Jane Journeys On Part 27

"I wonder," Daragh paused in the outer hall, "would I better cover him up?"

Jane nodded.

"Wait, then! I'll be soon back!"

When he came out again he was smiling. "Fine and fast asleep he is. He'll never open an eye for hours! I'll look in on him again, on my way home to-night. You were the wonder of the world to him, Jane Vail. But"--he halted on the sidewalk and peered contritely at her through the soft spring twilight,--"you are cruel weary!"

"I am ... tired," said Jane.

His voice gathered alarm. "I've never seen you the like of this. Shall I be finding a cab to rush you home?"

Pride (where was her decent pride?) rallied in her, and took the place of the earlier, racking rage. "I am not going home. I am going uptown--to the theater. I've a new man in the character part." Suddenly she knew what she was going to do. "I am going to meet Rodney Harrison there, and we are going to have supper, and to drive!" Her voice grew decisive again. That was it. Rodney Harrison. The man-she-met-on-the-boat. He would be waiting for her, and he wanted her, and she intended to want him. She visualized his special delivery letter, lying on her desk.

Rodney was quite justified. They would "settle the matter once and for all, definitely and right." She would marry Rodney Harrison, and they would live like sane human beings, comfortably, logically, merrily, and there would be no dope fiends with plucking fingers and no Fallen Sisters and self-righteous settlement workers and no drab days and drab ways in their scheme of things.

"Well, then," Michael was still staring at her, unhappily, "will it be the bus, or a taxi? Myself must go in the subway to another poor lad who is waiting in Ninety-first Street, but----"

"I may as well take the subway, too." (He was not to suppose or surmise that it bothered or burdened her to be with him.) "It will make me too early, but there's a lot to talk over with them all. I've rather neglected things lately." (Mooning in her candy-motto paradise!)

"I'm doubting the upper air is better for you, the way you're so white and weary," Michael shook his head, but they went down from the mild spring weather into the glare and blare of the world beneath. It was the hour of the last mad homeward rush of the workers. They found seats, but at the next station the packing and jamming began, and when they left the third stop the car was a solid, cohesive ma.s.s of steaming humanity. Talk was mercifully impossible. Only once Michael spoke, when he got up to give his place to a thin girl in a soiled middy blouse.

"You could be getting out at the next, you know, to fill your lungs with decent air, and go on in the bus----"

She shook her head and smiled very reasonably. She fixed her eyes on a vehement advertis.e.m.e.nt in shrieking colors and tried to see how many small words she could make out of the large one. "L-i-n-e, line, and L-i-s-t, list"--(she would go into the leading lady's dressing room and do her hair and put some color in her cheeks before she saw Rodney. Good old Rodney! He had been faithful, as faithful and patient as Marty Wetherby!)--"i-n, in, and r-i-"--the car was plunged into swift darkness and the train shrieked and jolted to a dead stop.

The girl to whom Michael had given his seat jumped up and began to emit short, gasping screams.

"There's no harm at all," said Daragh, pushing her back into her seat.

"The lights will be on again in two flips of a dead lamb's tail!"

The crowd took it good-naturedly enough. There were whistles and catcalls from one end of the car and a noisy imitation of a kiss. Girls giggled nervously. A man grew querulous: "Where are we? That's all I want to know. Where are we? If we're near a station, we can get out and walk.

Where _are_ we?"

The minutes dragged. Men hurried by in the outer darkness with lanterns, dim and ghoulish figures. Some one's foot was trodden on and a surly scuffle ensued. "Cut that out!" said a sharp voice. "You don't want to start nothin' here!"

Then the first man began again. "Where _are_ we? That's what I want to know!" A woman whimpered that she was going to faint.

"Can't!" called a gruff voice, facetiously. "There ain't room!"

But it was immediately evident that she had carried out her program for there was a shrill cry, "Oh, for G.o.d's sake! Get her up! Get her up! Get her _up_! I'm--I'm _standing_ on her!"

People began to sway and mutter, to push and surge. Jane felt herself lifted and swung to her feet on the seat where she had been sitting, and the Irishman's big body was spread like a shield before her. His hands were clamped upon the thin shoulders of the girl in the middy blouse, but he twisted his head to speak to Jane. "It will be all right in a wink,"

he said.

"Yes," she answered.

The first man began to shout, "Open this door! Want us to die like rats in a trap! Open this _door_!" There was a sound of splintering gla.s.s and the acrid smell of smoke.

"Fire!" squealed the girl in Michael's hold, fighting to free herself.

"Steady!" he soothed. "Let you be still now, till----"

"Fire! Fire! Fire!" It ran from solo shrieks into a frantic chorus. The middy blouse girl bit and clawed herself out of the Irishman's hands and he turned and faced Jane, his grasp on the rail above them, covering her with his body. "Lay hold of me," he commanded, and she locked her arms about his neck. The smoke-laden air was filled now with the sound of smashing windows, with labored breathing and moans and gasping sobs, with the dull impact of blows, with the grinding, rasping contact of tightly packed bodies. From time to time Michael called out to them to have patience, to have courage, to wait, and other voices echoed his words, but they were drowned out in the red sea of panic. Slowly, for all its insane haste, the crowd, that portion of it still on its feet, began to work its way through the shattered windows and doors into the black pa.s.sage outside. The pressure against Jane and Michael was greatly lessened and she spoke with her lips close to his ear.

