before—that his forehead was drilled with a small round hole like a larger picture nail leaves when it’s pulled from a plaster wall. “And now you’re sinking. You’ve only got a few hours. The trip home is over!”
His face contorted, lost all semblance of humanity, living or dead. Simultaneously the room was full of cold air and with a noise that was something between a paroxysm of coughing and a burst of horrible laughter, he was on his feet, reeking of shame and blasphemy.
“Come and look!” he cried. “I’ll show you—”
He took a step toward me, then another and it was exactly as if a door stood open behind him, a door yawning out to an inconceivable abyss of darkness and corruption. There was a scream of mortal agony, from him or from somewhere behind, and abruptly the strength went out of him in a long husky sigh and he wilted to the floor. …
How long I sat there, dazed with terror and exhaustion, I don’t know. The next thing I remember is the sleepy porter shining shoes across the room from me, and outside the window the steel fires of Pittsburgh breaking the flat perspective also—something too faint for a man, too heavy for a shadow, of the night. There was something extended on the bench. Even as I perceived it it faded off and away.
Some minutes later I opened the door of Ellen’s compartment. She was asleep where I had left her. Her lovely cheeks were white and wan, but she lay naturally—her hands relaxed and her breathing regular and clear. What had possessed her had gone out of her, leaving her exhausted but her own dear self again.
I made her a little more comfortable, tucked a blanket around her, extinguished the light and went out.
III
When I came home for Easter vacation, almost my first act was to go down to the billiard parlor near Seven Corners. The man at the cash register quite naturally didn’t remember my hurried visit of three months before.
“I’m trying to locate a certain party who, I think, came here a lot some time ago.”
I described the man rather accurately, and when I had finished, the cashier called to a little jockeylike fellow who was sitting near with an air of having something very important to do that he couldn’t quite remember.
“Hey, Shorty, talk to this guy, will you? I think he’s looking for Joe Varland.”
The little man gave me a tribal look of suspicion. I went and sat near him.
“Joe Varland’s dead, fella,” he said grudgingly. “He died last winter.”
I described him again—his overcoat, his laugh, the habitual expression of his eyes.
“That’s Joe Varland you’re looking for all right, but he’s dead.”
“I want to find out something about him.”
“What you want to find out?”
“What did he do, for instance?”
“How should I know?”
“Look here! I’m not a policeman. I just want some kind of information about his habits. He’s dead now and it can’t hurt him. And it won’t go beyond me.”
“Well”—he hesitated, looking me over—“he was a great one for travelling. He got in a row in the station in Pittsburgh and a dick got him.”
I nodded. Broken pieces of the puzzle began to assemble in my head.
“Why was he a lot on trains?”
“How should I know, fella?”
“If you can use ten dollars, I’d like to know anything you may have heard on the subject.”
“Well,” said Shorty reluctantly, “all I know is they used to say he worked the trains.”
“Worked the trains?”
“He had some racket of his own he’d never loosen up about. He used to work the girls travelling alone on the trains. Nobody ever knew much about it—he was a pretty smooth guy—but sometimes he’d turn up here with a lot of dough and he let ’em know it was the janes he got it off of.”
I thanked him and gave him the ten dollars and went out, very thoughtful, without mentioning that part of Joe Varland had made a last trip home.
Ellen wasn’t West for Easter, and even if she had been I wouldn’t have gone to her with the information, either—at least I’ve seen her almost every day this summer and we’ve managed to talk about everything else. Sometimes, though, she gets silent about nothing and wants to be very close to me, and I know what’s in her mind.
Of course she’s coming out this fall, and I have two more years at New Haven; still, things don’t look so impossible as they did a few months ago. She belongs to me in a way—even if I lose her she belongs to me. Who knows? Anyhow, I’ll always be there.
The Bowl
I
There was a man in my class at Princeton who never went to football games. He spent his Saturday afternoons delving for minutiae about Greek athletics and the somewhat fixed battles between Christians and wild beasts under the Antonines. Lately—several years out of college—he has discovered football players and is making etchings of them in the manner of the late George Bellows. But he was once unresponsive to the very spectacle at his door, and I suspect the originality of his judgments on what is beautiful, what is remarkable and what is fun.
I reveled in football, as audience, amateur statistician and foiled participant—for I had played in prep school, and once there was a headline in the school newspaper: “Deering and Mullins Star Against Taft in Stiff Game Saturday.” When I came in to lunch after the battle the school stood up and clapped and the visiting coach shook hands with me and prophesied—incorrectly—that I was going to be heard from. The episode is laid away in the most pleasant lavender of my past. That year I grew very tall and thin, and when at Princeton the following fall I looked anxiously over the freshman candidates and saw the polite disregard with which they looked back at me, I realized that that particular dream was over.
