The Whirligig of Time Part 55

He found no one in the press office except a few newspaper reporters who sat about on tables with their hats balanced on the backs of their heads. They eyed him suspiciously but said nothing. An inner door opened and a young man in his shirtsleeves, a stenographer, entered the room bearing a number of typewritten flimsies. The reporters pounced upon these and rushed away in search of telephones.

James asked the young man if he could see Mr. Barker, the agent.

The young man said Mr. Barker was busy, and asked James what paper he represented.

James said none.

On what business, then, did James want to see Mr. Barker?

To learn the fate of some one on the Maine Special.

A friend?

A wife.

The stenographer dropped his lower jaw, but said nothing. He immediately opened the inner door and led James up to an older man who sat dictating to a young woman at a typewriter. He was plump and clean-shaven and very neat about the collar and tie; James did not realize that this was the agent until the younger man told him so.

"My dear sir," replied Mr. Barker to James' question, "I know absolutely no more about it than you do. If I did, I'd tell you. The boys have been hammering away at me for the past hour, and I've given 'em every word that's come in. These two names are all I've got so far." He handed James a flimsy.

James' eye fell upon the names of two men, both described as traveling salesmen. He went back to the outer office and sat down to think. It was, of course, extremely improbable that Beatrice had been killed.

There had been, say, two hundred people on the train, of whom fifteen were known to have died--something like seven and a half per cent. Two of these were accounted for; that left thirteen. He wondered how long it would be before those thirteen names came in.

The room began to fill up again; the reporters returned and new recruits constantly swelled their number. From their talk James gathered why there was such a dearth of detailed news. The wreck occurring during the waking hours of the day had been learned, as far as the mere fact of its occurrence was concerned, and published within half an hour after it had happened. It naturally took longer than this to do even the first work of clearing the wreckage and the compiling of the lists of dead and injured would require even more time. With the results that interested friends and relations, learning of the wreck but none of its particulars, were rushing pell-mell to headquarters to get the first news. One young man described in vivid terms certain things he had just witnessed down in the concourse.

"Best sob stuff in months," was his one comment.

Just then one of their number, a slightly older man and evidently a leader among them, emerged from the inner office.

"What about it, Wilkins?" they greeted him in chorus. "Slip it, Wilkins, slip it over! Give us the dope! Any more stiffs yet? Come on, out with it--no beats on this story, you know...."

Harpies!

The outer door opened and two women burst into the room. The first of them, a tall, stout, good-featured Jewess, clothed in deep mourning, was wildly gasping and beating her hands on her breast.

"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 a.s.surance 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d," 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."

"Patrick F. McGuire, the engineer of Train 64 which ran through an open switch near Stamford this morning, has been in the employ of the Company for many years. He was severely cut about the face and head. He has been engineer of the Maine Special since the 23rd of last May, prior to which he had worked as engineer on Train 102. He began his service in the Company in 1898 as fireman on the Naugatuck Division...."

"Vice-President Henry T. Blomberg gave out in New Haven this morning the following statement concerning the accident at Stamford...."

"Whew!" exclaimed a reporter, issuing suddenly from a telephone booth near James, "this is _some_ story, believe me!" He took off his hat and wiped his forehead. He was a young man and looked somewhat more like a human being than the others.

"Oh, you'd call this harrowing, would you?" said James.

"Well," said the other apologetically, "I've only been on the job a few months and this human interest stuff sort of gets me. This is the first big one of the kind I've been on. I guess there's enough human interest here to-day for any one, though!"

"There doesn't seem to be enough to inconvenience you," observed James.

"Not you, so much, but--" with a wave toward the reporters'

table--"those--the others."

The young man laughed slightly. "Oh, you can stand pretty near anything after you've been on the job for a while! You see, when you're on the news end of a thing like this you don't have time to get worked up. When you're hot foot after every bit of stuff you can get, and have to hustle to the telephone to send it in the same minute, so's not to get beaten on it, you don't bother about whether people have hysterics or not. You simply can't--you haven't got time! That's why these fellows all seem so calm--it's _business_ to them, you see. They're not really hard-hearted, or anything like that. Gosh, it's lucky for me, though, that I'm here on business, if I have to be here at all!"

"You mean you're glad you don't know any one on the train?"

"Oh, Lord yes, that--but I'm glad I have something to keep me busy, as long as I'm here. If I were just standing round, watching, say--gosh, I wouldn't answer for what I'd do! I'd probably have hysterics myself, just from seeing the others!"

This gave James something more to think about.

He saw now that he had misjudged the reporters; even these harpies gave him something to envy. If one was going to feel indifferent at a time like this it would be well to feel at least an honest professional indifference.... But that was not all. Had not this young man admitted that the mere sight of such suffering would have stirred him to the depths if he did not have his business to think of, and that without being personally concerned in the accident? While he himself, with every reason to suffer every anxiety in this crucial moment, was quite the calmest person in the room, able to lecture a hysterical mother on the doctrine of chances! Was he dead to all human feeling?

There was a moment of calm in the room, which was broken by the entrance of a tall blonde young man--a college undergraduate, to all appearances.

"Can any of you tell me if Car 1058 was on the Maine Special?" he asked the reporters.

No one had heard of Car 1058. Research among the bulletins failed to reveal any mention of it.

"What's the name of the person you're interested in?" asked some one.

"We might be able to tell you something."

"Oh, it wasn't any _person_," the young man explained; "it was my dog I was looking for. I've found he was shipped on Car 1058. A water spaniel, he was. I don't suppose you've heard anything?"

A moment of silence followed this announcement, and then one of the reporters began to laugh. There was nothing funny about it, of course, except the contrast. They all knew it was by the merest accident that Fannie Schmidt's contusions had been flashed over the wires rather than the fate of the water spaniel.

The youth flushed to the roots of his yellow hair.

"Oh, yes, it's very funny, of course," he said, and stalked out of the room. But there shone another light in his eyes than the gleam of anger.

"Say, there's copy in that," observed one reporter, and straightway they were all busy writing.