Chapter 19

A HALF-HOUR'S LIBERTY

Inside the big Interurban car Lydia and Rankin were talking with a freedom that enormously surprised Lydia. The man had started up with an exclamation of pleasure, had taken her bag, found a vacant seat, put her next the window and sat down by her before Lydia, quite breathless with the shock of seeing him, could do more than notice how vigorous he looked, his tall, spare figure alert and erect, his ruddy hair and close-clipped beard contrasting vividly with his dark-blue flannel shirt and soft black hat. He was on a business trip, evidently, for on his knees he held a tool-box with large ungloved hands, roughened and red.

With his usual sweeping disregard of conventional approaches, he plunged boldly into the matter with which their thoughts were at once occupied. "So this was why Dr. Melton insisted I should take this car. Well, I'm grateful to him! It gives me a chance to relieve my mind of a weight of remorse I've been carrying around."

Lydia looked at him, relieved and surprised at the hearty spontaneity of this opening.

He misunderstood her expression. "You don't mind, do you, my speaking to you about last fall--my saying I am so very sorry I made you all the trouble Dr. Melton tells me I did? I'm really very sorry!"

Nothing could have more completely disarmed Lydia's acquired fear of him as the bogey-man of her mother's exhortations. It is true that she was, as she put it to herself, somewhat taken down by the contrast between her secret thought of him as a wounded, rejected suitor, and this clear-eyed, self-possessed, friendly reality before her; but, after a momentary feeling of pique, coming from a sense of the romantic, superficially grafted on her natural good feeling, she was filled with an immense relief. Lydia was no man-eater. In spite of traditional wisdom, she, like a considerable number of her contemporaries, was as far removed from this stage of feminine development as from a Stone-age appetite for raw meat. She now drew a long breath of the most honest satisfaction that she had done him no harm, and smiled at Rankin. He waited for her to speak, and she finally said: "It's awfully good of you to put it that way! I've been afraid you must have been angry with me and hurt that I--so you didn't mind at all!"

Rankin smiled at little ruefully at her swift conclusion. "I believe in telling the truth, even to young ladies, and I can not say I didn't mind at all--or that I don't now. But I am convinced that you were right in dropping me--out of the realm of acquaintances." His assumption was, Lydia saw with gratitude, that they were talking simply about a possible acquaintanceship between them. "It's evidently true--what I told you the very first time I saw you. We don't belong in the same world."

As he said this, he looked at her with an expression Lydia thought severe. She protested, "What makes you so sure?"

"Because to live in my world--even to step into it from time to time--requires the courage to believe in it."

"And you think I didn't?" asked Lydia. It was an inestimable comfort to her to have brought into the light the problem that had so long lain in the back of her head, a confused mass of dark conjecture.

"Did you?" he asked steadily. "You ought to know."

There was silence, while Lydia turned her head away and looked at the brown, flat winter landscape jerking itself past the windows as the car began to develop speed in the first long, open space between settlements. She was trying to remember something distinct about the nightmare of misery that had followed her admission of the identity of the man who had kissed her hand that starry night in October, but from the black chaos of her recollection she brought out only, "Oh, you don't realize how things are with a girl--how many million little ways she's bound and tied down, just from everybody in the family loving her as--"

"Oh, yes, I do; I prove I do by saying that you were probably right in yielding so absolutely to that overwhelming influence. If you hadn't the strength to break through it decisively even once, you certainly couldn't have gotten any satisfaction out of doing things contrary to it. So it's all right, you see."

Lydia's drooping face did not show that she derived the satisfaction from this view of her limitations that her companion seemed to expect. "You mean I'm a poor-spirited, weak thing, who'd better never try to take a step of my own," she said with a sorry smile.

"I don't mean anything unkind," he told her gently. "I've succeeded in convincing myself that your action of last autumn was the result of a deep-rooted instinct for self-preservation--and that's certainly most justifiable. It meant I'd expected too harsh a strength from you--" he went on with a whimsical smile, which even the steadiness of his eyes did not keep from sadness--"as though I'd hoped you could lift a thousand-pound weight, like the strong woman in the side-show."

She responded to his attempt at lightness with as plain an undercurrent of seriousness as his own. "Why do you live so that people have to lift thousand-pound weights before they dare so much as say good-morning to you?"

"Because I don't dare live any other way," he answered.

