Read Ebook: Forty Minutes Late 1909 by Smith Francis Hopkinson

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Ebook has 121 lines and 8193 words, and 3 pages

Again the door swung wide. This time it let in a fur overcoat, coon-skin cap, two gray yarn mittens, a pair of raw-beefsteak cheeks and a voice like a fog-horn.

"Didn't send for ye? Wall, I'll be gol-durned! And yer had to fut it? Well, don' that beat all. And yer ain't the fust one they've left down here to get up the best way they could. Last winter--Jan'ry, warn't it, Bill?" Bill nodded--"there come a woman from New York and they dumped her out jes' same as you. I happened to come along in time, as luck would have it--I was haulin' a load of timber on my bob-sled--and there warn't nothin' else, so I took her up to the village. She got in late, of course, but they was a-waitin' for her. I really wasn't goin' to hear you speak to-night--we git so much of that sort of thing since the old man who left the money to pay you fellers for talkin' died--been goin' on ten years now--but I'll take yer 'long with me, and glad to. But yer oughter have somethin' warmer'n what yer got on. Wind's kinder nippy down here, but it ain't nothin' to the way it bites up on the ridge."

This same thought had passed through my own mind. The unusual exertion had started every pore in my body; the red-hot stove had put on the finishing touches and I was in a Russian bath. To face that wind meant all sorts of calamities.

The Madonna-like wife with the cherub in her arms rose to her feet.

"Would you mind wearing my fur tippet?" she said in her soft voice; "'tain't much, but it 'ud keep out the cold from yer neck and maybe this shawl'd help some, if I tied it round your shoulders. Father got his death ridin' to the village when he was overhet."

She put them on with her own hands, bless her kind heart! her husband holding the baby; then she followed me out into the cold and helped draw the horse-blanket over my knees; the man in the coon-skin cap lugging the bags and the umbrella.

I looked at my watch. After eight o'clock, and two miles to drive!

"Oh, I'll git yer there," came a voice from inside the fur overcoat. "Darter wanted to go, but I said 'twarn't no night to go nowhars. Got to see a man who owes me some money, or I'd stay home myself. Git up, Joe."

It was marvellous, the intelligence of this man. More than marvellous when my again blinded eyes--the red flannel in the lamp helped--began to take in the landscape. Fences were evidently of no use to him; clumps of trees didn't count. If he had a compass anywhere about his clothes, he never once consulted it. Drove right on--across trackless Siberian steppes; by the side of endless glaciers, and through primeval forests, his voice keeping up its volume of sound, as he laid bare for me the scandals of the village--particularly the fight going on between the two churches--one hard and one soft--this lecture course being one of the bones of contention.

I saved my voice and kept quiet. If a runner did not give out or "Joe" break a leg, we would reach the hall in time; half an hour late, perhaps--but in time; the man beside me had said so--and the man beside me knew.

With a turn of the fence--a new one had thrust its hands out of a drift--a big building--big in the white waste--loomed up. My companion flapped the reins the whole length of Joe's back.

"Git up! No, by gosh!--they ain't tired yet;--they're still a-waitin'. See them lights--that's the hall."

I gave a sigh of relief. The ambitious young man with one ear open for stellar voices, and the overburdened John Bunyan, and any number of other short-winded pedestrians, could no longer monopolize the upward and onward literature of our own or former times. I too had arrived.

As I landed the last bag on the top step--the fog-horn couldn't leave his horse--I became conscious of the movements of a short, rotund, shad-shaped gentleman in immaculate white waistcoat, stiff choker and wide expanse of shirt front. He was approaching me from the door of the lecture hall in which sat the audience; then a clammy hand was thrust out--and a thin voice trickled this sentence:

"You're considerable late sir--our people have been in their--"

"I said you were forty minutes late, sir. We expect our lecturers to be on--"

That was the fulminate that exploded the bomb. Up to now I had held myself in hand. I was carrying, I knew, 194 pounds of steam, and I also knew that one shovel more of coal would send the entire boiler into space, but through it all I had kept my hand on the safety-valve. It might have been the white waistcoat or the way the curved white collar cupped his billiard-ball of a chin, or it might have been the slight frown about his eyebrows, or the patronizing smile that drifted over his freshly laundered face; or it might have been the deprecating gesture with which he consulted his watch: whatever it was, out went the boiler.

"Late! Are you the man that's running this lecture course?"

"Well, sir, I have the management of it."

"You have, have you? Then permit me to tell you right here, my friend, that you ought to sublet the contract to a five-year-old boy. You let me get out in the cold--send no conveyance as you agreed--"

"We sent our wagon, sir, to the station. You could have gone in and warmed yourself, and if it had not arrived you could have telephoned--the station is always warm."

"You have the impudence to tell me that I don't know whether a station is closed or not, and that I can't see a wagon when it is hauled up alongside a depot?"

The clammy hands went up in protest: "If you will listen, sir, I will--"

"No, sir, I will listen to nothing." and I forged ahead into a small room where five or six belated people were hanging up their coats and hats.

