Susan Lenox: Her Fall and RisePhillips, David Graham
General
Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise
Phillips, David Graham
Actresses -- Fiction; Prostitutes -- Fiction; Women -- United States -- Fiction
From Cincinnati to North Vernon, where they were to change cars,
he sat beside her without speech. At North Vernon, where they
had to occupy a bench outside the squat and squalid station for
nearly two hours, he sat beside her without speech. And without
a single word on either side they journeyed in the poking,
no-sooner-well-started-than-stopping accommodation train
southbound. Several Sutherland people were aboard. He nodded
surlily to those who spoke to him. He read an Indianapolis paper
which he had bought at North Vernon. All the way she gazed
unseeingly out over the fair June landscape of rolling or hilly
fields ripening in the sun.
At North Sutherland he bade her follow him to a dilapidated barn
a few yards from the railway tracks, where was displayed a
homemade sign--"V. Goslin. Livery and Sale Stable." There was
dickering and a final compromise on four dollars where the
proprietor had demanded five and Warham had declared two fifty
liberal. A surrey was hitched with two horses. Warham opened the
awkward door to the rear seat and ordered Susan to jump in. She
obeyed; he put the bundle on the floor beside her. He sat with
the driver--the proprietor himself. The horses set off at a
round pace over the smooth turnpike. It was evening, and a
beautiful coolness issued from the woods on either side. They
skimmed over the long level stretches; they climbed hills, they
raced down into valleys. Warham and the ragged, rawboned old
proprietor kept up a kind of conversation--about crops and
politics, about the ownership, value, and fertility of the farms
they were passing. Susan sat quiet, motionless most of the time.
The last daylight faded; the stars came out; the road wound in
and out, up and down, amid cool dark silence and mysterious
fascinating shadows. The moon appeared above the tree tops
straight ahead--a big moon, with a lower arc of the rim clipped
off. The turnpike ended; they were making equally rapid progress
over the dirt road which was in perfect condition as there had
been no rain for several days. The beat of the flying hoofs was
soft now; the two men's voices, fell into a lower key; the moon
marked out the line of the road clearly, made strange spectral
minglings of light and darkness in the woods, glorified the open
fields and gave the occasional groups of farm buildings an
ancient beauty and dignity. The girl slept.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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