Caleb Conover, Railroader

by Albert Payson Terhune

Yet none of the three members of the Conover family, sheltered within the Mausoleum, were awakened by the bellow of the cyclone, for none were asleep. Letty, alone in her great, hideous bedroom, lay alternately praying and weeping in maudlin comfortlessness over her absent daughter; and at sound of the hubbub outside wept the more and prayed with an added terror.

Gerald, despite the early start he must make in the morning, was still dressed, and was slouching back and forth in his suite of apartments, muttering occasionally to himself, and at other times pausing to gaze lifelessly ahead of him. As the ever-louder voice of the storm broke in on his thoughts, he stopped short in his aimless march, his dry lips twitching and on his face the nervous terror of a suddenly awakened child. He shambled into an inner chamber, unlocked and opened a drawer in his chiffonier, fumbled for a moment or two with something he took therefrom, then closed and locked the drawer and returned to the light. In a few moments the nervousness had died out of his face and bearing, and with a return of his habitual listless air he had resumed his walk.

Caleb Conover, stretched on a camp-bed in the corner of his study, smiled contentedly as the rain beat in torrents on the panes. But when the gale waxed fiercer and the rain at last ceased, he frowned.

“Going to blow off clear and cold after all!” he grumbled, turning over. “And the Weather Bureau’s the only one that can’t be ‘fixed.’”

But even the shriek of the storm could not long hold his attention. The Railroader was vaguely troubled as to himself. Heretofore, like Napoleon’s, his steel will had been able to dictate to Nature as imperiously as to his fellow-man. When he had commanded the presence of Sleep, the drowsy god had hastened on the moment to do his bidding. He had slumbered or awakened at wish. On the eve of his greatest crisis he had been unable to sleep like a baby. Yet for the past few weeks he had been aware of a subtle change. Sleep had deserted him, even as had so much else that he had loftily regarded as his to command.

He had acquired an unpleasant habit of lying awake for hours in that big lonely study of his, of seeking in vain to recover his old-time power of perfect self-mastery. Thought, Memory, Unrest—a trio that never could unduly assail him in saner hours—now had a way of rushing in upon the insomniac with the extinguishing of the last light. To-night these unwelcomed guests were lingering still longer than usual, and all the Conover’s dominating will power failed to banish them.

At length he gave over the struggle and let his vagrant fancies have their will. Was he growing old, he wondered, that his forces—mental, physical and political—thus wavered?

Worry? He had heard others complain of it, and he had laughed at them. Nerves? Those were for women. Not for a man with an eighteen-inch neck. Then what ailed him? He had been this way ever since—ever since—Yes, it was the night Anice Lanier left that he had first lain awake.

Anice Lanier! He had never analyzed his feelings toward her. He had been dully satisfied to know that in her presence he ever had an unwonted feeling of content, of sure knowledge that she would understand; that she was as unlike his general idea of women as he himself differed from his equally contemptuous estimate of other men; that he was at his best with her. Had he been less practical and more given to hackneyed phrases of thought, he would have said she inspired him.

But now? The Railroader could not yet force himself to dwell on the jarring end of all that. He tried to think of something else. Blanche? Yes, there was a nice sort of complication, wasn’t it? Another international marriage and the usual ending thereof.