Arthur had been taken ill suddenly in Miami. All that Larry knew about it was what Major Graystone, a reluctant Army doctor, had been willing to tell him by long-distance telephone. The major said that Colonel Bemrose had exhausted himself working long hours and was in the hospital. It sounded like a heart attack to Larry. He decided to go right down to Miami and promised to wire Lucy as soon as he learned the details.
Larry settled back against the dusty plush of the Pullman seat and closed his eyes. The call from Lucy had reached him that morning ten minutes after he arrived at the office. It took him an hour to locate Major Graystone by telephone, and the rest of the morning to put his cases in the hands of another lawyer. Bessie had his bag packed when he reached home, and she rode with him to Penn Station where crowds of service men jammed the concourse waiting for trains.
It was unusually muggy for April. Moisture beaded Bessie’s lip as they waited in the crowd for the gate to open. Her cheeks showed brightly under her rouge. She unbuttoned the coat of her gray sharkskin suit and fanned her hips with it. Larry saw that she looked worried.
He had kept himself from worrying all day by tending to the details of the trip. Now he wanted to sleep before dinner. If he speculated on Bemrose’s illness, he might think of it as more serious than it was. The important thing right now was to get some rest. Fortunately he had the section to himself and stretched his stubby legs on the seat opposite, noting that his dark green socks didn’t go with the red tie he had on.
At Trenton a shuffling in the aisle and angry voice woke him.
“We’ve been back there, and there ain’t none,” a tired blond sergeant explained to the conductor. “Last night was the same thing. We had our tickets, and no seats. We’re too tired to stand.”
The conductor’s oak leaf nose curled thin and long. He examined the tickets which the sergeant and his friends handed him. “These are coach tickets,” he said in a high, strangled voice. “You can’t sit in a Pullman with these.”
“There ain’t no coach seats. We been back there,” the sergeant wearily repeated.
Larry moved toward the window and motioned the boys to sit down. The conductor grudgingly returned their tickets. “Okay, but when the folks with this space turn up, you’ll have to clear out.”
Joe, the sergeant, sat next to Larry, and the other three crowded into the seat opposite.
“Joe’s still got ’em. He can’t take a chance riding backward,” grinned a skinny corporal with buck teeth.
A feckless smile hovered around the sergeant’s lips.
“You boys have a rough night?” Larry asked.
“The vestibule wouldn’t have been bad if we had along our field gear,” the one in the middle replied. “I slept anyway. I guess I can sleep standing.” Guiltily he eyed the sergeant. “It was nice and cool out there.”
Before the train reached North Philadelphia, Larry knew all about it. Dark-eyed Gerry, short for Geramina, did most of the talking. Occasionally the sergeant inserted an anemic word, and the aisle and window occupants endorsed the details with a vigorous, “You said it!”
They had been shipped from Boston after eating a fish dinner that gave them dysentery. A fellow could sit down with dysentery, they explained, but wasn’t much good on standing. They had coach tickets for the trip from Boston. The train was jammed, and there were no seats. After remaining vertical as long as they could, they went to the diner for a late supper. The sight of food didn’t appeal to them, but they had to find an excuse to sit down. They had a couple of beers and got acquainted with the dining car steward who had a nephew in the Philippines before Pearl Harbor. When they told him about last night’s fish, he brought them boiled rice to wash down with the beers. Rice was supposed to be good for the trots. It was nine o’clock when they finished eating, and they made a deal with the steward to sleep on the diner floor. In an hour, he told them, the car would be clean and everyone out. They brought their blue barracks bags back with them for pillows and had just settled down for the night when the conductor came through and kicked them out. The s.o.b. didn’t just tell them to go. He waited there until he saw them leave. They had to lug the bulky bags back five cars to the coaches, bumping through the aisles and knocking against people who were undressing behind curtains. Pulling and tugging luggage didn’t do much for their condition, and when they reached the coaches, one whiff of the smoke-fouled air was plenty. They headed for the outside vestibule, and spent the night retching, trying meanwhile to keep their balance on the shifting platform. Someone gave up on the sergeant’s bag; so he stood all night and was feeling shot today.