"It's hard on other people," Lydia ventured, but retreated hastily before the first expression of upbraiding she had seen in his eyes. He had so suddenly turned grave with the thought that it had been harder on him than on anyone else that she cried out hurriedly, "But you didn't help a bit--you left it all to me--"

She stopped, her face burning in uncertainty of the meaning of her words.

Rankin's answer came with the swiftness of one who has meditated long on a question. "I'm glad you've given me a chance to say what--I've wished you might know. I thought it over and over at the time--and since--and I'm sure it would not have been honorable--or delicate--or right, _not_ to leave it all to you. That much was yours to decide--whether you would take the first step. It would have been a crime to have hurried or urged you beyond what lay in your heart to do--or to have overborne you against some deep-lying, innate instinct."

Lydia's voice was shaking in self-pity as she cried out, "Oh, if you knew what the others--nobody _else_ was afraid to hurry or urge me to--"

She stopped and looked away, her heart beating rapidly with a flood of recollections. Rankin's lips opened, but he shut them firmly, as though he did not trust himself to speak. His large red hands closed savagely on the handle of his tool-box. There was a silence between them.

The car began to move more slowly, and the conductor, standing up from the seat where he had been dozing, remarked in a conversational tone to a woman with two children near him, "Gardenton--this is the cross-roads to Gardenton." Later, as the car stood still under the singing vibration of the trolley-wire overhead, he added in the general direction of Lydia and Rankin, now the only passengers, "Next stop is Wardsboro'!" His voice came to them with a singular clearness in the quiet of the momentary stop. They were in the midst of a mournful expanse of bare ploughed fields, frozen and brown. The motorman released his brake, letting the brass arm swing noisily about, the conductor sat down again, and as the car began to move forward again he closed his eyes. He looked very tired and, now that an almost instant sleep had relaxed his features, pathetically young.

"How pale he is," said Lydia, wishing to break the silence with a harmless remark. "He looks tired to death."

"He probably is just that," said Rankin, wincing. "It's sickening, the way they work. Seven days a week, most of them, you know."

"No; I didn't know," cried Lydia, shocked. "Why, that's awful. When do they see their families?"

"They don't. One of them, whose house isn't far from mine, told me that he hadn't seen his children, except asleep, for three weeks."

"But something ought to be done about it!" The girl's deep-lying instinct for instant reparation rose up hotly.

"Are they so much worse off than most American business men?" queried Rankin. "Do any of them feel they can take the time to see much more than the outside of their children; and isn't seeing them asleep about as--"

Lydia cut him short quickly. "You're always blaming them for that," she cried. "You ought to pity them. They can't help it. It's better for the children to have bread and butter, isn't it--"

Rankin shook his head. "I can't be fooled with that sort of talk--I've lived with too many kinds of people. At least half the time it isn't a question of bread and butter. It's a question of giving the children bread and butter and sugar rather than bread and butter and father. Of course, I'm a fanatic on the subject. I'd rather leave off even the butter than the father--let alone the sugar."

"But here's this very motorman you know about--what could he do?"

"They're not forced by the company to work seven days a week--only they're not given pay enough to let them take even one day off without feeling it. This very motorman I was talking with got to telling me why he was working so extra hard just then. His oldest daughter is going to graduate from the high school and he wants to give her a fine graduating dress, as good as anybody's, and a graduating 'present.' It seems that's the style now for graduating girls. He said he and his wife wanted her always to remember that day as a bright spot, and not as a time when she was humiliated by being different from other girls."

"Well, my goodness! you're not criticizing them for that, are you? I think it was just as sweet and lovely of them as can be to realize how a girl feels."

Rankin looked at her, smiled slightly, and said nothing. His silence made Lydia thoughtful. After a time, "I see what you mean, of course," she said slowly, "that it would be _better_ for her, perhaps--but if he _loves_ her, her father _wants_ to do things for her."

Rankin's roar of exasperation at this speech was so evidently directed at an old enemy of an argument that Lydia was only for an instant startled by it. "I _don't_ say he can do too much for her," he cried. "He can't! Nobody can do too much for anybody else if it's the right thing."

"And what in the world do you think _would_ be the right thing in this case?" Lydia put the question as a poser.

"Why, of course, to pamper her vanity; to feed her moral cowardice; to make her more afraid than ever of senseless public opinion; to deprive her of a fine exercise for her spiritual force; to shut her off from a sense of her material situation in life until the knowledge of it will come as a tragedy to her; to let her grow up without any knowledge of her father's point of view--"

"There, there! That's enough!" said Lydia.

