Deserted by Edward Bellamy (bookreader TXT) 📖

"What a glorious, all-satisfying country this Nevada desert would be, if one were only all eyes, and had no need of food, drink, and shelter! Would n't it, Miss Dwyer? Do you know, I 've no doubt that this is the true location of heaven. You see, the lack of water and vegetation would be no inconvenience to spirits, while the magnificent scenery and the cloudless sky would be just the thing to make them thrive."

"But what I can't get over," responded the young lady addressed, "is that these alkali plains, which have been described as so dreary and uninteresting, should prove to be in reality one of the most wonderfully impressive and beautiful regions in the world. What awful fibbers, or what awfully dull people, they must have been whose descriptions have so misled the public! It is perfectly unaccountable. Here I expected to doze all the way across the desert, while in fact I 've grudged my eyes time enough to wink ever since I left my berth this morning."

"The trouble is," replied her companion, "that persons in search of the picturesque, or with much eye for it, are rare travelers along this route. The people responsible for the descriptions you complain of are thrifty businessmen, with no idea that there can be any possible attraction in a country where crops can't be raised, timber cut, or ore dug up. For my part, I thank the Lord for the beautiful barrenness that has consecrated this great region to loneliness. Here there will always be a chance to get out of sight and sound of the swarming millions who have already left scarcely standing-room for a man in the East. I wouldn't give much for a country where there are no wildernesses left."

"But I really think it is rather hard to say in just what the beauty of the desert consists," said Miss Dwyer. "It is so simple. I scribbled two pages of description in my note-book this morning, but when I read them over, and then looked out of the window, I tore them up. I think the wonderfully fine, clear, brilliant air transfigures the landscape and makes it something that must be seen and can't be told. After seeing how this air makes the ugly sagebrush and the patches of alkali and brown earth a feast to the eye, one can understand how the light of heaven may make the ugliest faces beautiful."

The pretty talker is sitting next the window of palace-car No. 30 of the Central Pacific line, which has already been her flying home for two days. The gentleman who sits beside her professes to be sharing the view, but it is only fair I should tell the reader that under this pretense he is nefariously delighting in the rounded contour of his companion's half-averted face, as she, in unfeigned engrossment, scans the panorama unrolled before them by the swift motion of the car. How sweet and fresh is the bright tint of her cheek against the ghastly white background of the alkali-patches as they flit by! Still, it can't be said that he is n't enjoying the scenery too, for surely there is no such Claude-Lorraine glass to reflect and enhance the beauty of a landscape as the face of a _spirituelle_ girl.

With a profound sigh, summing up both her admiration and that despair of attaining the perfect insight and sympathy imagined and longed for which is always a part of intense appreciation of natural beauty, Miss Dwyer threw herself back in her seat, and fixed her eyes on the car-ceiling with an expression as if she were looking at something at least as far away as the moon.

"I 'm going to make a statue when I get home," she said,--"a statue which will personify Nevada, and represent the tameless, desolate, changeless, magnificent beauty and the self-sufficient loneliness of the desert. I can see it in my mind's eye now. It will probably be the finest statue in the world."

"If you 'd as lief put your ideal into a painting, I will give you a suggestion that will be original if nothing else," he observed.

"What's that?"

"Why, having in view these white alkali-patches that chiefly characterize Nevada, paint her as a leper."

"That's horrid! You need n't talk to me any more," she exclaimed emphatically.

With this sort of chatter they had beguiled the time since leaving San Francisco the morning of the day before. Acquaintances are indeed made as rapidly on an overland train as on an ocean steamship, but theirs had dated from the preceding winter, during which they had often met in San Francisco. When Mr. Lombard heard that Miss Dwyer and Mrs. Eustis, her invalid sister, were going East in April, he discovered that he would have business to attend to in New York at about that time; and oddly enough,--that is, if you choose to take that view of it,--when the ladies came to go, it turned out that Lombard had taken his ticket for the selfsame train and identical sleeping-car. The result of which was that he had the privilege of handing Miss Dwyer in and out at the eating-stations, of bringing Mrs. Eustis her cup of tea in the car, and of sharing Miss Dwyer's seat and monopolizing her conversation when he had a mind to, which was most of the time. A bright and congenial companion has this advantage over a book, that he or she is an author whom you can make discourse on any subject you please, instead of being obliged to follow an arbitrary selection by another, as when you commune with the printed page.

