The Debtor: A Novel

by Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman

A rumble and jar became audible, and the New Sanderson car came up at right angles on the track on the other road. The two cars connected. Then passengers alighted from the New Sanderson car and entered the waiting one. There was a distinct stir of excitement as they entered, for it was evidently a bridal party. They were all Hungarians, and on their way to Port Willis for the ceremony. There were the prospective bride and groom and several friends of both sexes. They settled themselves in the car, the girls huddled close together, the young men by themselves. The bride was quite evident from the bridal whiteness of her hat, a pitiful cheap affair bedecked with thin white ribbon and a forlorn white plume; but although the bridegroom was as unmistakable, it was difficult to tell how. Carroll decided that it was because of the intensified melancholy and abjectness and shame of his expression. Not one of the young men, who numbered as many as the girls, but had it. They were all ignoble, contemptible, their faces above their paper collars and hideous ties stained with miserable imaginations. There was not a self-respecting face among them; but the girls were better. There was in their faces an innocent gayety like children. Instead of the painful, restrained grins of the young men, they giggled artlessly when their eyes met. They were innocently conscious of their flimsy and gaudy dresses of the cheapest lawn or muslin on that cold day, with a multitude of frills of cheap lace and bows of cheap ribbon, with bare hands adorned with blue or red stoned rings protruding from their poor jacket-sleeves. The bride, afraid of crushing her finery, had nothing over her shoulders in her thin white muslin except one of the gay Hungarian kerchiefs. It was of an exceedingly brilliant green color, a green greener than the grass of spring. Above it her homely, downcast face showed beneath the flapping white hat, which had a cluster of blue roses under the brim next the dark streaks of her coarse hair. The face of the bride was simple and rude in contour and line, the face of a peasant from a long line of peasants, and it was complex with the simple complexity of the simplest and most primal emotions, with love and joy and wonder, the half-fearful triumph of swift inertia, attained at last in the full element of life. The others were different; they were dimpling and laughing and jesting in their unintelligible guttural. Their faces knew nothing of the seriousness of the bride's. One of them was exceedingly pretty, with a beauty unusual in her race. Her high cheek-bones were covered with the softest rosy flesh, her wide mouth was outlined by curves. She wore her cheap muslin with an air, gathering up her petticoat, edged with the coarsest lace, daintily from the muddy floor, revealing her large feet in heavy shoes and white stockings. All the young men of the party except the prospective groom, who sat entirely wrapped in his atmosphere of grinning, shamefaced consciousness, glanced furtively at her from time to time. She was quite aware of their glances, but she never returned them. When a young man looked at her, she said something to one of the girls, and laughed prettily, striking another pose for admiration. She never, however, glanced at Carroll as did the two pretty girls beyond him on the same seat. She seemed to have no consciousness of any one in the car outside of those of her own race. Indeed, the whole party, travelling in a strange land, speaking their strange tongue, gave a curious impression of utter alienty. It was almost as if they lived apart in their own crystalline sphere of separation, as if they were as much diverse as inhabitants of Mars, and yet they were bound on a universal errand, which might have served to bring them into touch with the rest if anything could. Carroll gathered an uncanny impression that he might be himself invisible to these people, that, living in another element, they actually could not see or fairly sense anything outside. He looked from them to the two older women of the same race with their children, and again his pessimistic attitude, evolved from his own misery, set his mind in a bitterly interrogative attitude. He looked at the bride and the mistakenly happy mother caressing the evil-looking child, and a sickening disgust of the whole was over him.

The car started, and proceeded at a terrific speed along the straight road. Carroll stared past the bulk of the German woman at the flying landscape. Since noon the sky had become clouded; it threatened snow if the wind should go down. The earth, which had been sodden with rain a few days before, the mud from which showed dried on the countryman's boots, was now frozen in a million wrinkles. The trees stood leafless, extending their rattling branches, the old corn-fields flickered with withered streamers; a man was mournfully spreading dung over a slope of field. His old horse stood between the shafts with drooping head. The man himself was old, and moved slowly and painfully. A white beard of unusual length blew over his right shoulder. Everything seemed aged and worn and weary, and full of knowledge, to its undoing. To Carroll, in this mood, even the bridal-party, even the children, seemed as old as age itself, puppets evolved from the ashes of ages, working out a creation-old plan of things.

The car was very close and hot—in fact, the atmosphere was intolerable—but he felt chilly. He pulled his coat closer. Two young men, countrymen, who had entered from the New Sanderson car, and sat next the German woman, eyed him at the gesture, and their eyes fell with a sort of dull dissent upon his handsome coat. One said something to the other, and both laughed with boorish malice. Then one, after glancing at the conductor, whose back was turned as he talked to one of the pretty girls with pompadours, bent his head hastily to the floor. Then he scraped his foot, and looked aloft with an innocent and unconcerned expression. One of the pretty girls had observed him, and said something to the conductor, pointing to a printed placard over the man's head. The conductor looked at him, but the man did not notice. He gave his fare, when it was demanded, surlily. Then he bent his head again, when the conductor had turned again, scraped his foot, and gave a sharp glance at the same time at Carroll's long coat, which was almost within range. The German woman suddenly awoke to nervous life and pulled her satin skirt aside, with a look at the offender, to which he was impervious.