"I didn't need to be so violent about it, that's a fact," apologized Rankin.

"But you're talking of people the way they ought to be," objected Lydia, apparently drawing again from a stock of inculcated arguments. "Do you really, honestly, suppose that that girl would rather have an opportunity to do something for her parents and--and--and all that, than have a fine dress that would cost a lot and make the other girls envious?"

"Oh, Lydia!" cried her companion, not noticing the betrayal of a mental habit in the slipping out of her name. "You're just in a state of saturated solution of Dr. Melton. Don't you believe a word he says about folks. They're lots better than he thinks. The only reason anybody has for raging at them for being a bad lot is because they are such a good lot! They are so chuck-full of good possibilities! There's so much more good in them than bad. You think that, don't you? You _must_! There's nothing to go on, if you don't."

As Lydia began to answer she felt herself, as once or twice before when with Rankin, suddenly an immeasurable distance from her usual ways of mental life. She looked about her upon a horizon very ample and quite strange, without being able to trace the rapid steps that had carried her away from the close-walled room full of knickknacks and trifles, where she usually lived. She drew a deep breath of surprise and changed her answer to an honest "I don't believe I know whether I believe you or not. I don't think I ever thought of it before."

"What _do_ you think about?" The question was evidently too sincere an interrogation to resent.

The girl made several beginnings at an answer, stopped, looked out of the window, looked down at her shoe-tip, and finally burst into her little clear trill of amusement. "I don't," she said, looking full at Rankin, her eyes shining. "You've caught me! I can't remember a single time in my day when I think about anything but hurrying to get dressed in time to be at the next party promptly. Maybe some folks can think when they're hurrying to get dressed, but I can't."

Rankin was very little moved to hilarity by this statement, but he was too young to resist the contagion of Lydia's mirth, and laughed back at her, wondering at the mobility of her ever-changing face.

"If you don't think, what do you _do_?" he interrogated with mock relentlessness.

"Nothing," said Lydia recklessly, still laughing.

"What do you feel?" he went on in the same tone, but Lydia's face changed quickly.

"Oh--lots!" she said uncertainly, and was silent.

The car began to pass some poor, small houses, and in a moment came to a standstill in the midst of a straggling village. The young conductor still slept on, his head fallen so far on his shoulder that his breathing was difficult. The motorman, getting no signal to go on, looked back through the window, putting his face close to the glass to see, for it had grown dusky outside and the electric lights were not yet turned on. After a look at the sleeping man he glanced apprehensively at the two passengers, and then, apparently reassured that they were not "company detectives," he pushed open the door. "This is Wardsboro'," he told them as he went down the aisle, "and the next stop is Hardville."

He was a strong, burly man, and easily lifted the slight, boyish form of the conductor to a more comfortable position, propping him up in a corner of the seat. The young man did not waken, but his face relaxed into peaceful lines of unconsciousness as his head fell back, and his breathing became long and regular, like a sleeping child's. As the big motorman went back to his post, he explained a little sheepishly to the two, who had watched his operation in attentive silence, "It's against the rules, I know, but there ain't anybody but you two here, and he don't look as though he'd really got his growth yet. I got a boy ain't sixteen that looks as old as he does, and ruggeder at that. I reckon the long hours are too much for him."

"Do you know him?" asked Rankin.

The motorman turned his red, weather-beaten face to them from the doorway where he stood, pulling on his clumsy gloves. "Who, me?" he asked. "No; I never seen him till to-day. He's a new hand, I reckon." He drew the door after him with a rattling slam, rang the bell for himself, and started the car forward.

In the warm, vibrating solitude of the car, the two young people looked at each other in a silent transport. Lydia's dark eyes were glistening, and she checked Rankin, about to speak, with a quick, broken "No; don't say a word! You'd spoil it!"

There was between them one of the long, vital silences, full of certainty of a common emotion, which had once or twice before marked a significant change in their relation. Finally, "That's something I shall never forget," said Lydia.

Rankin looked at her in silence, and then, quickly, away.

"It's like an answer to what I was saying--a refutation of what Dr. Melton thinks--about people--"

As Rankin still made no answer, she exclaimed in a ravished surprise, "Why, I never saw anything so lovely--that made me so happy! I feel warm all over!"

