John Webster told with great attention to details the story of the
arrival of the two people at the little town. He had slept but little
during the night and was very aware of everything going on about him.
There was a row of wooden store buildings that led up from the station
and, within a few hundred yards, it became a residence street and then
a country road. A man in his shirt sleeves walked along the sidewalk on
one side the street. He was smoking a pipe, but as the carriage passed
he took the pipe out of his mouth and laughed. He called to another man
who stood before the open door of a store on the opposite side of the
street. What strange words he was saying. What did they mean? “Make it
fancy, Eddie,” he called.
The carriage containing the three people drove quickly along. John
Webster had not slept during the night and there was a kind of
straining at something within him. He was all alive, eager. Her uncle
on the front seat was a large man, like her father, but living as he
did out of doors had made the skin of his face brown. He also had a
gray moustache. Could one get acquainted with him? Would one ever be
able to say intimate confidential things to him?
For that matter would one ever be able to say intimate confidential
things to the woman one had married? The truth was that all night his
body had been aching with anticipation of a coming love-making. How
odd that one did not speak of such matters when one had married women
out of respectable families in respectable Illinois manufacturing
towns. At the wedding every one must have known. That was no doubt what
the young married men and women were smiling and laughing about, behind
the walls, as it were.
There were two horses hitched to the carriage and they went soberly
and steadily along. Now the woman who had become John Webster’s bride,
was sitting up, very straight and tall on the seat beside him and she
had her hands folded in her lap. They were nearing the edge of town
and a boy came out at the front door of a house and stood on a little
porch staring at them with blank questioning eyes. There was a large
dog asleep beneath a cherry tree beside another house a little further
along. He let the carriage get almost past before he moved. John
Webster watched the dog. “Shall I get up from this comfortable place
and make a fuss about that carriage or shall I not?” the dog seemed to
be asking himself. Then he sprang up and racing madly along the road
began barking at the horses. The man on the front seat struck at him
with the whip. “I suppose he made up his mind he had to do it, that it
was the proper thing to do,” John Webster said. His bride and her uncle
both looked at him with questioning eyes. “Eh, what’s that? What’d you
say?” the uncle asked, but got no answer. John Webster felt suddenly
embarrassed. “I was only speaking of the dog,” he said presently. One
had to make some kind of explanation. The rest of the ride was taken in
silence.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account