CHAPTER XIV

THE DORMITORY ON WHEELS

Of all the shocking institutions in human history, the sleeping car is the most shocking--or would be, if we were not so used to it. There can be no doubt that we are the most moral nation on earth, for we admit it ourselves. Perhaps we prove it, too, by the Arcadian prosperity of these two-story hotels on wheels, where miscellaneous travelers dwell in complete promiscuity, and sleep almost side by side, in apartments, or compartments, separated only by a plank and a curtain, and guarded only by one sleepy negro.

After the fashion of the famous country whose inhabitants earned a meagre sustenance by taking in each other's washing, so in Sleeping Carpathia we attain a meagre respectability by everybody's chaperoning everybody else.

So topsy-turvied, indeed, are our notions, once we are aboard a train, that the staterooms alone are regarded with suspicion; we question the motives of those who must have a room to themselves!--a room with a real door! that locks!!

And, now, on this sleeping car, prettily named "Snowdrop," scenes were enacting that would have thrown our great-grandmothers into fits--scenes which, if we found them in France, or Japan, we should view with alarm as almost unmentionable evidence of the moral obliquity of those nations.

But this was our own country--the part of it which admits that it is the best part--the moralest part, the staunch Middle West. This was Illinois. Yet dozens of cars were beholding similar immodesties in chastest Illinois, and all over the map, thousands of people, in hundreds of cars, were permitting total strangers to view preparations which have always, hitherto, been reserved for the most intimate and legalized relations.

The porter was deftly transforming the day-coach into a narrow lane entirely surrounded by portières. Behind most of the portières, fluttering in the lightest breeze, and perilously following the hasty passer-by, homely offices were being enacted. The population of this little town was going to bed. The porter was putting them to sleep as if they were children in a nursery, and he a black mammy.

The frail walls of little sanctums were bulging with the bodies of people disrobing in the aisle, with nothing between them and the beholder's eye but a clinging curtain that explained what it did not reveal. From apertures here and there disembodied feet were protruding and mysterious hands were removing shoes and other things.

Women in risky attire were scooting to one end of the car, and men in shirt sleeves, or less, were hastening to the other.

When Mallory returned to the "Snowdrop," his ear was greeted by the thud of dropping shoes. He found Marjorie being rapidly immured, like Poe's prisoner, in a jail of closing walls.

She was unspeakably ill at ease, and by the irony of custom, the one person on whom she depended for protection was the one person whose contiguity was most alarming--and all for lack of a brief trialogue, with a clergyman, as the _tertium quid_.

When Mallory's careworn face appeared round the edge of the partition now erected between her and the abode of Doctor and Mrs. Temple, Marjorie shivered anew, and asked with all anxiety:

"Did you find a minister?"

Perhaps the Recording Angel overlooked Mallory's answer: "Not a damn' minister."

When he dropped at Marjorie's side, she edged away from him, pleading: "Oh, what shall we do?"

He answered dismally and ineffectively: "We'll have to go on pretending to be--just friends."

"But everybody thinks we're married."

"That's so!" he admitted, with the imbecility of fatigued hope. They sat a while listening to the porter slipping sheets into place and thumping pillows into cases, a few doors down the street. He would be ready for them at any moment. Something must be done, but what? what?