"Are we just to wait here until help comes?"

"We are just to wait here."

Presently she spoke again. "I am not afraid, M.D."

"I know you are not." He added a swift line in Gaelic.

When there was a cleared s.p.a.ce about them, they sat down again on the seat, hand in hand, like good children. The air was growing difficult.

"We must just wait until they come for us, mustn't we?" She was coughing a little.

"We must just wait."

There was a shuddering groan from the floor, just at their feet, and he bent with his pocket flash. It was the gaunt girl in the middy blouse....

"Keep fast hold of my coat," said Daragh. He bent and lifted the girl on to the opposite seat. "There must be others. I must look."

"Let me hold the flash," said Jane. "That will give you both hands free.

I won't let go of you." They traversed the black length of the car, doing the grim little they could do where there was anything to be done, and then they went back to their corner. Jane's teeth were chattering. "But I'm not afraid, M.D.," she said. "It's just--the ghoulishness of it! The abysmal savagery--I can't _bear_ it!"

"Many there were as cool as ourselves," he said, "swept on by the panic and couldn't help themselves. It was the wild few only that brought the curse. And let you remember this--for every one that pushed and fought and trampled there are twenty up there now, above ground, wondering what way they'll help us the soonest, working for us, risking, daring----"

"Yes, I know it," said Jane obediently. She leaned back in her corner. It was true that she was not afraid. She felt very peaceful and very gentle.

The red rage was gone and the gray depression, and the scorn and the bitterness, and Rodney Harrison was gone. She began to talk, easily and interestedly. "You know, one looks back on this sort of thing, after it's all over, as educational. One doesn't enjoy _having_ an experience like this, but _having_ had it makes for growth, shouldn't you say?" His grasp on her hand tightened but he did not answer. "Well, Michael Daragh, I've crowded about every sensation into my life except--death.

This is really not so bad as being in that Mexican prison was! For one thing, you're here"--she curled her fingers more tightly into his--"and there I had only my extremely civil engineer. I did my best to fall in love with him, M.D., but I couldn't seem to manage it." She stopped to cough. "The air is getting pretty awful, isn't it? But I don't believe it will be much longer, now, do you?"

"I do not," he said.

"I'm rather proud of us, aren't you, Michael Daragh?--Of course, I expect I shouldn't be so--so Nathan Hale and Casabianca and--and Lady Jane Grey--if I didn't know that we'll soon be up in the air again, safe--_breathing_ ..." She coughed again, but her voice went on, husky, gallant. "If we could have looked an hour ahead an hour ago, you and I, dripping pity on that boy, feeling so utterly secure ourselves--'_Why should the spirit of mortal be proud?_' M.D., I got a silver thimble for learning that by heart when I was eight. Rollicking nursery rhyme, wasn't it? But I adored it, especially the parts I didn't understand.

'_From the gilded saloon to the bier and the shroud_'--you know, for years I thought it meant one of those fascinating places with swinging half-doors and rows and rows of feet visible from the outside, into which one's nurse would never let one peer, and I thought 'shroud' was a sort of cracker to be eaten with the beer! Wasn't that funny? I remember thinking----"

But now the big Irishman stopped her with a groan which shook him from head to heel. "Core of my heart," he said, "will you hush your pretending? G.o.d forgive me for a heedless fool has dragged you down to a black death this night!"

"What," said Jane interestedly, "what was it you called me?"

He caught her up to him, fiercely, furiously, and she could feel him trembling, that tall tower of strength, like a terrified child. "Core of my heart," he said again, and now his wild kisses separated his wild words--"_Acushla ... Mavourneen ... Solis na Suile_ ..." and the tide of fear which had been rising in her turned and slipped away into a sea of rose and silver bliss, and with it went forever the hot shame of the afternoon and the cold misery of the evening.

It seemed to her that she could not breathe at all now, what with the acrid air and the power of his arms about her, but it did not matter. "I that loved you from the first moment my eyes were resting on the wonder of your face and heard the harps sounding in your voice, I have brought you death!"

"No, Michael Daragh," she said hoa.r.s.ely, breathlessly, "you have brought me life!"

His voice was scorched and dry with smoke, and she had to strain her ears to hear his lyric lovemaking. "Journeys' end"--she thought again as she had thought that afternoon. Sarah Farraday would say that she was making phrases, trying to be clever, even in this great and terrible moment,--to be thinking that she had taken the subway to the heights.... Presently she put a reproving hand over his lips.

"Oh, Michael Daragh! I expect I don't know G.o.d as well as you do, but I know Him better than that! _Of course_ we'll be saved! _Don't_ keep saying you wouldn't tell me this if we weren't dying! Nothing could happen to us ... _now_ ... what do you suppose makes me so sleepy?... Do you mind if I just sleep a--f--few minutes? I'm pretty--t--tired...."

He gathered her up wholly into his arms. "No, no! Don't go to sleep!