FullReads

“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.”