"The bird, too!" said John. "Everyone doing his little best to sustain the illusion—even, if I am any judge, the lady herself."
But Benis Spence had never wasted time upon the lady herself. And he did not begin now. With a face which had suddenly become years younger he was searching frantically in his desk for the transcontinental time-table.
CHAPTER XXXVI
The train crawled.
Although it was a fast express whose speed might well provoke the admiration of travellers, in one traveller it provoked nothing save grim endurance. Beside the consuming impatience of Benis Hamilton Spence, its best effort was a little thing. When it slowed, he fidgeted, when it stopped he fumed. He wanted to get out and push it.
Five days—four—three—two—a day and a half—the vastness of the spaces over which it must carry him grew endless as his mind continually tried to span them. He felt a distinct grievance that any country should be so wide.
"Making good time!" said a genial person, travelling in the tobacco trade. The professor eyed him with suspicion, as a man deranged by optimism.
The train crawled.
Spence removed his eyes from the passing landscape and tried to forget how slowly it was passing. He saw himself at the end of his journey. He saw Desire. He saw a grudging moment, or second perhaps, devoted to explanation. And then—How happy they were going to be! (If the train would only forget to stop at stations it might get somewhere.) How wonderful it would be to feel the empty world grow full again! To raise one's eyes, just casually, and to see—Desire. To speak, in just one's ordinary voice, and to know she heard. To stretch out one's hand and feel that she was there. (What were they doing now? Putting on more cars? Outrageous!) He would even write that book presently, when he got around to it. (When one felt sure one could write.) But first they would go away, just he and she, east of the sun and west of the moon. They would sit together somewhere, as they used to sit on the sun-warmed grass at Friendly Bay, and say nothing at all.... How nearly they had missed it ... but it would be all right now. Love, whom they had both denied, had both given and forgiven. It would be all right, it must be all right, now! (But how the train crawled.)