Larry took a good look at the kids who seemed young enough to be put to bed by their mamas. They had gone through a tough training period, and in another few months would be making juicy targets for the Nazis. They needed their sleep, and while civilians like himself stretched out in clean berths, they rode in a grimy train vestibule all night. It didn’t make sense.
Larry reached for his wallet and handed his pink sleeper reservation to the sergeant. Joe thanked him but said he was getting off soon and wouldn’t need a berth. Larry tried to persuade the kid to let him have it made up now so that he could sleep a few hours before he got off the train, but Joe didn’t want the others to stand. Then Larry tried to buy them all a drink, but they were afraid of going to the club car and having another argument with the conductor.
At North Philadelphia a mob, heavy with luggage, crowded from the station platform into the cars. Larry watched to see whether the ticket holders for his section put in an appearance, but the kids were in luck. Not only the space in Larry’s section but some seats across the aisle remained empty. The train jogged past the Philadelphia streets filled with their red and white houses, announcing that in a democracy things are sometimes uniform as well as equal, and eased into the lower level of Thirtieth Street station. Three more soldiers wandered in, and were greeted by Gerry and the boys. They belonged to the same outfit and had been looking for a place to sit down since Trenton. Joe pointed to the empty seats across the aisle, and the new crowd started to move in.
“You boys got Pullman tickets?” It was old Leaf Nose.
“Coach.”
“You can’t sit here.”
A baby-faced private first-class with pink cheeks and a lone stripe wistfully pointed to the boys sitting with Larry.
“They got to go back to the coach, too,” the conductor decided.
“They’re sick boys, and they had to stand up all night,” Larry protested.
Old Leaf Nose clucked, his voice plated with sarcasm. “That still don’t give ’em seats. This company ain’t in charity, it’s in business.”
“I guess you want to lose your pension rights,” Larry squeezed the words through a corner of his mouth. “This story will look good on the front page of my paper.”
“They ain’t entitled to sit here without tickets.”
Larry took out a pencil and used the back of an envelope to make notes. “How do you spell your name? I want the readers of the paper in New York to spot a patriotic citizen.”
A corny gag, but it seemed to work. The conductor nervously plucked the rubber bands on his black leather book.
“I’d let ’em sit here if they had reservations.” Cautiously he moved down the aisle.
“Your initials,” Larry threatened. “People ought to find out how the Company is helping the War.”
“Okay, you take the responsibility.” Old Leaf Nose shuffled away.
“It worked!” Larry rubbed his knees delightedly.
“What paper y’ on?” Gerry smiled.
“I’m a lawyer.” Larry felt good, and they grinned their appreciation.
He needed a smoke and left them griping about some detail they had been handed at the last barracks. The sergeant hoisted his bag to the seat, spit on his handkerchief, and went to work on the memoirs of the night before.
They were good kids. It was easy to see how Bemrose might have overdone it, working with them. Larry pushed aside the thought of Bemrose and grabbed the moving curtains of the men’s room entrance. He slid along a black leather bench next to the window.
When he woke with a crick in his neck and the smell of a fifteen cent cigar in his nostrils, night showed under the green window shade. Larry rubbed his broad nose in his palm and, rousing himself, dug in his pocket for a cigarette. A man in a torn undershirt was splashing water on his beard. Larry decided that some cold water wouldn’t hurt him either, and got up to wipe his face with a damp towel.
“I hope the Statler saves a room for me. You going to Washington?” asked a hawk-faced traveler of two hundred pounds with hard gray eyes. He moved over on the bench to make room for Larry. “They’re sleeping in the men’s room down there.” His middle quivered with the joke. “If you’re lucky, they’ll rent you a can in the men’s room for only five bucks.”
“I’ve been to Washington twice, and I’m goin’ again. They refuse me a priority this time, and I’m out of business,” said a man in blue serge at the water cooler. “Lamp shades are my line,” he said helplessly, waiting for a thin trickle to fill the paper cup.