Indeed, her face shone through the dusk upon her companion, who could now no longer constrain himself to look away from her. He said, his voice vibrant with a deep note which instantly carried Lydia back to the other time when she had heard it, under the stars of last October, "It's only an instrument exquisitely in tune which can so respond--" He broke off, closed his lips, and, turning away from her, gazed sightlessly out at the dim, flat horizon, now the only outline visible in the twilight.

Lydia said nothing, either then or when, after a long pause, he said that he would leave the car at the next station.

"It has been very pleasant to see you again," he said, bending over his tool-box, "and you mustn't lay it up against me that I haven't congratulated you on your engagement. Of course you know how I wish you all happiness."

"Thank you," said Lydia.

Ahead of the car, some lights suddenly winking above the horizon announced the approach of Hardville. Rankin stood up, slipped on his rough overcoat, and sat down again. He drew a long breath, and began evenly: "I know you won't misunderstand me if I try to say one more thing. I probably won't see you again for years, and it would be a great joy to me to be sure that you know how hearty is my good-will to you. I'm afraid you can't think of me without pain, because I was the cause of such discomfort to you, but I know you are too generous to blame me for what was an involuntary hurt. Of course I ought to have known how your guardians would feel about your knowing me--"

"Oh, _why_ should you be so that all that happened!" cried Lydia suddenly. "If it was too hard for me, why couldn't you have made it easier--thought differently--acted like other people. _Would_ you--if I hadn't--if we had gone on knowing each other?"

Rankin turned very white. "No," he said; "I couldn't."

"It seems to me," said Lydia hurriedly, "that, without being willing to concede anything to their ideas, you ask a great deal of your friends."

"Yes," said Rankin, "I do. It's a hard struggle I'm in with myself and the world--oh, evidently much too hard for you even to look at from a distance." His voice broke. "The best thing I can do for you is to stay away--" He rose, and stepped into the aisle. "But you are so kind--you will let me serve you in any other way, if I can--ever. If I can ever do something that's hard for you to do--you must know that I stand as ready as even Dr. Melton to do it for you if I can."

Indeed, for the moment, as Lydia looked up into his kind, strong face, his impersonal tenderness made him seem almost such an old, tried friend as her godfather; almost as unlikely to expect any intimate personal return from her.

"You must remember," he went on, "the great joy it gave us both to-day even to see an act of kindness. Give me an opportunity to do one for you if I ever can."

It already seemed to Lydia as though he had gone away from her, as though this were but a beneficent memory of him lingering by her side. She hardly noticed when he left her alone in the car.

The conductor started up, wakened by the silence, and announced wildly, "Wardsboro', Wardsboro'!"

"No, it ain't; it's the first stop in Hardville," contradicted the motorman, sticking his head in through the door. "Turn on them lights!"

As the glass bulbs leaped to a dazzling glare, Lydia blinked and looked away out of the window. A moment later an arm laid about her neck made her bound up in amazement and confront a small, middle-aged woman, with a hat too young for her tired, sallow face, with a note-book in her hand and an apologetic expression of affection in her light blue eyes. "I'm sorry I startled you, Miss Lydia," she said. "I keep forgetting you're not still a little girl I can pick up and hug."

"Oh, you!" breathed the girl, sitting down again. "I didn't think there was anybody in the car with me, you see."

"Have you come all the way from Endbury alone, then?" asked Miss Burgess, looking about her suspiciously.

"No, I have not," said Lydia uncompromisingly. "Mr. Rankin, the cabinet-maker, has been with me till just now."

Miss Burgess sat down hastily in the vacant seat by Lydia. "And he's coming back?" she inquired.

"No; he got off at Hardville. This _is_ Hardville, isn't it?"

"Yes. I happened to be out reporting a big church bazaar here." She settled back comfortably. "What a nice chance for a cozy little visit I shall have with you. These long trips on the Interurban are fine for talking. Unless I shall tire you? Did Mr. Rankin talk much? What does he talk _about_, anyhow? He's always so rude to me that I've never heard him say a word except about his work."

Lydia considered for a moment. "We talked about the street-car conductors having such long hours to work," she said, "and later about whether people have more bad in them than good."

"Oh!" said Miss Burgess.

Lydia smiled faintly, the ghost of her whimsical little look of mockery. "We decided that they have more good," she said.

Miss Burgess cast about her for a suitable comment. At last, "Really!" she said.