The World of Chance

by William Dean Howells

“But how will they get there with those two babies? They can’t walk.”

The conductor shrugged. “Guess they’ll have to try it.”

“Look here!” said Ray. He took a dollar note out of his pocket, and gave it to the conductor. “Find out whether they’ve got any change, and if they haven’t, tell them one of the passengers wanted them to take this for car fares. Don’t tell them which one.”

“All right,” said the conductor.

He passed into the next car. When he came back Ray saw him stop and parley with the young women. He went through the whole train again before he stopped for a final word with Ray, who felt that he had entered into the poetry of his intentions towards the women, and had made these delays and detours of purpose. He bent over Ray with a detached and casual air, and said:

“Every cent they had was in that pocket-book. Only wonder is they hadn’t their tickets there, too. They didn’t want to take the dollar, but I guess they had to. They live ’way up on Third Avenue about Hundred and First Street; and the one that gave her baby her money to hold looks all played out. They couldn’t have walked it. I told ’em the dollar was from a lady passenger. Seemed as if it would make it kind of easier for ’em.”

“Yes, that was, right,” said Ray.

III.

When they stopped in Jersey City, Ray made haste out of the car to see what became of his beneficiaries, and he followed closely after them, and got near them on the ferry-boat. They went forward out of the cabin and stood among the people at the bow who were eager to get ashore first. They each held her heavy baby, and silently watched the New York shore, and scarcely spoke.

Ray looked at it too, with a sense of the beauty struggling through the grotesqueness of the huge panorama, and evoking itself somehow from the grossest details. The ferry-boats coming and going; the great barges with freight trains in sections on them; the canal-boats in tow of the river steamers; the shabby sloops slouching by with their sails half-filled by the flagging breeze; the ships lying at anchor in the stream, and wooding the shore with their masts, which the coastwise steamboats stared out of like fantastic villas, all window-shutters and wheel-houses; the mean, ugly fronts and roofs of the buildings beyond, and hulking high overhead in the further distance in vast bulks and clumsy towers, the masses of those ten-storied edifices which are the necessity of commerce and the despair of art, all helped to compose the brutal and stupid body of the thing, whose soul was collectively expressed in an incredible picturesqueness. Ray saw nothing amiss in it. This agglomeration of warring forms, feebly typifying the ugliness of the warring interests within them, did not repulse him. He was not afraid. He took a new grip of the travelling-bag where he had his manuscript, so that he should not be parted from it for a moment till it went into some publisher’s keeping. He would not trust it to the trunk which he had checked at Midland, and which he now recognized among the baggage piled on a truck near him. He fingered the outside of his bag to make sure by feeling its shape that his manuscript was all right within. All the time he was aware of those two young women, each with her baby in her arms, which they amused with various devices, telling them to look at the water, the craft going by, and the horses in the wagon-way of the ferry-boat. The children fretted, and pulled the women’s hair, and clawed their hats; and the passengers now and then looked censoriously at them. From time to time the young women spoke to each other spiritlessly. The one whose child had thrown her pocket-book away never lost a look of hopeless gloom, as she swayed her body half round and back, to give some diversion to the baby. Both were pretty, but she had the paleness and thinness of young motherhood; the other, though she was thin too, had the fresh color and firm texture of a young girl; she was at once less tragic and more serious than her sister, if it was her sister. When she found Ray gazing fixedly at her, she turned discreetly away, after a glance that no doubt took in the facts of his neat, slight, rather undersized person; his regular face, with its dark eyes and marked brows; his straight fine nose and pleasant mouth; his sprouting black moustache, and his brown tint, flecked with a few browner freckles.