FullReads

A question that he now asked himself was: “Do women snore?” And: “If people cannot travel in drawing-rooms, why do they travel at all?” The safety of his nine hundred dollars worried him; he knelt up to look in the inside pocket of his jacket, and bumped his head, a dull, solid bump. Pale golden stars, shaped like the enlarged pictures of snow-flakes, streamed across his consciousness. But the money was safe.

Already his nostrils were irritable with cinders; he attempted to blow them clear, and failed. He was terribly thirsty. He wished very much to smoke. Whichever way he turned, the frogs on the uppers of his pajamas made painful holes in him. He woke at last with two coarse blankets wrapped firmly about his head and shoulders and the rest of him half-naked, gritty with cinders, and as cold as a well curb. Through the ventilators (tightly closed) daylight was struggling with gas-light. The car smelled of stale steam and man. The car wheels played a headachy tune to the metre of the Phoebe-Snow-upon-the-road-of-anthracite verses. David cursed Phoebe Snow, and determined that if ever God vouchsafed him a honey-moon it should be upon the clean, fresh ocean.

There had been wistaria in Aiken. There was snow in New York. There was a hurricane in Chicago. But in the smoker bound West there was a fine old gentleman in a blue-serge suit and white spats who took a fancy to David, just when David had about come to the conclusion that nothing in the world looked friendly except suicide.

If David had learned nothing else from Miss Tennant, he had learned to speak the truth. “Any employer that I am ever to have,” he resolved, “shall know all that there is to be known about me. I shall not try to create the usual impression of a young man seeking his fortune in the West purely for amusement.” And so, when the preliminaries of smoking-room acquaintance had been made–the cigar offered and refused, and one’s reasons for or against smoking plainly stated–David was offered (and accepted) the opportunity to tell the story of his life.

David shook his head at a brilliantly labelled cigar eight inches long.

“I love to smoke,” he said, “but I’ve promised not to.”

“Better habit than liquor,” suggested the old gentleman in the white spats.

“I’ve promised not to drink.”

“Men who don’t smoke and who don’t drink,” said the old gentleman, “usually spend their time running after the girls. My name is Uriah Grey.”

“Mine is David Larkin,” said David, and he smiled cheerfully, “and I’ve promised not to make love.”

“What–never?” exclaimed Mr. Grey.

“Not until I have a right to,” said David.

Mr. Grey drew three brightly bound volumes from between his leg and the arm of his chair, and intimated that he was about to make them a subject of remark.

“I love stories,” he said, “and in the hope of a story I paid a dollar and a half for each of three novels. This one tells you how to prepare rotten meat for the market. This one tells you when and where to find your neighbor’s wife without being caught. And in this one a noble young Chicagoan describes the life of society persons in the effete East.”

“Whom he does not know from Adam,” said David.

“Whom he does not distinguish from Adam,” corrected Mr. Grey. “But I was thinking that I am disappointed in my appetite for stories, and that just now you made a most enticing beginning as–‘I, Roger Slyweather of Slyweather Hall, Blankshire, England, having at the age of twenty-two or thereabouts made solemn promise neither to smoke nor to drink, nor to make love, did set forth upon a blustering day in April….'”

“Oh,” said David, “if it’s my story you want, I don’t mind a bit. It will chasten me to tell it, and you can stop me the minute you are bored.”

And then, slip by slip and bet by bet, he told his story, withholding only the sex of that dear friend who had loaned him the five thousand dollars, and to whom he had bound himself by promises.