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The Pumpkin Coach
by
The motor stopped before a little shabby hotel in a neighboring cross-street, and the footman, in livery beside the driver, got down at a direction of the girl and went up the steps. In a few moments a man came out and descended to the motor standing by the curb. He was about middle age. He looked as though Nature had intended him, in the beginning, for a person of some distinction, but he had the dissipated face of one at middle age who had devoted his years to a life of pleasure. There were hard lines about his mouth and a purple network of veins showing about the base of his nose.
As he approached the girl, leaning out of the open window of the tonneau, dropped her glove as by inadvertence. The man stooped, recovered it and returned it to her. The girl started with a perceptible gesture. Then she cried out in her charming voice
“Merci, monsieur. I stopped a moment to thank you for the flowers you sent me last night. It was lovely of you!” and she indicated the bunch of roses pinned to her corsage.
The man seemed astonished. For a moment he hesitated as though about to make some explanation, but the girl went on without regarding his visible embarrassment.
“You shall not escape with a denial,” she said. “There was no card and you did not do me the honor to wait at the door, but I know you sent them – an usher saw you; you shall not escape my appreciation. You did send them?” she said.
The man laughed. “Sure,” he said, “if you insist.” He was willing to profit by this unexpected error, and the girl went on:
“I have worn the roses to-day,” she said, “for you. Will you wear one of them to-morrow for me?”
She detached a bud and leaned out of the door of the motor. She pinned the bud to the lapel of the man’s coat. She did it slowly, deliberately, like one who makes the touch of the fingers do the service of a caress.
Then she spoke to the driver and the motor went on, leaving the amazed man on the curb before the shabby Markheim Hotel with the rosebud pinned to his coat – astonished at the incredible fortune of this favor from an inaccessible idol about whom the city raved.
The woman accepted the enigma of this interview as she had accepted the wonder of the girl’s sudden appearance and the other, incidents of this extraordinary night. She did not undertake to imagine what the drawing on the menu meant, the words about the one-armed man, the glove dropped for Thompson to pick up, the rose pinned on his coat; it was all of a piece with the mystery that she had stumbled into.
When the motor stopped and she was taken through a little door by an attendant into a theater box, she accepted that as another of these things into which she could not inquire; things that happened to her outside of her volition and directed by authorities which she could not control.
The staging of the opera refined and extended the illusion that she had been transported out of the world by some occult agency. The wonderful creature that had taken her up out of her abandoned misery before the sordid shop-shutter appeared now in a fairy costume glittering with jewels. And the gnomes, the monsters and goblins appearing about her were all fabulous creatures, as the girl herself seemed a fabulous creature.
She sighed like one who must awaken from the splendor of a dream to realities of which the sleeper is vaguely conscious. Only the girl’s voice seemed real. It seemed some great, heavenly reality like the sunlight or the sweep of the sea. It filled the packed places of the theater. She sang and one believed again in the benevolence of heaven; in immortal love. To the distressed woman effacing herself in the corner of the empty box it was all a sort of inconceivable witch-work.