Then the car stopped in response to a signal, and a tiny, evidently aged, woman with the activity of a child sprang on board. She had a large bag which she bore on one meagre little arm as if it had been a feather. Her wrinkled little face, rosily colored with the cold air, peeped alertly from under quite a fine, youthful hat trimmed with smart bows and a wing, but set crookedly on the head. Her sparse gray hair was strained tightly back from her thin temples and wound tightly at the back. Although she was undoubtedly old, her face could no more be called old than could that of a bird. She kept it in constant motion, bringing bright eyes to bear upon the different passengers. She did not travel very far. She stopped the car, springing alertly to her feet and pulling the bell-rope. Then she hopped off as spryly as a sparrow, on her thin ankles, moving with nervous haste. Then it was that Carroll noticed the boy for the first time, although he was seated directly opposite, and the child looked long and intently at the man. When the strange, agile old woman ran through the car, the boy looked across with a look of innocent fun at the man, and for the first time the two pairs of eyes met. It was not in Carroll, whatever his stress of mind, to meet a smile like that without response. He smiled back. Then the boy ducked his head with fervor, and off came his little cap, like a gentleman.

He was a handsome little fellow, younger than Eddy by a year or two, fair-haired and blue-eyed, with a most innocent and infantile expression. He was rather poorly dressed, but he looked well cared for, and he had the confident and unhesitating regard of a child who is well-beloved. He had a little package of school-books under his arm.

Carroll, after returning the child's smile, turned away. He did not look again, although he felt that the blue eyes with a look of insistent admiration were steadfastly upon his face. The country through which the car was now passing was of a strange, convulsive character. It was torn alike by nature and by man. Storms and winds had battered at the clayey soil, spade and shovel had upturned it. It was honey-combed and upheaved. There were roughly shelving hills overhung with coarse dry grass like an old man's beard, there were ragged chasms and gulfs, and all in raw reds and toneless browns and drabs, darkened constantly by the smoke which descended upon them from the chimneys of the great factories to the right. Over this raw red and toneless drab surface crawled, on narrow tracks, little wagons, drawn by plodding old horses, guided by plodding men. Beyond, the salt river gleamed with a keen brightness like steel. The sky above it was dull and brooding. The wind was going down. The whole landscape was desolate, and with a strange, ragged, ignominious desolation. The earth looked despoiled, insulted, dissected, as if her sacred inner parts were laid bare by these poor pygmies, the tools of a few capitalists grubbing at her vitals for the clay which meant dollars.

In the most desolate part of this desolate country, the car was stopped, and two Syrians laden with heavy grips got on. These tall, darkly gaunt men, their sinister picturesqueness thinly disguised by their Western garb, these Orientals in the midst of the extremest phase of the New World, passed Carroll with grace, and seated themselves, with a weary air, and yet an air of ineffable lengths of time at command, suggestive of anything but weariness. There was actually, or so Carroll fancied, a faint odor of attar of rose and sandal-wood evident in the horribly close car. The men had in their grips rosaries, and Eastern stuffs or Eastern trinkets of the cheapest description.

To Arthur Carroll, regarding them, the fancy occurred, as it had often occurred, of himself following a similar pursuit. He had revolved in his mind all possible schemes of money-making, of winning an honest living. All the more dignified methods, the methods apparently suited to himself, seemed out of his reach. He pictured himself laden with a heavy grip, with two of them, one painfully poised on the hip, the other dragging at the hand, going about the country, concealing his rage with abjectness and humility, striving to dispose of his small and worthless wares for money enough to keep the machinery going.

“I believe I would make a very good peddler,” he thought. Although his grace of address was involuntary, like any keenly intelligent and retrospective man, he could not avoid being aware of it. He felt that he could outstrip that saturnine Syrian in his own field.

Looking away from them, his eyes met the little boy's, also returning from a sober, innocent contemplation of them, and the boy's eyes again smiled at him with an odd, confidential expression. So clearly wise and understanding was their direct regard, that it almost seemed as if the child guessed at the man's thoughts; but that was, of course, impossible. Carroll smiled at him again, and the little face blushed and dimpled like a girl's with admiration and grateful delight. He was a daintily built little boy, with nothing of Eddy's little dash of manner, but he was charming. The car reached Port Willis and proceeded along the principal street. Carroll suddenly reflected that he must soon get off; he would reach the end of the line. Again his errand loomed up before him. The necessity for immediate action removed the paralyzing effect which the very horror of it had had upon him for a time. Curiously enough, during the half-hour in the car he had held, as it were, a little truce with this fell appetite which had seized upon him. He had thought very little of it. The strange inertia of passivity in motion of the other passengers had seized upon him, but now was coming a period of wakening. The passengers began to drop off. The bridal-party went out chattering and laughing, the prospective bride with ugly red spots of agitation on her high cheek-bones, the pretty girl holding up her laced petticoats with the air of a princess. The stout German woman got off in front of her husband's saloon. The Syrians stopped in front of a store. Carroll rode through to the end of the line, and there was then nobody left except himself, the two pretty girls, and the little boy. The girls swept off before him, with a consciousness of their backs in his sight. Carroll got off, and, to his utter amazement, the little boy, pressing close to his heels, lifted a small voice. It was an exceedingly small and polite little voice, as sweet as a girl's, a thin treble.