“You can’t tell whether you’re in or out of business,” the hawk-faced man agreed. “One minute they hand you an A-A-1 priority, and the next minute they grab back the stuff for parachutes.”
“You in lamp shades, too?” The man at the cooler looked surprised.
“Wholesale silks, but you watch and see. They’ll have us making the damned ’chutes next instead of selling them the material.”
“One of those bright professors down there screwed up our priority.” As the train lurched, the man in serge grabbed the basin edge. “They promised us plenty of rayon if we compromised with them and made our frames of plastic. We switched, and now I don’t know. This teacher running the show in Washington says we’re non-essential.”
“I suppose he’s essential.”
“After taxes a fellow won’t be able to make a decent profit, priority or no priority,” said the lamp manufacturer.
“Profits? Who worries about profits? I’m trying to figure out how to meet the payroll.”
Like hell you are, Larry edited silently. You’re not thinking about those kids in the next car, or the profits they’ll collect either—profits like a couple of shells in the shoulder. Fellows like Bemrose are knocking themselves out while you eat yourselves up over your lousy take. Go on, criticize. That’s what you know how to do. You’re experts.
A train jolt knocked over a heavy metal ashstand, and it fell on the size twelve shoe of the silk manufacturer. He yowled, and Larry was pleased, silently admiring the wisdom of inanimate objects.
Joe, the sergeant from back in the car, pushed through the curtain, and saw with relief, the metal tab marked “vacant.”
While he was inside, Larry told the rest of them about the kids being sick. The ashstand victim stopped nursing his foot long enough to mutter, “It’s a rotten shame.”
“What do you expect with the stinking way they run things?” The man who had changed to plastic frames looked at the dark, cool field out the window as though he’d like to crawl there and stay.
The sergeant came out of the toilet and smiled sadly in answer to Larry’s “Doing all right?” His shoulders fell forward as he pushed through the green curtain.
“Wait and see, they’ll screw things up in the Army, too,” someone said when he had left.
“A few Army guys must know the score. They’re taking some good men,” Larry pointed out.
“You wait. They won’t have the say.”
Bemrose probably won’t, Larry thought, if he’s sick as that major made him sound over the phone. Bemrose had known the score when ninety-nine percent of the others, including himself, were insulated. He knew the score by heart—about the petty bureaucrats like Old Leaf Nose who were pulling an inflated importance out of the War, and about the smoking-room commandos who talked priorities and worried about profits. Backwards and forwards Bemrose knew them, and had figured that fellows like him better see things were done right. Personally. Larry himself was a delayed-action Joe. He had to be exposed first-hand to conditions, but now he was beginning to wake up.
Chimes sounded in the passage, and the others filed out for dinner. Larry stayed with the cold black leather of the smoking room. He thought of Bemrose in the Army hospital. What if the Army gave him a discharge? Bemrose, dependent and helpless, was a skyscraper without utilities, a river cut from its source. Bemrose leaning on others, would be a cliff twisted and bent toward the river, a bleeding stone shaft. Others might welcome dependence, but Arthur had always resisted it. His was a giving philosophy, almost a warped giving. Bemrose, the Provider. The fixed vision of working for others that unfitted him for easy living with them. A twisted dream, but what became of Bemrose if it were snuffed? That’s what troubled Larry.
He decided to go to the diner. On his way to the rear, he checked in with the kids. They were playing stud poker on their barracks bags and wanted to deal him into the game, but he refused and had the porter bring them a table. A stack of match stems in front of Joe had picked him up like benzedrine. Wide awake from winning, there was color in his yellowish skin.
The littered floors of the cars, as Larry walked through, promised further wartime neglect. Already the old train equipment creaked and groaned. Larry grabbed a dirty window bar in the passage outside the diner and took his place in line. The lumpy procession advanced slowly toward the doorway a foot or so at a time.
As Larry waited to approach the entrance of the diner, he diverted himself by thinking of Lucy, and her frail kind of beauty, wondering what strength lay behind it, and whether it would stand up in the not-so-good days that threatened ahead.