The Great Accident

by Ben Ames Williams

He saw that his face was dirty, and his collar soiled and crushed. He took the collar off and turned it inside out and replaced it, and it gave him some faint satisfaction to see the improvement thus effected in his appearance. But he was still ghastly. There was no water in the room; and he knew that the bathroom at the end of this upper hall was not made for cleanliness, so he wet his handkerchief with his tongue and scrubbed his face clean with that. The result had a forced and unnatural look, but he was constrained to be content.

He started slowly for the door, but his feet lagged. It was hard for him to make up his mind to face the world again. He thought, uneasily, of remaining here through the day and catching a night freight out of town; and he turned irresolutely back toward the bed, but Muldoon, at his knee, barked softly in remonstrance, and Wint bent and patted the dog’s head and said softly: “Right you are, pup. We’re not afraid of them. But Heaven help the man that laughs, Muldoon!”

The dog wagged its whole body, and barked again, as though in approval; and Wint smiled faintly and went again toward the door. He looked down and saw that his trousers were wrinkled, and he smoothed and tugged at them in an effort to give them some appearance of respectability. When he had done his best for them, he went toward the door again, and this time he did not stop. He went out into the hall, and to the stair head, and so down into the office of the hotel.

Like the bedroom, the office of the Weaver House suffered by daylight. Even the dingy and unwashed window panes could not keep out the pitiless sun; and the room’s ugliness was exposed in hideous nakedness.

The room, save for the fact that the sun instead of a lamp lighted it, was as it had been the night before. The smoky lamp, still standing on the table, gave forth a smell of dirty oil which filled the place and fought with the reek of bad tobacco and the pungent smell of alcohol. Doors and windows were tight shut. At their corner of the table, above their checkerboard, still leaned the two old men. It was as though they had not stirred, the long night through. As Wint came down the stairs, a game ended, and their cackling voices broke into the familiar argument, while their stained old fingers swiftly rearranged the pieces for a new beginning. Then one moved a piece, and both fell silent, and the new game began.

Mrs. Moody sat at her place behind what had been the bar. The only change in the room since the night before was that instead of the reading boy, a man sat by the table. This man was unshaven, trembling, shrunken within his rumpled and baggy garments. His eyes were open, and his head wagged from side to side as he sat, and his lips moved in an interminable, mumbling argument with some one invisible.

Jim, the dog that was just a dog, was not to be seen.

Wint, with Muldoon at his heels, came down the stairs and stopped in front of the bar and nodded to Mrs. Moody. He reached into his pocket, and the old woman got up briskly and grinned at him, the enamel of her teeth a blinding white flash in her wrinkled old face. Her eyes puckered when she grinned; and she laid her hands, palms down, upon the bar.

“Going away, deary?” she asked.

Wint nodded. “What do I owe you?”