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Excuse Me! (Dramatic Reading)

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180 <h3 class="p6">CHAPTER XXV THE TRAIN WRECKER</h3> The train-butcher, entering the Observation Room, found only a loving couple. He took in at a glance their desire for solitude. A large part of his business was the forcing of wares on people who did not want them. His voice and his method suggested the mosquito. Seeing Mallory and Marjorie mutually absorbed in reading each other's eyes, and evidently in need of nothing on earth less than something else to read, the train-butcher decided that his best plan of attack was to make himself a nuisance. It is a plan successfully adopted by organ-grinders, street pianists and other blackmailers under the guise of art, who have nothing so welcome to sell as their absence. Mallory and Marjorie heard the train-boy's hum, but they tried to ignore it. "Papers, gents and ladies? Yes? No? Paris fashions, lady?" He shoved a large periodical between their very noses, but Marjorie threw it on the floor, with a bitter glance at her own borrowed plumage: 181 "Don't show me any Paris fashions!" Then she gave the boy his congé by resuming her chat with Mallory: "How long do we stop at Ogden?" The train-boy went right on auctioning his papers and magazines, and poking them into the laps of his prey. And they went right on talking to one another and pushing his papers and magazines to the floor. "I think I'd better get off at Ogden, and take the next train back. That's just what I'll do. Nothing, thank you!" this last to the train-boy. "But you can't leave me like this," Mallory urged excitedly, with a side glance of "No, no!" to the train-boy. "I can, and I must, and I will," Marjorie insisted. "I'll go pack my things now." "But, Marjorie, listen to me." "Will you let me alone!" This to the gadfly, but to Mallory a dejected wail: "I—I just remembered. I haven't anything to pack." "And you'll have to give back that waist to Mrs. Temple. You can't get off at Ogden without a waist." "I'll go anyway. I want to get home." "Marjorie, if you talk that way—I'll throw you off the train!" She gasped. He explained: "I wasn't talking to you; I was trying to stop this phonograph." Then he rose, and laid violent hands on the annoyer, 182 shoved him to the corridor, seized his bundle of papers from his arm, and hurled them at his head. They fell in a shower about the train-butcher, who could only feel a certain respect for the one man who had ever treated him as he knew he deserved. He bent to pick up his scattered merchandise, and when he had gathered his stock together, put his head in, and sang out a sincere: "Excuse me." But Mallory did not hear him, he was excitedly trying to calm the excited girl, who, having eloped with him, was preparing now to elope back without him. "Darling, you can't desert me now," he pleaded, "and leave me to go on alone?" "Well, why don't you do something?" she retorted, in equal desperation. "If I were a man, and I had the girl I loved on a train, I'd get her married if I had to wreck the——" she caught her breath, paused a second in intense thought, and then, with sudden radiance, cried: "Harry, dear!" "Yes, love!" "I have an idea—an inspiration!" "Yes, pet," rather dubiously from him, but with absolute exultation from her: "Let's wreck the train!" "I don't follow you, sweetheart." "Don't you see?" she began excitedly. "When there are train wrecks a lot of people get killed, and 183 things. A minister always turns up to administer the last something or other—well——" "Well?" "Well, stupid, don't you see? We wreck a train, a minister comes, we nab him, he marries us, and—there we are! Everything's lovely!" He gave her one of those looks with which a man usually greets what a woman calls an inspiration. He did not honor her invention with analysis. He simply put forward an objection to it, and, man-like, chose the most hateful of all objections: "It's a lovely idea, but the wreck would delay us for hours and hours, and I'd miss my transport——" "Harry Mallory, if you mention that odious transport to me again, I know I'll have hydrophobia. I'm going home." "But, darling," he pleaded, "you can't desert me now, and leave me to go on alone?" She had her answer glib: "If you really loved me, you'd——" "Oh, I know," he cut in. "You've said that before. But I'd be court-martialled. I'd lose my career." "What's a career to a man who truly loves?" "It's just as much as it is to anybody else—and more." She could hardly controvert this gracefully, so she sank back with grim resignation. "Well, I've proposed 184 my plan, and you don't like it. Now, suppose you propose something." The silence was oppressive. They sat like stoughton bottles. There the conductor found them some time later. He gave them a careless look, selected a chair at the end of the car, and began to sort his tickets, spreading them out on another chair, making notes with the pencil he took from atop his ear, and shoved back from time to time. Ages seemed to pass, and Mallory had not even a suggestion. By this time Marjorie's temper had evaporated, and when he said: "If we could only stop at some town for half an hour," she said: "Maybe the conductor would hold the train for us." "I hardly think he would." "He looks like an awfully nice man. You ask him." "Oh, what's the use?" Marjorie was getting tired of depending on this charming young man with the very bad luck. She decided to assume command herself. She took recourse naturally to the original feminine methods: "I'll take care of him," she said, with resolution. "A woman can get a man to do almost anything if she flirts a little with him." "Marjorie!" "Now, don't you mind anything I do. Remember, it's all for love of you—even if I have to kiss him." "Marjorie, I won't permit——" 185 "You have no right to boss me—yet. You subside." She gave him the merest touch, but he fell backward into a chair, utterly aghast at the shameless siren into which desperation had altered the timid little thing he thought he had chosen to love. He was being rapidly initiated into the complex and versatile and fearfully wonderful thing a woman really is, and he was saying to himself, "What have I married?" forgetting, for the moment, that he had not married her yet, and that therein lay the whole trouble. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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