Chapter 16

ALICE ON THE WAY

Out on a Dakota prairie, in a corner of a motionless Pullman sat a short girl in a plain blue suit, her grey eyes behind thick glasses bent upon the pages of a red leather book.

"'Beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness.'" She read the words over and over, and the book fell from her hands as she looked out on the limitless fields. "'Beauty for ashes.' What a striking way of putting it! 'The oil of joy'--why, I wonder what we are stopping here so long for. It doesn't look like a station."

And suddenly Alice Prescott sat up straight and looked about her, alert and alive.

The porter came slowly in response to her repeated ring. "What's the matter? Why, there's an engine off the track a little ways off, and our crew and engine has gone to help. No, nobody hurt. Just a freight engine. Don't know how long. Mebbe one hour. Mebbe two."

"But I'll miss my connections!"

"Too bad, Miss." The porter looked at her with lazy curiosity. The train had already been at a standstill for ten minutes, and every other woman on the car had put him through a catechism long ago. This girl looked awake and practical. How could a porter understand that the mere beauty of words and ideas could render one unconscious to delays in transportation?

Alice rose and walked up and down the aisle. Three women, rather overdressed, were playing cards in a remote section. A man slept in a corner. She went to the door, and seeing groups of passengers standing outside along the track, jumped down from the high step and walked a little, tasting the fresh air with pleasure. The country offered nothing to her gaze. Her eye, accustomed to mountains, found endless level stretches harrowing rather than soothing. She recalled a Dakota girl at Dexter who was always telling of the beauty of the prairie, and longing for it. "I suppose it's a matter of habit," she thought to herself. "There is certainly something that kindles your imagination in such a sight. It would be dreary if it weren't cultivated, but it must be wonderful to see a whole country reclaimed from wildness and made productive. 'Beauty for ashes' O!" and with a little shiver of pleasure, she repeated the lines that had so charmed her a few minutes before. "'The spirit of heaviness.' What a strange thing to include in the same message with the vengeance of the Lord! It makes blues and dullness seem so important. It doesn't say anything here about Christ's coming to heal bodily suffering or sin, and it does explicitly say he is to cure the blues. Isn't that interesting?"

Her walk had brought her to the first of the line of day-coaches by this time, and she glanced up at the listless faces leaned against the dirty window-panes. As she passed, each pair of eyes rested wearily on her figure. Suddenly a thought struck her. Blues and dullness! Where were they ever more to the fore than here? She entered the car impulsively and stood looking people over. She spoke to the nearest woman.

"It's a nuisance having to wait so, isn't it? Wouldn't you like to come out for a little walk?"

"No," snapped the woman, "I wouldn't." Alice flushed, then smiled and went on down the aisle. Evidently her mission of good fairy was not going to be successful at the start. "Some people want to be 'heavy,'" she thought. "I'll take some one who looks as though she wanted to be lightened up. Here's one."

The red-eyed cindery young woman who was curled up in her seat, dabbing her cheeks with a smeary handkerchief, looked as though any change would be a welcome one. Alice stopped resolutely. "Can I do anything for you?" she asked, not at all sure of her reception.

The girl lifted her eyes and swallowed a sob. "Nobud-d-dy can," she wailed; "I'm going to be m-m-married!"

Alice's face twitched. "Won't you tell me about it?" she asked. "Cheering folks up" was proving an intricate business. "If the garment of praise doesn't fit any one," she thought, "I'll just have to carry it back and wear it myself."

The bride gulped and spoke again:

"It's to be to-night and I've missed my train at the Junction already, and I don't know what to do. Everybody was invited and the supper won't keep, and I lost my solid silver hatpin, anyway."

"Can't you come out and walk with me?" suggested Alice. "The air will make you feel better. Bathe your eyes and come."

Still tearful, but manifestly a little relieved, the bride obeyed and, once out on the prairie, poured forth her tale. She had at the last moment decided she could not bear to be married without a veil, and had gone early in the morning to the nearest town to invest her last money in that frivolity. Fate was against her, however, for there were no veils in the shops, and a persuasive milliner had induced her to give up her cherished notion and buy a hat instead. "And I'm most sure the ribbon's cotton-back," she sighed. "I don't know why I bought it, anyway. That's always the way with me. I think I know what I'll get, and then they coax me into getting something different. Once I went down town to buy me a pair of black stockings, and I got an Alice blue silk waist, instead. Stephen he thinks it's funny and he says he'll see to the shopping when we're married. I wisht he'd come to-day."

"Wouldn't it be fun if he had?" said Alice. "There is a minister on the train, and we could have had a lovely wedding out here!"