But the Immaculate still persisted:

"This is not where--Will you come into the dressing-room, sir? We have a nice warm room for the lecturers on the other side of the--"

"No--sir; I won't go another step, except on to that platform, and I'm not very anxious now to get there--not until I put something inside of me--" "to save me from an attack of pneumonia." "When I think of how hard I worked to get here and how little you--" .

The expression of disgust that wrinkled the placid face of the Immaculate as the half-empty flask went back to its place, was pathetic--but I wouldn't have given him a drop to have saved his life.

I turned on him again.

"Do you think it would be possible to get a vehicle of any kind to take me where I am to sleep?"

"I think so, sir." His self-control was admirable.

"Well, will you please do it?"

"A sleigh has already been ordered, sir." This came through tightly closed lips.

"All right. Now down which aisle is the entrance to the platform?"

"This way, sir." The highest glacier on Mont Blanc couldn't have been colder or more impassive.

Just here a calming thought wedged itself into my brain-storm. These patient, long-suffering people were not to blame; many of them had come several miles through the storm to hear me speak and were entitled to the best that was in me. To vent upon them my spent steam because--No, that was impossible.

"Hold on, my friend," I said, "stop where you are, let me pull myself together. This isn't their fault--" We were passing behind the screen hiding the little stage.

But he didn't hold on; he marched straight ahead; so did I, past the pitcher of ice water and the two last winter's palms, where he motioned me to a chair.

His introduction was not long, nor was it discursive. There was nothing eulogistic of my various acquirements, occupations, talents; no remark about the optimistic trend of my literature, the affection in which my characters were held; nothing of this at all. Nor did I expect it. What interested me more was the man himself.

The steam of my wrath had blurred his outline and make-up before; now I got a closer, although a side, view of his person. He was a short man, much thicker at the middle than he was at either end--a defect all the more apparent by reason of a long-tailed, high-waisted, unbuttonable black coat which, while it covered his back and sides, would have left his front exposed, but for his snowy white waistcoat, which burst like a ball of cotton from its pod.

His only gesture was the putting together of his ten fingers, opening and touching them again to accentuate his sentences. What passed through my mind as I sat and watched him, was not the audience, nor what I was going to say to them, but the Christianlike self-control of this gentleman--a control which seemed to carry with it a studied reproof. Under its influence I unconsciously closed both furnace doors and opened my forced draft. Even then I should have reached for the safety-valve, but for an oily, martyr-like smile which flickered across his face, accompanied by a deprecating movement of his elbows, both indicating his patience under prolonged suffering, and his instant readiness to turn the other cheek if further smiting on my part was in store for him. I strode to the edge of the platform: "I know, good people," I exploded, "that you are not responsible for what has happened, but I want to tell you before I begin, that I have been boiling mad for ten minutes and am still at white heat, and that it is going to take me some time to get cool enough to be of the slightest service to you. You notice that I appear before you without a proper suit of clothes--a mark of respect which every lecturer should pay his audience. You are also aware that I am nearly an hour late. What I regret is, first, the cause of my frame of mind, second, that you should have been kept waiting. Now, let me tell you exactly what I have gone through, and I do it simply because this is not the first time that this has happened to your lecturers, and it ought to be your last. It certainly will be the last for me." Then followed the whole incident, including the Immaculate's protest about my being late, my explosion, etc., etc., even to the incident of my flask.

There was a dead silence--so dead and lifeless that I could not tell whether they were offended or not; but I made my bow as usual, and began my discourse.

I squeezed in beside the bags and was about to draw up the horse blanket, when a voice rang out:

"Mis' Plimsole's goin' in that sleigh, too." It was at Mrs. Plimsole's that I was to spend the night.

Then a faint voice answered back:

"No, I can just as well walk." She evidently knew the danger of sitting next to an overcharged boiler.

Mrs. Plimsole!--a woman--walk--on a night like this--I was out of the sleigh before she had ceased to speak.

"No, madam, you are going to do nothing of the kind; if anybody is to walk it will be I; I'm getting used to it."

She allowed me to tuck her in. It was too dark for me to see what she was like--she was so swathed and tied up. Being still mad--fires drawn but still dangerous, I concluded that my companion was sour, and skinny, with a parrot nose and one tooth gone. That I was to pass the night at her house did not improve the estimate; there would be mottoes on the walls--"What is home without a mother," and the like; tidies on the chairs, and a red-hot stove smelling of drying socks. There would also be a basin and pitcher the size of a cup and saucer, and a bed that sagged in the middle and was covered with a cotton quilt.

Oh, such a dear, sweet gray-haired old lady! The kind of an old lady you would have wanted to stay--not a night with--but a year. An old lady with plump fresh cheeks and soft brown eyes and a smile that warmed you through and through. And such an all-embracing restful room with its open wood fire, andirons and polished fender--and the plants and books and easy-chairs! And the cheer of it all!

"Now you just sit there and get comfortable," she said, patting my shoulder--. "Maggie'll get you some supper. We had it all ready, expecting you on the six-ten. Hungry, aren't you?"

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