• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 3326 0

was gone, yes. From where he had left it: he hoped to find it yet, but I don't think he has. He came back the second time to the dining car and spoke about it. He laid his hand on the guard's arm. 'While I was sitting at the table and eating my dinner, the carriages have been shifted about,' he said. 'I wandered through the cars with the dogs running and cars with boxes in them, and through cars with human beings sitting in them I never laid eyes on in the journey—one party going on among some young people that would altogether block the traffic in the corridor.'"

"All Irish," said the young wife, and smoothed Victor's head; he looked big-eyed into space.

"The guard was busy and spoke to a third party, a gentleman eating. Yes, they were, all Irish. 'Will you mercifully take and show this gentleman where he is traveling, when you can, since he's lost?' 'Not lost,' he said, 'distracted,' and went through his system of argument. The gentleman said he could jolly well find his own carriage. The man opposite him rose up and that was when he declared the chicken was rabbit. The gentleman put down his knife and said man lost or not, carriage shifted or not, the stew rabbit or not, the man could just the same fight back to where he had come from, as he himself jolly well intended to do when he could finish the dinner on his plate in peace." She opened her purse, and passed licorice drops around.

"He sounds vulgar," said the man from Connemara.

"'Twas a lovely dinner."

"You weren't lost, I take it?" said the Welshman, accepting a licorice drop. "Traveled much?"

"Oh dear Heaven, traveled? Well, I have. Yes, no end to it."

"Oh my God."

"No, I'm never lost."

"Let's drop the subject," said the Welshman.

The lovers settled back into the cushions. They were the one subject nobody was going to discuss.

"Look," the young girl said in a low voice, from within the square of the young man's arm, but not to him. "I see a face that keeps going past, looking through the window. A man, plying up and down, could he be the one so unfortunate?"

"Not him, he's leading greyhounds, didn't we see him come in?" The young man spoke eagerly, to them all. "Leading, or they leading him."

"'Tis a long train," the lady murmured to the Welshman. "The longest, most populated train leaving England, I would suppose, the one going over to catch the Innisfallen."

"Is that the name of the boat? You were glad to leave England?"

"It is and I was—pleased to be starting my journey, pleased to have it over." She gave a look at him—then at the others, the compartment, the tumbled baggage, everything. Outside, dim Wales clapped strongly at the window, like some accompanying bird. "I'll just lower the shade, will I?" she said.

She pulled at the window shade and fastened it down, and pulled down the door shade after it. The minute she did that, the window shade flew up, with a noise like a turkey.

They shouted for joy—they knew it! She was funny.

The train stopped and waited a long time in the dark, out from nowhere. They sat awhile, swung their feet; the man from Connemara whistled for a minute marvelously, Victor had his third orange.

"Suppose we're late!" shouted the man from Connemara. The mountains could hear him; they had opened the window to look out hoping to see the trouble, but could not. "And the Innisfallen sails without us! And we don't reach the other side in this night!"

"Then you'll all have to spend the night in Fishguard," said the Welshman.

"Oh, what a scene there'll be in Cork, when we don't arrive!" cried the young wife merrily. "When the boat sails in without us, oh poor souls."

Victor laughed harshly. He had made a pattern with his orange peel on the window ledge, which he now swept away.

"There's none too much room for the traveler in the town of Fishguard," said the Welshman over his pipe. "You'll do best to keep dry in the station."

"Won't they die of it in Cork?" The young wife cocked her head.

"Me five brothers will stand ready to give me a beating!" Victor said, then looked proud.

"I daresay it won't be the first occasion