Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

“ Hesitating a moment, she stared up utterly unsmilingly into the Salesman's beaming face, ignored the Youngish Girl's inviting hand, and with a sudden little chuckling sigh of contentment, climbed up clumsily into the empty place beside the Young Electrician, rummaged bustlingly around with its hands and feet for an instant, in a petulant effort to make a comfortable nest for itself, and then snuggled down at last, lolling half-way across the Young Electrician's perfectly strange knees, and drowsed off to sleep with all the delicious, friendly, unconcerned sang-froid of a tired puppy. ”

“ And then suddenly, out of the blur, and the dust, and the dizziness, and the half-blinding glare of lights, the figure of a Man loomed up directly and indomitably across the Youngish Girl's path--a Man standing bare-headed and faintly smiling as one who welcomes a much-reverenced guest--a Man tall, stalwart, sober-eyed, with a touch of gray at his temples, a Man whom any woman would be proud to have waiting for her at the end of any journey. ”

“ More than being absurdly blond and absurdly messy, the Young Electrician had one of those extraordinarily sweet, extraordinarily vital, strangely mysterious, utterly unexplainable masculine faces that fill your senses with an odd, impersonal disquietude, an itching unrest, like the hazy, teasing reminder of some previous existence in a prehistoric cave, or, more tormenting still, with the tingling, psychic prophecy of some amazing emotional experience yet to come. ”

“ Then, as the bumpy cars switched laboriously into a siding, and the engine went puffing off alone on some noncommittal errand of its own, the Young Electrician rose and stretched himself and peered out of the window into the acres and acres of snow, and bent down suddenly and swung the child to his shoulder, then, sauntering down the aisle to the door, jumped off into the snow and started to explore the edge of a little, snow-smothered pond which a score of red-mittened children were trying frantically to clear with huge yellow brooms. ”

“ Martha's got a sore thought. That's what ails her. And God help the crittur with a sore thought! God help anybody who's got any one single, solitary sick idea that keeps thinking on top of itself, over and over and over, boring into the past, bumping into the future, fussing, fretting, eternally festering. ”

“ Something, indeed, in the peculiar set of the Young Electrician's jaw warned you quite definitely that if you should ever even so much as hint the small, sentimental word "lure" to him he would most certainly "swat" you on first impulse for a maniac, and on second impulse for a liar—smiling at you all the while in the strange little wrinkly tissue round his eyes. ”

“ I can recognize a slim fellow when I see him, Johnny,' she says, 'and I like nice grammar as well as the next one, but praising 'em to you, dear, don't seem to me so awfully polite. Bragging about handsome women to a plain wife, Johnny,' she says, 'is just about as raw as bragging about rich men to a husband who's broke.'
"Oh, I tell you a fellow's a fool," mused the Traveling Salesman judicially, "a fellow's a fool when he marries who don't go to work deliberately to study and understand his wife. Women are awfully understandable if you only go at it right. ”

“ More than being short and quick, the Traveling Salesman was distinctly fat and unmistakably dressy in an ostentatiously new and pure-looking buff-colored suit, and across the top of the shiny black sample-case that spanned his knees he sorted and re-sorted with infinite earnestness a large and varied consignment of "Ladies' Pink and Blue Ribbed Undervests." Surely no other man in the whole southward-bound Canadian train could have been at once so ingenuous and so nonchalant. ”

“ Life insurance ain't by any means, in my mind, the only kind of protection that a man owes his widow. Provide for her Future—if you can!—That's my motto!—But a man's just a plain bum who don't provide for his own Past! She may have plenty of trouble in the years to come settling her own bills, but she ain't going to have any worry settling any of mine. I tell you, there'll be no ladies swelling round in crape at my funeral that my wife don't know by their first names!"
With a sudden startling guffaw the Traveling Salesman's mirth rang joyously out above the roar of the car. ”

“ Altogether unconsciously her small hands went gripping out to the edge of her seat, as though just a grip on plush could hold her imagination back from soaring into a miraculous, unfamiliar world where women did not idle all day long on carpets waiting for men who came on--pavements. ”

“ Why, when I was first married I used to think that my wife was awful snippety about other women. But, Lord! when you point a girl out in the car and say, 'Well, ain't that girl got the most gorgeous head of hair you ever saw in your life?' and your wife says: 'Yes—Jordan is selling them puffs six for a dollar seventy-five this winter,' she ain't intending to be snippety at all. No!—It's only, I tell you, that it makes a woman feel just plain silly to think that her husband don't even know as much as she does. ”

“ But with people like us—me and the Electrician, or the soldier's widow from South Africa who does your washing, or the Eskimo man at the circus—you're as simple as a kitten. All your own kind of folks are nothing but grown-up people to you, and you treat 'em like grown-ups all right—a hundred cents to the dollar—but all our kind of folks are playmates to you, and you take us as easy and pleasant as you'd slide down on the floor and play with any other kind of a kid. ”

“ Just for a moment, then, his smiling eyes reassured the jaded, jabbering French-Canadian mother, who turned round with craning neck from the front of the car.
"She's all right here. Let her alone!" he signaled gesticulatingly from child to mother.
Then, turning to the Traveling Salesman, he mused reminiscently: "Talking's—all—right. But where in creation do you get the time to think? Got any kids?" he asked abruptly.
"N-o," said the Traveling Salesman. "My wife, I guess, is kid enough for me."
Around the Young Electrician's eyes the whimsical smile-wrinkles deepened with amazing vividness. ”

