached him in his section, he frankly avoided chance of their speaking to him, by an appearance of complete immersion in his own concerns. The Englishman directly across the aisle from Eaton clearly was not likely to speak to him, or to anybody else, without an introduction; the red-haired man, "D. S.," however, seemed a more expansive personality. Eaton, seeing "D. S." look several times in his direction, pulled a newspaper from the pocket of his overcoat and engrossed himself in it; the newspaper finished, he opened his traveling bag and produced a magazine.
But as the train settled into the steady running which reminded of the days of travel ahead during which the half-dozen cars of the train must create a world in which it would be absolutely impossible to avoid contact with other people, Eaton put the magazine into his traveling bag, took from the bag a handful of cigars with which he filled a plain, uninitialed cigar-case, and went toward the club and observation car in the rear. As he passed through the sleeper next to him,—the last one,—Harriet Dorne glanced up at him and spoke to her father; Dorne nodded but did not look up. Eaton went on into the wide-windowed observation-room beyond, which opened onto the rear platform protected on three sides.
The observation-room was nearly empty. The sleet which had been falling when they left Seattle had changed to huge, heavy flakes of fast-falling snow, which blurred the windows, obscured the landscape and left visible only the two thin black lines of track that, streaming out behind them, vanished fifty feet away in the white smother. The only occupants of the room were a young woman who was reading a magazine, and an elderly man. Eaton chose a seat as far from these two as possible.
He had been there only a few minutes, however, when, looking up, he saw Harriet Dorne and Avery enter the room. They passed him, engaged in conversation, and stood by the rear door looking out into the storm. It was evident to Eaton, although he did not watch them, that they were arguing something; the girl seemed insistent, Avery irritated and unwilling. Her manner showed that she won her point finally. She seated herself in one of the chairs, and Avery left her. He wandered, as if aimlessly, to the reading table, turning over the magazines there; abandoning them, he gazed about as if bored; then, with a wholly casual manner, he came toward Eaton and took the seat beside him.
"Rotten weather, isn't it?" Avery observed somewhat ungraciously.
Eaton could not well avoid reply. "It's been getting worse," he commented, "ever since we left Seattle."
"We're running into it, apparently." Again Avery looked toward Eaton and waited.
"It'll be bad in the mountains, I suspect," Eaton said.
"Yes—lucky if we get through."
The conversation on Avery's part was patently forced; and it was equally forced on Eaton's; nevertheless it continued. Avery introduced the war and other subjects upon which men, thrown together for a time, are accustomed to exchange opinions. But Avery did not do it easily or naturally; he plainly was of the caste whose pose it is to repel, not seek, overtures toward a chance acquaintance. His lack of practice was perfectly obvious when at last he asked directly: "Beg pardon, but I don't think I know your name."
Eaton was obliged to give it.
"Mine's Avery," the other offered; "perhaps you heard it when we were getting our berths assigned."
And again the conversation, enjoyed by neither of them, went on. Finally the girl at the end of the car rose and passed them, as though leaving the car. Avery looked up.
"Where are you going, Harry?"
"I think some one ought to be with Father."
"I'll go in just a minute."
She had halted almost in front of them. Avery, hesitating as though he did not know what he ought to do, finally arose; and as Eaton observed that Avery, having introduced himself, appeared now to consider it his duty to present Eaton to Harriet Dorne, Eaton also arose. Avery murmured the names. Harriet Dorne, resting her hand on the back of Avery's chair, joined in the conversation. As she replied easily and interestedly to a comment of Eaton's, Avery suddenly reminded her of her father. After a minute, when Avery—still ungracious and still irritated over something which Eaton could not guess—rather abruptly left them, she took Avery's seat; and Eaton dropped into his chair beside her.
Now, this whole proceeding—though within the convention which, forbidding a girl to make a man's acquaintance directly, says nothing against her making it through the medium of another man—had been so unnaturally done that Eaton understood that Harriet Dorne deliberately had arranged to make his acquaintance, and that Avery, angry and objecting, had been overruled.
She seemed to Eaton less alertly boyish now than she had looked an hour before when they had boarded the train. Her cheeks were smoothly rounded, her lips rather full, her lashes very long. He could not look up without looking directly at her, for her chair, which had not been moved since Avery left it, was at an angle with his own. A faint, sweet fragrance from her hair and clothing came to him and made him recollect how long it was—five years—since he had talked with, or even been near, such a girl as this; and the sudden tumult of his pulses which her nearness caused warned him to keep watch of what he said until he had learned why she had sought him out.
To avoid the appearance of studying her too openly, he turned slightly, so that his gaze went past her to the white turmoil outside the windows.
"It's wonderful," she said, "isn't it?"
"You mean the storm?" A twinkle of amusement came to Eaton's eyes. "It would be more interesting if it allowed a little more to be seen. At present there is nothing visible but snow."
