Lady Betty Across the WaterWilliamson, C. N. (Charles Norris)
General
Lady Betty Across the Water
Williamson, C. N. (Charles Norris)
British -- United States -- Fiction; Voyages and travels -- Fiction; Young women -- Fiction
I was horrified to find when we arrived that--as the Americans
say--there was "nothing doing," not a soul in sight, and there I was,
very hot and hysterical, with Vivace and my dressing bag looking like
an escaped burglaress. I had been so nervous while I was packing, that
I'd been afraid of everything, even the soap in the soap dish, which
had two great blinking bubbles at one end, like a pair of goblin eyes
that watched me move, but I was much worse now, and I could have fallen
on the neck of the first official person I saw moving about the station
after I had waited for perhaps a quarter of an hour. I don't know what
he was, but when I appealed to him for news of a train for New York,
instead of calling the police to give Vivace and me in charge as a
dangerous pair, he scratched his head and said there was a milk train
due presently, if I was mighty anxious.
A milk train sounded innocent and suitable to a girl travelling alone,
but even if it hadn't I should have been thankful to go in it. I
couldn't buy a ticket, it appeared, in the ordinary way; but when the
milk train came my man introduced me to another. Perhaps he was a
milkman; anyway he seemed to have authority, and he said as a favour
Vivace and I could be taken. He was a nice person, and he talked a
great deal after the train had given several false starts and at last
had got off. I sat on my bag, as I had on the docks, in a bare, curious
car, which really belonged to the milk, and sometimes when we bumped I
should have fallen on the floor if it hadn't been for him. He told me
all about himself, and wanted to be told all about me, but I thought,
nice as he was, it would be safer not. He asked leading questions which
it was hard to keep from answering, unless I hurt his feelings; but I
think he somehow got the impression that I was going to see a sick
relative, though I never exactly said so.
I don't know what time I should have got to New York if I had had to
travel all the way with the milk, for milk it seems objects to speed;
but after we had jogged along for a couple of hours, we crawled into a
station where a real train was ready to start. There were just five
minutes to say farewell to my friend, and buy a ticket, when all
flushed and panting, I found myself and Vivace and the bag, in a car
different from any I had seen yet. It had no nice easy chairs and plate
glass mirrors and wire nettings in the windows, like the one in which
I'd travelled to Newport, but there were two rows of seats, and when
the train moved a cloud of coal smoke poured in through the door at the
front end. Babies squalled, children whined, and their faces grew black
and damp with mingled dirt and heat while grown-up people scolded; but
a dear old lady got into my seat before long, and just because I helped
her with a band-box, she made me a present of a huge peach. I was
thankful to have it, for by this time I was collapsing with hunger,
having been up all night without anything to eat.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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