This romantic idea cheered them both for a time, but its power was brief. There were signs of a tear-shower imminent, and Alice was at her wits' end for devices to adjust that garment of praise to fit.

Then came a great inspiration. "Let's walk to the Junction," she exclaimed. "I'll go with you, and you can get a team there, and drive home."

"But you'd miss your train."

"O, no, I wouldn't. It has to come right along there behind us, and I could jump on the cow-catcher if it came; but it can't come without an engine, and there isn't one in sight, and it's only two miles to your Junction, you say. That won't be anything of a walk. Go and get your hat-box."

The hat-box was not all. Though the journey was to be only a short one, the bride had taken a satchel with her of a type Alice especially loathed. This was a trifle, however, to a spirit so bent on adventure, and Alice seized the "grip" and started off at a brisk pace.

"I can't walk so fast," said the bride fretfully. "My shoes hurt."

Alice looked from her own broad-soled street shoes to the high-heeled, misshapen things on her companion's feet. The latter looked at them, too, with pride and affection. "I'm going to wear them at the wedding and I thought that, being they was so tight, I'd best break 'em in a little first."

"I see," and Alice moderated her own pace to the hobbling gait of the wedding slippers. Two miles seemed more of an undertaking now and she began to wonder if she had been rash in her suggestion. "I'll carry it through," she said to herself. "I know I can, and I won't back down. We'll get tired if we keep going without rests," she said aloud. "So let's walk ten minutes and then rest. You can tell by your watch."

The bride brightened at the allusion to the great plated and chased timepiece suspended from a rhinestone dove very near to her breast-bone. "Steve give me that when we was first engaged," she explained, and Alice smiled indulgently. "He give me my bracelet for Christmas, and all his friends give me bangles." She jingled the thing proudly as she spoke. "There's thirty-four of 'em."

"Thirty-four friends! He must be a popular man!" said Alice.

"O, he is, awful. And he's the handsomest! You just ought to see him."

"The garment of praise is settling into place without a wrinkle," thought Alice. "I hope she won't take it all, for I may need a corner of it myself, to console me for this abominable bag, and the tinkle of that bracelet. I suppose she would think it was finer than the jade one Mrs. Langdon gave me. And I wonder what she would think if she knew my necklace was under my dress, so it wouldn't show in travelling. O, well, she's a nice little thing, and I hope Steve will be good to her."

"I'm afraid you'll be all beat out helping me," said the bride remorsefully, as they paused once more for a rest. "I don't know how I'll ever thank you, anyhow."

"O, that's all right," and Alice seized the bag and bore it mightily forward.

"O, dear," sighed the bride presently. "There's somebody driving this way. I wish they was going the other, and would give us a lift."

The black speck down the road, which here ran alongside the track, expanded rapidly, developing into a smart buggy with two good horses, and a man driving. He leaned forward as he neared them, and suddenly reined in the horses with a jerk.

"Great Guns!" he shouted, throwing the reins over the dashboard, and leaping out over the wheel.

"It's Steve," cried the bride in a rapture, and Alice pinched herself with delight as Steve embraced his lady.

"However in the world did you get off here?" he asked, releasing her enough to reply.

"How did you?" she answered, and he laughed, "O, I thought I'd drive over to the Junction to meet you and carry you home, and I heard about the train being stalled out here and couldn't get out for hours, so I drove on, that's all. But the idea of you hoofing it in!" He put his head back and laughed loudly.

His fiancée then remembered Alice and introduced her, telling Steve of her kind interest. He was all cordiality, and offered to give her a ride back to the train.

"No, no," she protested. "I love to walk. And do hurry along home and have the wedding. I'm so glad it all turned out all right; and you're feeling happier, aren't you?" she asked the girl.

Steve put his arm around his little bride gently. "I guess she won't ever feel bad again. I shan't let her go off alone any more. And thank you for what you done. I shan't forget it. Say, couldn't you stop off now for the wedding?"

"O, do," begged the bride, and Alice had to refuse tenderly. She watched them get into the buggy, and drive happily away, waving to her as they did so. Then she turned back to her train, and her own car.

One of the card-playing women was tired and inclined to be sociable. So Alice sat with her, by invitation, and listened to the history of her family's diseases and operations, and her difficulties with servants, till the train was started once more and the rumble of the cars resumed their interrupted song of "Getting nearer, getting nearer."

"I must hear it that way every minute," Alice thought, as she took her own seat again, and while the lamps were lighted, watched in the windows not the rushing landscape but her own face. "It would be so easy to hear 'Getting farther,' and think of leaving home for nine whole months, but I'll just remember Hannah and Catherine and Frieda and dear Dexter,--and that will keep the garment from slipping off my shoulders."