"Is that the only way it affects you?" She turned to him, apparently a trifle disappointed.
"I don't exactly understand."
"Why, it must affect every man most as it touches his own interests. An artist would think of it as a background for contrasts—a thing to sketch or paint; a writer as something to be written down in words."
Eaton understood. She could not more plainly have asked him what he was.
"And an engineer, I suppose," he said, easily, "would think of it only as an element to be included in his formulas—an x, or an a, or a b, to be put in somewhere and square-rooted or squared so that the roof-truss he was figuring should not buckle under its weight."
"Oh—so that is the way you were thinking of it?"
"You mean," Eaton challenged her directly, "am I an engineer?"
"Are you?"
"Oh, no; I was only talking in pure generalities, just as you were."
"Let us go on, then," she said gayly. "I see I can't conceal from you that I am doing you the honor to wonder what you are. A lawyer would think of it in the light of damage it might create and the subsequent possibilities of litigation." She made a little pause. "A business man would take it into account, as he has to take into account all things in nature or human; it would delay transportation, or harm or aid the winter wheat."
"Or stop competition somewhere," he observed, more interested.
The flash of satisfaction which came to her face and as quickly was checked and faded showed him she thought she was on the right track.
"Business," she said, still lightly, "will—how is it the newspapers put it?—will marshal its cohorts; it will send out its generals in command of brigades of snowplows, its colonels in command of regiments of snow-shovelers and its spies to discover and to bring back word of the effect upon the crops."
"You talk," he said, "as if business were a war."
"Isn't it?—like war, but war in higher terms."
"In higher terms?" he questioned, attempting to make his tone like hers, but a sudden bitterness now was betrayed by it. "Or in lower?"
"Why, in higher," she declared, "demanding greater courage, greater devotion, greater determination, greater self-sacrifice."
"What makes you say that?"
"Soldiers themselves say it, Mr. Eaton, and all the observers in this horrible war say it when they say that they find almost no cowards and very few weaklings among all the millions of every sort of men at the front. They could not say the same of those identical millions under the normal conditions of everyday business life."
He remained silent, though she waited for him to reply.
"You know that is so, Mr. Eaton," she said. "One has only to look on the streets of any great city to find thousands of men who have not had the courage and determination to carry on their share of the ordinary duties of life. Recruiting officers can pick any man off the streets and make a good soldier of him, but no one could be so sure of finding a satisfactory employee in that way. Doesn't that show that daily life, the everyday business of earning a living and bearing one's share in the workaday world, demands greater qualities than war?"
Her face had flushed eagerly as she spoke; a darker, livid flush answered her words on his.
"But the opportunities for evil are greater, too," he asserted almost fiercely.
"What do you mean?"
"For deceit, for lies, for treachery, Miss Dorne! Violence is the evil of war, and violence is the evil most easily punished, even if it does not bring its own punishment upon itself. But how many of those men you speak of on the streets have been deliberately, mercilessly, even savagely sacrificed to some business expediency, their future destroyed, their hope killed!" Some storm of passion, whose meaning she could not divine, was sweeping him.
"You mean," she asked after an instant's silence, "that you, Mr. Eaton, have been sacrificed in such a way?"
"I am still talking in generalities," he denied ineffectively.
He saw that she sensed the untruthfulness of these last words. Her smooth young forehead and her eyes were shadowy with thought. Eaton was uneasily silent. The train roared across some trestle, giving a sharp glimpse of gray, snow-swept water far below. Finally Harriet Dorne seemed to have made her decision.
"I think you should meet my father, Mr. Eaton," she said. "Would you like to?"
He did not reply at once. He knew that his delay was causing her to study him now with greater surprise.
"I would like to meet him, yes," he said, "but,"—he hesitated, tried to avoid answer without offending her, but already he had affronted her,—"but not now, Miss Dorne."
She stared at him, rebuffed and chilled.
"You mean—" The sentence, obviously, was one she felt it better not to finish. As though he recognized that now she must wish the conversation to end, he got up. She rose stiffly.
"I'll see you into your car, if you're returning there," he offered.
Neither spoke, as he went with her into the next car; and at the section where her father sat, Eaton bowed silently, nodded to Avery, who coldly returned his nod, and left her. Eaton went on into his own car and sat down, his thoughts in mad confusion.
How near he had come to talking to this girl about himself, even though, he had felt from the first that that was what she was trying to make him do! Was he losing his common sense? Was the self-command on which he had so counted that he had dared to take this train deserting him? He felt that he must not see Harriet Dorne again alone. At first this was all he felt; but as he sat, pale and quiet, staring vacantly at the snow-flakes which struck and melted on the window beside him, his thoughts grew more clear. In Avery he had recognized, by that instinct which so strangely divines the personalities one meets, an enemy from the start; Dorne's attitude toward him, of course, was not yet defined; as for Harriet Dorne—he could not tell whether she was prepared to be his enemy or friend.