By way of peace-offering for his blasphemy in calling the Nevada desert a leper, Lombard had embezzled a couple of chairs from the smoking-room and carried them to the rear platform of the car, which happened to be the last of the train, and invited Miss Dwyer to come thither and see the scenery. Whether she had wanted to pardon him or not, he knew very well that this was a temptation which she could not resist, for the rear platform was the best spot for observation on the entire train, unless it were the cowcatcher of the locomotive.

The April sun mingled with the frosty air like whiskey with ice-water, producing an effect cool but exhilarating. As she sat in the door of the little passage leading to the platform, she scarcely needed the shawl which he wrapped about her with absurdly exaggerated solicitude. One of the most unmistakable symptoms of the lover is the absorbing and superfluous care with which he adjusts the wraps about the object of his affections whether the weather be warm or cold: it is as if he thought he could thus artificially warm her heart toward him. But Miss Dwyer did not appear vexed, pretending indeed to be oblivious of everything else in admiration of the spectacle before her.

The country stretched flat and bare as a table for fifty miles on either side the track,--a distance looking in the clear air not over one fifth as great. On every side this great plain was circled by mountains, the reddish-brown sides of some of them bare to the summits, while others were robed in folds of glistening snow and looked like white curtains drawn part way up the sky. The whitey-gray of the alkali-patches, the brown of the dry earth, and the rusty green of the sagebrush filled the foreground, melting in the distance into a purple-gray. The wondrous dryness and clearness of the air lent to these modest tints a tone and dazzling brilliance that surprised the eye with a revelation of possibilities never before suspected in them. But the mountains were the greatest wonder. It was as if the skies, taking pity on their nakedness, had draped their majestic shoulders in imperial purple, while at this hour the westering sun tipped their pinnacles with gilt. In the distance half a dozen sand-spouts, swiftly-moving white pillars, looking like desert genii with too much "tanglefoot" aboard, were careering about in every direction.

But as Lombard pointed out the various features of the scene to his companion, I fear that his chief motive was less an admiration of Nature that sought sympathy than a selfish delight in making her eyes flash, seeing the color come and go in her cheeks, and hearing her charming unstudied exclamations of pleasure,--a delight not unmingled with complacency in associating himself in her mind with emotions of delight and admiration. It is appalling, the extent to which spoony young people make the admiration of Nature in her grandest forms a mere sauce to their love-making. The roar of Niagara has been notoriously utilized as a cover to unlimited osculation, and Adolphus looks up at the sky-cleaving peak of Mont Blanc only to look down at Angelina's countenance with a more vivid appreciation of its superior attractions.

It was delicious, Lombard thought, sitting there with her on the rear platform, out of sight and sound of everybody. He had such a pleasant sense of proprietorship in her! How agreeable--flatteringly so, in fact--she had been all day! There was nothing like traveling together to make people intimate. It was clear that she understood his intentions very well: indeed, how could she help it? He had always said that a fellow had shown himself a bungler at love-making if he were not practically assured of the result before he came to the point of the declaration. The sensation of leaving everything else so rapidly behind that people have when sitting on the rear platform of a train of cars makes them feel, by force of contrast, nearer to each other and more identified. How pretty she looked sitting there in the doorway, her eyes bent so pensively on the track behind as the car-wheels so swiftly reeled it off! He had tucked her in comfortably. No cold could get to the sweet little girl, and none ever should so long as he lived to make her comfort his care.

One small gloved hand lay on her lap outside the shawl. What a jolly little hand it was! He reached out his own and took it, but, without even a moment's hesitation for him to extract a flattering inference from, she withdrew it. Perhaps something in his matter-of-course way displeased her.

To know when it is best to submit to a partial rebuff, rather than make a bad matter worse by trying to save one's pride, is a rare wisdom. Still, Lombard might have exercised it at another time. But there are days when the magnetisms are all wrong, and a person not ordinarily deficient in tact, having begun wrong, goes on blundering like a schoolboy. Piqued at the sudden shock to the pleasant day-dream, in which he had fancied himself already virtually assured of this young lady,--a day-dream which she was not really accountable for spoiling, since she had not been privy to it,--what should he do but find expression for his mingled vexation and wounded affection by reminding her of a previous occasion on which she had allowed him the liberty she now denied? Doubtless helping to account for this lack of tact was the idea that he should thus justify himself for so far presuming just now. Not, of course, that there is really any excuse for a young man's forgetting that ladies have one advantage over Omniscience, in that not only are they privileged to remember what they please, but also to ignore what they see fit to forget.

"You have forgotten that evening at the California Theatre,"