“ A moment later he and the Traveling Salesman were forging their way ahead through the crowded aisle. Like the transient, impersonal, altogether mysterious stimulant of a strain of martial music, the Young Electrician vanished into space. But just at the edge of the car steps the Traveling Salesman dallied a second to wait for the Youngish Girl. ”

“ But 'Martha,' I says, of course, 'Martha, it sure does beat all how we fellows that travel round so much in cars and trains are always and forever picking up automobile veils—dozens of them, dozens—red, blue, pink, yellow—why, I wouldn't wonder if my wife had as many as thirty-four tucked away in her top bureau drawer!'—'I wouldn't wonder,' says Martha, stooping lower and lower over Thomkins's blue cotton shirt that she's trying to cut down into rompers for the baby. ”

“ For just an instant the Youngish Girl gazed a bit skeptically at the Traveling Salesman's general rotund air of prosperity.
"You don't look--exactly like a man who's never had enough," she said smilingly.
"Food?" said the Traveling Salesman. "Oh, shucks! It wasn't food I was thinking of. It was education. Oh, of course," he added conscientiously, "of course, when the crops weren't either too heavy or too blooming light, Pa usually managed some way or other to get Daniel and me to school. ”

“ And that little retriever of mine would have gone straight to work and ferreted out every single, solitary, uncomplimentary thing about Ella that she could find, and 'a' fetched 'em to me as pleased and proud as a puppy, expecting, for all the world, to be petted and patted for her astonishing shrewdness. And there would sure have been gloom in the Sabbath.
"But now--now--what I say now is: 'Wife, I'm going to bring Ella down for Sunday. You've never seen her, and you sure will hate her. ”

“ Ella's a traveling man, too. Sells shotguns up through the Aroostook. Yes, shotguns! Funny, ain't it, and me selling undervests? Ella's an awful smart girl. Good as gold. But cheeky? Oh, my!--Well, once I would have brought her down to the house for Sunday, and advertised her as a 'peach,' and a 'dandy good fellow,' and praised her eyes, and bragged about her cleverness, and generally done my best to smooth over all her little deficiencies with as much palaver as I could. ”

“ Yes, sir, that's what she is—a retriever; faithful, clever, absolutely unscarable, with no other object in life except to track down and fetch to her husband every possible interesting fact in the world that he don't already know. And then she's so excited and pleased with what she's got in her mouth that it 'most breaks her heart if her man don't seem to care about it. ”

“ Sure you can listen! Though, bless your heart, we weren't talking about anything so very specially interesting," he explained conscientiously. "You see, I was merely arguing with my young friend here that if a woman really loves you, she'll follow you through any kind of blame or disgrace--follow you anywheres, I said--anywheres!"
"Not anywheres," protested the Young Electrician with a grin. "'Not up a telegraph pole!'" he requoted sheepishly.
"Y-e-s--I heard that," acknowledged the Youngish Girl with blithe shamelessness. ”

“ It's Fate's move next."
"But maybe he never got the letter!" protested the Traveling Salesman, buckling frantically at the straps of his sample-case.
"Very likely," the Youngish Girl answered calmly. "And if he never got it, then Fate has surely settled everything perfectly definitely for me—that way. The only trouble with that would be," she added whimsically, "that an unanswered letter is always pretty much like an unhooked hook. Any kind of a gap is apt to be awkward, and the hook that doesn't catch in its own intended tissue is mighty apt to tear later at something you didn't want torn." ”

“ Slowly to the tips of his ears mounted a dark red flush of real mortification.
"Now, there's some traveling men," he mourned, "who are as slick and fine as any college president you ever saw. But me? I'd look coarse sipping warm milk out of a gold-lined spoon. I haven't had any education. And I'm fat, besides!" Almost plaintively he turned and stared for a second from the Young Electrician's embarrassed grin to the Youngish Girl's more subtle smile. ”

“ Halfway up the car the French Canadian mother and her brood of children crowded their faces close to the window—and thought they were watching the snow.
And suddenly the car seemed very empty. The Youngish Girl thought it was her book that had grown so astonishingly devoid of interest. Only the Traveling Salesman seemed to know just exactly what was the matter. Craning his neck till his ears reddened, he surveyed and resurveyed the car, complaining: "What's become of all the folks?" ”

“ But all the time I couldn't seem to think about anything except how perfectly awful it was that a stranger like me should be running round loose in the world, carrying all the big, scary secrets of a man who didn't even know where I was. ”

“ And in this very seat I'm sitting in now, I guess, a red-kerchiefed Dago woman, who worked on a pansy farm just outside of Boston, used to ride in town with me every night for a month, and she coached me quite a bit on Dago talk, and I paid her five dollars for that."
"Oh, dear me!" said the Youngish Girl, with unmistakable sincerity. "I'm afraid you haven't learned anything at all from me!"
"Oh, yes, I have too!" cried the Traveling Salesman, his whole round face lighting up suddenly with real pleasure. "I've learned about an entirely new kind of lady to go home and tell my wife about. ”

“ So if I should croak sudden any time in a railroad accident or a hotel fire or a scrap in a saloon, I ain't calculating on leaving my wife any very large amount of 'sore thoughts.' When a man wants his memory kept green, he don't mean--gangrene! ”

“ We always were a powerfully unlucky family. Nothing much ever came our way!"
Even as he spoke, a toddling youngster from an overcrowded seat at the front end of the car came adventuring along the aisle after the swaying, clutching manner of tired, fretty children on trains. ”