"Can any of you tell me about a young man called Lindenbaum?" she asked between her sobs. "Lindenbaum—a young man—on Car fifty-six he was! Has anything been heard of him—anything?"
The reporters promptly told her that nothing had. She sank into a chair, covered her face with her hands and burst into an uncontrollable fit of weeping. The younger woman, evidently her daughter, stood by trying to comfort her. At length the other raised her veil and wearily wiped her eyes. James studied her face; her sunken eyes no less than her black clothes gave evidence of an older sorrow. Moved by a sudden impulse he went over and spoke to her, telling her that her son was in all probability safe and basing his assurance on the calm mathematical grounds of his own reasoning. The woman did not understand much of what he said, but the quiet tones of his voice seemed to comfort her. She rose and started to go.
"Thank you," she said to James, "you're a nice boy.—Oh, I do hope God will spare him to me—only nineteen, he is, and the only man I have left, all I have left...."
Sob stuff!
Scarcely had the door closed behind her when a business man of about forty-five, prosperous, well-dressed and unemotional-looking, came in and asked if the name of his daughter was on the list of the dead. Some one said it was not.
"Thank God," said the man in a weak voice. He raised his hand to his forehead, closed his eyes and fell over backward in a dead faint. When he came to he had to be told that the names of only three of the dead were as yet known.
These were the first of a long series of scenes such as James would not have thought possible off the stage. He had never seen people mastered by an overwhelming anxiety before; it was interesting to learn that they acted in such cases much as they were generally supposed to. Anxiety, he reflected, was perhaps the most intolerable emotion known to man. Yet as he sat there calmly waiting for the arrival of the relief train he could have wished that he might have tasted the full horror of it.... No, that was mere hysteria, of course. But there was something holy about such a feeling; it was like a sort of cleansing, a purifying by fire.... Was it that his soul was not worthy of such a purifying? Oh, hysterics again!
But the purifying of others went on before his eyes as he sat trying not to think or feel and reading the bulletins as they came out from the inner office. Grotesquely unimportant, those bulletins, or so they must seem to those concerned for the fate of friends!
"General Traffic Manager Albert S. Holden learned by telegram of the accident to Train 64 near Stamford this morning and immediately hurried to Stamford by special train. Mr. Holden will conduct an investigation into the causes of the accident in conjunction with Coroner Francis X. Willis of Stamford."
"One young woman among the injured was identified as Miss Fannie Schmidt of Brooklyn. She was taken to the Stamford hospital suffering from contusions."