"You always hear worse than happens." The clerk's glance at Catherine was anxious. But she signed her name to the message and wrote out the address.
V
The midnight express for New York, coming through three hours late, did not stop. The clerk came up to Catherine's door to tell her.
"They ain't an empty berth on her," he said. "Took off several coaches to lighten her for the drifts."
"What am I going to do?" Catherine asked.
"There's a local in the morning. You could get something out of Pittsburgh, if you got that far."
The rest of the night, the next day, the next night, all were to Catherine grotesquely unreal, as if life had been transposed to a different key, where all familiar things were flatted into dissonance and harsh strangeness. All night the scrape of snow-plows and shovels, futile against the snow; the snow which seemed the wind itself turned to dry, drifting, impenetrable barriers. The local, dragged by two locomotives, hours late, like a moving snowdrift itself. The hours in that train, with nothing but snow darkening the windows, hiding the world, driving through the aisles with the opening of the doors. Pittsburgh, late in the afternoon, and no word from Charles. She beat helplessly against the gruff taciturnity of the ticket agent; he had stood up all day confronting cross, belated travelers. There was a train in an hour, making connections at Philadelphia. Night on that train, in a crowded day coach, malodorous and noisy. She felt as if she dragged the train herself, down through strange valleys, where blast furnaces sent up red shrieks of flame, through dim, sleeping towns.
Philadelphia at two, the next morning. A narrow strip of platform across which the wind whirled. Another crowded day coach. Where were these people going, that colored boy, asleep, his feet stuck out into the aisle in their ragged socks, his shoes clasped under one arm—that man and woman, slumping peacefully against each other, mouths drooping wide?
As Catherine stepped down to the platform in the New York station, the huge dim roofs of the train shed spun dangerously about her. A porter loped beside her, pawing at her bag, but she walked away from him, her eyes wide like a somnambulist. She made her way to a telephone booth, and then, when she had lifted her hand to drop in the nickel, stopped abruptly. If she telephoned, and something dreadful came over the wire, buzzing into her head, it would transfix her there, unable to move, held forever behind that close, dirty glass door. She pushed violently against the door, freed herself, and fled out to the street. She passed on the steps a woman crawling on her knees, one arm moving in sluggish circles, scrubbing. After she had found a taxi and was whirring away through the dark street, the motion of that weary arm continued before her eyes. How dark the city was, and still, as if she had come into it just at the turn of the tide, before the morning life moved in. "Dark o' the moon"—she heard Spencer's voice chanting—"pulls the ole water away from the earth."