The Indiscreet Letter by Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
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Eleanor Hallowell Abbott >> The Indiscreet Letter
"And then the Voice choked again, just a little bit, and said:
'Well--here goes, then. Once upon a time--but first, can you move your
right hand? Turn it just a little bit more this way. There! Cuddle it
down! Now, you see, I've made a little home for it in mine. Ouch!
Don't press down too hard! I think my wrist is broken. All ready,
then? You won't cry another cry? Promise? All right then. Here goes.
Once upon a time--'
"Never mind about the story," said the Youngish Girl tersely. "It
began about the first thing in all his life that he remembered
seeing--something funny about a grandmother's brown wig hung over the
edge of a white piazza railing--and he told me his name and address,
and all about his people, and all about his business, and what banks
his money was in, and something about some land down in the Panhandle,
and all the bad things that he'd ever done in his life, and all the
good things, that he wished there'd been more of, and all the things
that no one would dream of telling you if he ever, ever expected to
see Daylight again--things so intimate--things so--
"But it wasn't, of course, about his story that I wanted to tell you.
It was about the 'home,' as he called it, that his broken hand made
for my--frightened one. I don't know how to express it; I can't
exactly think, even, of any words to explain it. Why, I've been all
over the world, I tell you, and fairly loafed and lolled in every
conceivable sort of ease and luxury, but the Soul of me--the wild,
restless, breathless, discontented _soul_ of me--_never sat down
before in all its life_--I say, until my frightened hand cuddled into
his broken one. I tell you I don't pretend to explain it, I don't
pretend to account for it; all I know is--that smothering there under
all that horrible wreckage and everything--the instant my hand went
home to his, the most absolute sense of serenity and contentment went
over me. Did you ever see young white horses straying through a
white-birch wood in the springtime? Well, it felt the way that
_looks_!--Did you ever hear an alto voice singing in the candle-light?
Well, it felt the way that _sounds_! The last vision you would like to
glut your eyes on before blindness smote you! The last sound you would
like to glut your ears on before deafness dulled you! The last
touch--before Intangibility! Something final, complete,
supreme--ineffably satisfying!
"And then people came along and rescued us, and I was sick in the
hospital for several weeks. And then after that I went to Persia. I
know it sounds silly, but it seemed to me as though just the smell of
Persia would be able to drive away even the memory of red plush dust
and scorching woodwork. And there was a man on the steamer whom I used
to know at home--a man who's almost always wanted to marry me. And
there was a man who joined our party at Teheran--who liked me a
little. And the land was like silk and silver and attar of roses. But
all the time I couldn't seem to think about anything except how
perfectly awful it was that a _stranger_ like me should be running
round loose in the world, carrying all the big, scary secrets of a man
who didn't even know where I was. And then it came to me all of a
sudden, one rather worrisome day, that no woman who knew as much about
a man as I did was exactly a 'stranger' to him. And then, twice as
suddenly, to great, grown-up, cool-blooded, money-staled, book-tamed
_me_--it swept over me like a cyclone that I should never be able to
decide anything more in all my life--not the width of a tinsel ribbon,
not the goal of a journey, not the worth of a lover--until I'd seen
the Face that belonged to the Voice in the railroad wreck.
"And I sat down--and wrote the man a letter--I had his name and
address, you know. And there--in a rather maddening moonlight night on
the Caspian Sea--all the horrors and terrors of that other--Canadian
night came back to me and swamped completely all the arid timidity
and sleek conventionality that women like me are hidebound with
all their lives, and I wrote him--that unknown, unvisualized,
unimagined--MAN--the utterly free, utterly frank, utterly
honest sort of letter that any brave soul would write any other brave
soul--every day of the world--if there wasn't any flesh. It wasn't a
love letter. It wasn't even a sentimental letter. Never mind what I
told him. Never mind anything except that there, in that tropical
night on a moonlit sea, I asked him to meet me here, in Boston, eight
months afterward--on the same Boston-bound Canadian train--on
this--the anniversary of our other tragic meeting."
"And you think he'll be at the station?" gasped the Traveling
Salesman.
The Youngish Girl's answer was astonishingly tranquil. "I don't know,
I'm sure," she said. "That part of it isn't my business. All I know is
that I wrote the letter--and mailed it. It's Fate's move next."
"But maybe he never got the letter!" protested the Traveling
Salesman, buckling frantically at the straps of his sample-case.
"Very likely," the Youngish Girl answered calmly. "And if he never got
it, then Fate has surely settled everything perfectly definitely for
me--that way. The only trouble with that would be," she added
whimsically, "that an unanswered letter is always pretty much like an
unhooked hook. Any kind of a gap is apt to be awkward, and the hook
that doesn't catch in its own intended tissue is mighty apt to tear
later at something you didn't want torn."
"I don't know anything about that," persisted the Traveling Salesman,
brushing nervously at the cinders on his hat. "All I say is--maybe he's
married."
"Well, that's all right," smiled the Youngish Girl. "Then Fate would
have settled it all for me perfectly satisfactorily _that_ way. I
wouldn't mind at all his not being at the station. And I wouldn't
mind at all his being married. And I wouldn't mind at all his turning
out to be very, very old. None of those things, you see, would
interfere in the slightest with the memory of the--Voice or
the--chivalry of the broken hand. THE ONLY THING I'D MIND, I TELL
YOU, WOULD BE TO THINK THAT HE REALLY AND TRULY WAS THE MAN WHO WAS
MADE FOR ME--AND I MISSED FINDING IT OUT!--Oh, of course, I've
worried myself sick these past few months thinking of the audacity of
what I've done. I've got such a 'Sore Thought,' as you call it, that
I'm almost ready to scream if anybody mentions the word 'indiscreet'
in my presence. And yet, and yet--after all, it isn't as though I were
reaching out into the darkness after an indefinite object. What I'm
reaching out for is a _light_, so that I can tell exactly just what
object is there. And, anyway," she quoted a little waveringly:
"He either fears his fate too much,
Or his, deserts are small,
Who dares not put it to the touch
To gain or lose it all!"
