The Wayfarers. Mary Stewart Cutting
a pretty chin. Her blue eyes had a bright, alert look in them that waited on those with whom she held converse; her slender young figure bent slightly forward, while her lips parted unconsciously, as if in deep attention. This, with her varying color, gave her a charm.
But her greatest attraction was still the innocent, artless expression of extreme youth which experience has never touched, which has nothing to remember and nothing to forget—the typical fair white page, still unwritten upon, although she had been twenty on her last birthday.
When she looked at the scenery, she kept seeing at first only the family group at the station as she had left it: her father, tall, gray-bearded, with hollow eyes, a continually working mouth, a slouching gait, a worn hat and an old striped coat; her stepmother, short, stout, pretty, and unkempt, in a frayed and faded shirtwaist, and a skirt pinned with a large brass safety-pin dragging away from the belt; three barefooted children in nondescript attire beside her, and a curly-haired, brown-eyed boy of two holding her dress with one hand and throwing kisses with the other. That was how Dosia had seen them last. The elders had been so kind about her going, her eyes filled remorsefully at the thought; she had been so shamelessly glad to go! And yet, she did love them. Mingled with a sense of kindness was also a strange little disappointment—she felt that when they turned homeward with their backs to the train they would let her slip out of their lives with the same ease with which they had accustomed themselves to let other things go, with a selfish inertia too deep to feel anything long. Only the baby—little Rolf—he would miss her; he would cry, at any rate for a while, for his Dosia to put him to sleep. Her lips trembled and her arms yearned for him, with a sudden savage instinct of latent motherhood unknown to her placid stepmother. It was characteristic of this girl, who was tired of taking care of children, that the fact of there being a two-year-old baby also at her cousin’s house seemed now its crowning attraction; she turned comfortingly to intimate speculations about the darling.
After a while the rush-rushing of the train, the sense of traveling, blurred out the past for her. She was journeying to the life that was hers by right; the luxurious appointments of the car, her own new elegance, began to seem a part of her, wonted necessaries to which, indeed, she had been born. It was a buffet-car, and she took the card offered her by the white-aproned colored waiter and selected her dinner as she saw others doing. He was so long in bringing it that she thought he had forgotten it; but at last he brought the meal, and she ate it from the table which he had obseqiously fastened up in front of her; there was an exhilaration in the performance of this very simple act which made several people look at her with a smiling indulgence. Afterwards she put her gray felt hat in the rack, and took off her jacket, and made herself comfortable, as she saw others had done. The car was by no means crowded, and she had seen from the first that there was no one who could serve as a peg to hang a romance on—only middle-aged women and men, and a mother with half-grown children. She fell to wondering, as she had done many times before, what her cousins would be like; she was prepared to love them dearly. With the unconscious egotism of her age, everything in this new life was to revolve around her. The other players were accessories—she was the star performer.
The afternoon whirled away amid patches of light and dark, of green and shadow, red clay and somber pine, scattered white houses and rounded overhanging slopes that shut out the day. Dosia looked, and dreamed—and dreamed. Then night closed her into the train, with its crimson plush and gleaming woods and lights, and strange faces, and impalpable cinders, and that rush-rushing still. Then the berths were made up, people sitting the while in tired, silent groups in other sections, holding on to cloaks and hand-bags, before disappearing singly behind the curtains. Dosia crept under hers. She had first tried to braid the brown hair that would curl itself out of the plaits, and then lay down at last without removing any clothing, with both hands tucked under her soft cheek and her eyes staring before her. There had been a bustle of walking to and fro before the berths were made ready, but after a while all was still behind the long curtains, that waved outward a little when the train went suddenly around a curve. Gradually those wide-open blue eyes began to close; she seemed to be floating in a blissful dream on pillows of roseate down, between waking and sleeping; and then—God in heaven! A crash as of a breaking world, an awful, blinding, helpless terror! A giant force had her by the throat, clutching her, beating her against the planks, jamming her into awful darkness as if she were a creature without bone or sinew, while her shrieking voice lost itself among the other voices shrieking. A plunge, and then—nothing.
The night was inky black, and the wind that swept down the gorge brought an occasional raindrop with it. Dosia felt one fall on her cheek. A long while after that she heard voices, then a man’s hand was passed over her face and a voice close above her said, “It is a woman,” and added, bending still nearer to her, “Can you speak?”
Dosia opened her lips, but no sound came from them; instead, she broke into a helpless sobbing in which there were no tears. The man spoke to some one near, and she became aware that there were other sounds of talking and distress around her. Far up above them an occasional light twinkled and disappeared.
Presently the man bent down to her again, and, lifting her head gently, placed something soft under it. His touch was compassionate, and his tone still more so as he said:
“Are you in much pain?”
She tried again to speak, and again the sobbing spoke for her. She wanted to question him, but could not. He seemed to divine her thought.
“Never mind; do not try to answer me. Perhaps you wonder where you are. There has been a terrible accident—the trestle gave way, and one car fell down here; the others, I believe, smashed farther up somewhere. People are coming to us with light and stretchers, and all we have to do now is to wait patiently. I wonder if you will try and do just as I tell you? Move your right foot—yes, there—now your left—now this arm—now the other. Why, that’s brave of you!”—as she tried to raise herself a little. “Perhaps you will be able to stand soon.” He broke off suddenly with a groan: “I wish to Heaven I had some whisky! I wish to Heaven I had! but there’s not a drop left in the flask.”
The wind began to blow harder, and the rain to descend, and the sounds of moving and confusion around increased. The lights Dosia had seen above seemed to get nearer, and then twinkled down close to the wreck; but even then, in the opaque blackness of the night, they remained only isolated points of light, diffusing no radiance around them, as they dipped down to the earth, and rose again, and wavered and went backward and forward; with them came more voices and stumbling feet, sounds half swallowed by the depth of the night and the growing fury of the gusts of wind.
Dosia felt a new and terrible pang of loneliness as the fleeting flash of a lantern above her revealed that there was no one beside her; it was like being dropped again into nothingness. She did not know how long she lay there. With the recognized tones came a returning wave of life, though she scarce knew what was said. A strong arm raised her to a sitting position, and held her there, with her head resting against the shoulder of this new-found friend. “Drink this—all of it. I want to see if you can stand after a few moments, and perhaps walk—there are so few stretchers.” Dosia could feel him involuntarily shudder.
“No, I will not leave you”—he spoke as one would to a little child, as she made a faint, terrified motion to hold his arm—“I will not leave you. I will take you every step of the way. You are a girl, aren’t you? Were you alone on the train? Had you no friends with you?”
She whispered with some difficulty, “No one.”
“You are perhaps spared much.” There was a silence. Presently he said gently: “We must not wait here too long; we must follow the lanterns—see, they are going. You can stand; now try and walk. Give me your hand—that way. Lean on me. Take one step—now another. Come! Don’t be afraid—you must.”
With his arm around her, supporting, guiding, almost carrying her, she essayed to walk. Shaking at each step pitifully at first, then growing stronger, with one hand locked in his, she found herself ascending the rocky path of the hillside with dark moving shapes beside her. The lights ahead disappeared in the mouth of a long tunnel into which the light was walled solidly. He was leading her along the railroad-ties. As she stumbled from