Their rich yet subtle perfume saturated her mood and coloured every thought as she lay wakeful in the dark, watching the ghastly panorama of the Cajon Pass, basking in unearthly moonlight, unfold like a march upon the hitherside of Hell, and, later on, the vast, still ranges of the desert, where tortured cacti entreated Heaven with frozen gestures of torment and terror, while from afar the goblin hills looked on in dark, sphinxlike disdain.
Here, linking widely spaced oases, where the pepper-tree and eucalyptus shadowed roofs of ribbed iron, and the pineapple palm posed its graceful fronds against the ungainly bulks of water-tanks on stilts, dim trails ran with the tracks, and ever and again panting and bouncing flivvers would spring up out of the night to race the train for a mile or so, or, less frequently, cars more powerful would overtake and distance it as it laboured up-grade; shapes of solid shadow hurtling through the night as if breaking their hearts in hopeless efforts to overtake the fugitive fans of light thrown out by their lamps ... as men pursue hope through life ... as women pursue love....
And Lucinda, watching, wondered at life's strangeness and its sadness, and marvelled at the mettle men are made of to sustain them through the race, though they know the end is ever failure, heart-break, death.
The scent of roses numbed mind and senses: pain and opiate in one....
And it was as if she had slept not at all, save that she felt rested; as if she had closed her eyes on darkness and unclosed them an instant later to find the very scene she had been gazing on bathed in hot splendor of sunlight, warm with colour. Still the desert stretched its flats of sand and alkali, sage and cactus, to a far, notched rim of hills, still the train drudged stoutly on an up-grade, buffeting the hushed air with stentorian gasps; still upon the trail beside the tracks raced the motor-car Lucinda had been watching when sleep claimed her....
Another car, of course. Nevertheless the coincidence was surprising.
She lay for a little lazily watching it; a powerful, spirited piece of machinery, well-driven, breasting gallantly that long ascent about which the train was making such great ado; drawing abeam, forging ahead, flirting derisively a tail of dust as it vanished from the field commanded by the window.... Bound whither? upon what urgency of life or death? that it must make such frantic haste in the heat of the desert sun!...
Heat was already beginning to make the tiny drawing-room resemble a cubicle in Tophet. Lucinda rose, ransacked her luggage for her flimsiest garments, gave her flesh the sketchy sponging which was all that facilities permitted, dressed, and rang for the porter and a waiter from the dining-car. While her room was being tidied up she ordered breakfast. Before it could be served the porter turned the drawing-room over to her again.
She waited by the window, looking out upon without seeing the few rude buildings that composed a tank town at which the train had made a halt for water. After that brief respite from the scent of roses she was finding reintroduction to its influence overpowering. It took her by the throat and subjugated her, reducing her to a most miserable estate of nostalgic longing....
The waiter was knocking. She started up, hastily dried her eyes, pronounced a tremulous "Come in!"