"Ain't you scared just a little bit?" probed the Traveling Salesman.
All around them the people began bustling suddenly with their coats
and bags. With a gesture of impatience the Youngish Girl jumped up and
started to fasten her furs. The eyes that turned to answer the
Traveling Salesman's question were brimming wet with tears.
"Yes--I'm--scared to death!" she smiled incongruously.
Almost authoritatively the Salesman reached out his empty hand for her
traveling-bag. "What you going to do if he ain't there?" he asked.
The Girl's eyebrows lifted. "Why, just what I'm going to do if he _is_
there," she answered quite definitely. "I'm going right back to
Montreal to-night. There's a train out again, I think, at
eight-thirty. Even late as we are, that will give me an hour and a
half at the station."
"Gee!" said the Traveling Salesman. "And you've traveled five days
just to see what a man looks like--for an hour and a half?"
"I'd have traveled twice five days," she whispered, "just to see what
he looked like--for a--second and a half!"
"But how in thunder are you going to recognize him?" fussed the
Traveling Salesman. "And how in thunder is he going to recognize you?"
"Maybe I won't recognize him," acknowledged the Youngish Girl, "and
likelier than not he won't recognize me; but don't you see?--can't you
understand?--that all the audacity of it, all the worry of it--is
absolutely nothing compared to the one little chance in ten thousand
that we _will_ recognize each other?"
"Well, anyway," said the Traveling Salesman stubbornly, "I'm going to
walk out slow behind you and see you through this thing all right."
"Oh, no, you're not!" exclaimed the Youngish Girl. "Oh, no, you're
not! Can't you see that if he's there, I wouldn't mind you so much;
but if he doesn't come, can't you understand that maybe I'd just as
soon you didn't know about it?"
"O-h," said the Traveling Salesman.
A little impatiently he turned and routed the Young Electrician out
of his sprawling nap. "Don't you know Boston when you see it?" he
cried a trifle testily.
For an instant the Young Electrician's sleepy eyes stared dully into
the Girl's excited face. Then he stumbled up a bit awkwardly and
reached out for all his coil-boxes and insulators.
"Good-night to you. Much obliged to you," he nodded amiably.
A moment later he and the Traveling Salesman were forging their way
ahead through the crowded aisle. Like the transient, impersonal,
altogether mysterious stimulant of a strain of martial music, the
Young Electrician vanished into space. But just at the edge of the car
steps the Traveling Salesman dallied a second to wait for the Youngish
Girl.
"Say," he said, "say, can I tell my wife what you've told me?"
"Y-e-s," nodded the Youngish Girl soberly.
"And say," said the Traveling Salesman, "say, I don't exactly like to
go off this way and never know at all how it all came out." Casually
his eyes fell on the big lynx muff in the Youngish Girl's hand. "Say,"
he said, "if I promise, honest-Injun, to go 'way off to the other end
of the station, couldn't you just lift your muff up high, once, if
everything comes out the way you want it?"
"Y-e-s," whispered the Youngish Girl almost inaudibly.
Then the Traveling Salesman went hurrying on to join the Young
Electrician, and the Youngish Girl lagged along on the rear edge of
the crowd like a bashful child dragging on the skirts of its mother.
Out of the groups of impatient people that flanked the track she saw
a dozen little pecking reunions, where some one dashed wildly into the
long, narrow stream of travelers and yanked out his special friend or
relative, like a good-natured bird of prey. She saw a tired, worn,
patient-looking woman step forward with four noisy little boys, and
then stand dully waiting while the Young Electrician gathered his
riotous offspring to his breast. She saw the Traveling Salesman grin
like a bashful school-boy, just as a red-cloaked girl came running to
him and bore him off triumphantly toward the street.
And then suddenly, out of the blur, and the dust, and the dizziness,
and the half-blinding glare of lights, the figure of a Man loomed up
directly and indomitably across the Youngish Girl's path--a Man
standing bare-headed and faintly smiling as one who welcomes a
much-reverenced guest--a Man tall, stalwart, sober-eyed, with a touch
of gray at his temples, a Man whom any woman would be proud to have
waiting for her at the end of any journey. And right there before all
that hurrying, scurrying, self-centered, unseeing crowd, he reached
out his hands to her and gathered her frightened fingers close into
his.
"You've--kept--me--waiting--a--long--time," he reproached her.
"Yes!" she stammered. "Yes! Yes! The train was two hours late!"
"It wasn't the hours that I was thinking about," said the Man very
quietly. "It was the--_year_!"
And then, just as suddenly, the Youngish Girl felt a tug at her coat,
and, turning round quickly, found herself staring with dazed eyes
into the eager, childish face of the Traveling Salesman's red-cloaked
wife. Not thirty feet away from her the Traveling Salesman's
shameless, stolid-looking back seemed to be blocking up the main exit
to the street.
"Oh, are you the lady from British Columbia?" queried the excited
little voice. Perplexity, amusement, yet a divine sort of marital
confidence were in the question.
"Yes, surely I am," said the Youngish Girl softly.
Across the little wife's face a great rushing, flushing wave of
tenderness blocked out for a second all trace of the cruel, slim scar
that marred the perfect contour of one cheek.
"Oh, I don't know at all what it's all about," laughed the little
wife, "but my husband asked me to come back and kiss you!"