“Perhaps we can get out home some way,” he answered, with the instinct of the man who considers two hours in his own bed worth ten in any other.
Mrs. Gibbons cast the reserve of decency to the winds. They had made her miss this train! Her husband waiting for her—the sleeping Harold uncovered—the milk tickets to be put in the pail to-morrow—“I don’t care what you do; I can’t stay in town to-night. I won’t stay in town, Mr. Worthington! I’ll have to get home to-night if I swim for it!”
“No need to do that,” said a man rapidly coming out with a pipe-smoking group from the ferry-house. “We’re going out on the twelve-forty-five boat on the other road, a couple blocks below here, and take the trolley out. It’s Mrs. Gibbons, isn’t it? I don’t believe you recognize me. I saw your husband an hour or so ago at Weber and Fields.”
“Oh, thank you!” said Mrs. Gibbons. “Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you!” She stumbled after the group over the cobblestones outside of the long wharves, still insanely warbling her gratitude, her protectors sullenly stalking after her. They crushed and wedged themselves into the midst of an unsavoury and strenuous populace on the boat that pushed out slowly into the fog of the river, but that did not matter—they were saved, they were off! They were surely bound for that other side on which lay all that made life worth living. Then there was another mad rush for the trolley car that went their way. Fighting, struggling, pressing, the three snot into seats, exhausted, and whizzed off into the dark night. Mr. Worthington, after a few minutes, went sound asleep, lurching as the car lurched, his wife, poor woman, pale enough as she sat with face averted from Mrs. Gibbons, her lips pressed tightly together, one hand holding mechanically to her raiment, and the other within her husband’s arm. Men sat with their heads on their sweet-hearts’ shoulders, in true early morning trolley-car fashion, and every inch of standing room was packed too thick for the eye to penetrate with a singing, drunken, cat-calling, indecent crowd, the last scum of a great city. It was an offense to delicacy to be there. The lights flared wildly up and then went out at intervals. When they went out, Mrs. Gibbons felt a cold terror. She had always been afraid of drunken men, and she was so used to the protection of love! How sorry Arnold would be when she told him about it all, how tender he would be of her!
Oh, she had never realized before how utterly married she was, how long she had ceased to remember the independence of her girlhood, for what a short distance her little struts and flights were planned! So helpless, so forlorn, so terribly outside of life was she without him, without that individual care which was as much a part of existence as her own ability to raise her food to her mouth, or move one foot before another! She thought of a woman she knew who had lost her husband, and who had said, “I did not know it could be like this.” He had “given his body to the storm” many a time and oft for her dear sake; yet even for her a day might sometime come—like this—when—— Her soft cheek was cold and wet, and even through her thought of him she was also trying to get home and put those milk tickets in the pail so that the child would not be bereft in the morning. One must always remember a little child’s needs.
“Ye’re frightenin’ the lady, ye big bloke.”
“I ain’t frightenin’ of her, ye——”
She shrank painfully at the notice thrust upon her. For hours, and hours, and hours they were jigging off over the dark salt meadows.
Crash, lurch, jam—everything came to a sudden stop. The conductor called, “All out here for the car ahead.”
The sleeping ones awoke. In the scuffle and rush forward Mrs. Gibbons became separated from her friends. The new car was already jammed when she reached it, with fighting in the doorway. With one foot raised to step up she was thrust to one side by a man who leapt from it, followed by several others dashing back across the tracks and down a side street, amid cries of “Catch him! Get the pocketbook! Catch the thief!”