PAGE 11
The Pursuit Of The Piano
by
He began to long for some new occasion of promoting the arrival of the piano in Lower Merritt, and he was so far from regretting his former interventions that at the first junction where his train stopped he employed the time in exploring the freight-house in the vain hope of finding it there, and urging the road to greater speed in its delivery to Miss Desmond. He was now not at all ashamed of the stand he had taken in the matter at former opportunities, and he was not abashed when a man in a silk cap demanded, across the twilight of the freight-house, in accents of the semi-sarcasm appropriate in addressing a person apparently not minding his own business, “Lost something?”
“Yes, I have,” answered Gaites with just effrontery. “I’ve lost an upright piano. I started with it from Boston ten days or a fortnight ago, and I’ve found it everywhere I’ve stopped, and sometimes where I didn’t stop. How long, in the course of nature, ought an upright piano to take in getting to this point from Boston, anyway?”
The man obviously tasted the sarcasm in Gaites’s tone, and dropped it from his own, but he was sulkier if more respectful than before in answering: “‘D ought a come right through in a couple of days. ‘D ought a been here a week ago.”
“Why isn’t it here now, then?”
“Might ‘a’ got off on some branch road, by mistake, and waited there till it was looked up. You see,” the man continued, resting an elbow on the tall casing of a chest of drawers, and dropping to a more confidential level in his manner, “an upright piano ain’t like a passenger. It don’t kick if it’s shunted off on the wrong line. As a gene’l rule, freight don’t complain of the route it travels by, and it ain’t in a hurry to arrive.”
“Oh!” said Gaites, with a sympathetic sneer.
“But it ain’t likely,” said the man, who now pushed his hat far back on his head, in the interest of self-possession, “that it’s gone wrong. With all these wash-outs and devilments, the last fo’t-night, it might a’ been travellin’ straight and not got the’a, yet. What d’you say was the address?”
“Lower Merritt,” said Gaites, beginning to feel a little uncomfortable.
“Name?” persisted the man.
“Miss Phyllis Desmond,” Gaites answered, now feeling really silly, but unable to get away without answering.
“That ain’t your name?” the man suggested, with reviving sarcasm.
“No, it isn’t!” Gaites retorted, angrily, aware that he was giving himself away in fine shape.
“Oh, I see,” the man mocked. “Friend o’ the family. Well, I guess you’ll find your piano at Lower Merritt, all right, in two-three weeks.” He was now openly offensive, as with a sense of having Gaites in his power.
A locomotive-bell rang, and Gaites started toward the doorway. “Is that my train?”
The man openly laughed. “Guess it is, if you’re goin’ to Lower Merritt.” As Gaites shot through the doorway toward his train, he added, in an insolent drawl, “Miss–Des–mond!”
Gaites was so furious when he got back to the smoking-room of the parlor-car that he was sorry for several miles that he had not turned back and kicked the man, even if it lost him his train. But this was only while he was under the impression that he was furious with the man. When he discovered that he was furious with himself, for having been all imaginable kinds of an ass, he perceived that he had done the wisest thing he could in leaving the man to himself, and taking up the line of his journey again. What remained mortifying was that he had bought his ticket and checked his bag to Lower Merritt, which he wished never to hear of again, much less see.
He rang for the porter and consulted him as to what could be done toward changing the check on his bag from Lower Merritt to Middlemount Junction; and as it appeared that this was quite feasible, since his ticket would have carried him two stations beyond the Junction, he had done it. He knew the hotel at Middlemount, and he decided to pass the night there, and the next day to go back to Kent Harbor and June Alber, and let Lower Merritt and Phyllis Desmond take care of themselves from that time forward.