Chapter IV: The Portage Through the Dust

Now Helen Illingworth did not want to waste time any more than Bertram Meade did. It was, of course, the height of foolishness for her to explore a half-completed bridge, or an entirely finished one for that matter, in an elaborate and expensive dinner gown. But whatever her age or his they were at that period of life and love in which, if ever, humanity had a clear title to be foolish--and there you are!

Economy had not necessarily been inculcated in this young woman's mind and although she prized the dress it had served its purpose, since the man so obviously highly approved of it and her. If she spoiled it she spoiled it and that was all there was about it. She dismissed that possibility promptly. There was nothing else she could wear which was so exquisitely becoming, anyway, and especially in the moonlight. So, instead of taking her father's advice all she did was to cover her beautiful shoulders with a light wrap, gather the train of her gown in her hand and hasten to the car door in the shortest possible time. She did not even stop to change the light slippers and filmy stockings she wore, satin and silk of the same delicate tint and fabric to match her gown. It was a warm summer night and she needed no covering except nature's golden crowning on her head.

Every moment they were apart, since the sum-total in which they could be together was so small, was a moment lost. What were all the dresses and slippers on earth to the pressure of his hand, a glance from his eyes? She was very much in love with him and he with her then, and thereafter.

"Now," she said, coming out of the door of the car and descending the steps toward him, eagerly expectant, "I want a prize for my swiftness."

"A prize!" returned the man, "why, you've been gone years and years and years. You have had time to dress yourself a thousand times, and you haven't even changed your gown. What have you been doing? How have you idled away precious time you might have bestowed upon me?" he concluded reprovingly in mock severity.

"I think that it's less than sixty seconds since you said you would wait for me here," she laughed in joyous satisfaction.

"Of course, time seems shorter to you than it would to me," was his cool reply. "It naturally would. You don't have to wait for any man, things come always to you."

"If you can refer to me as a thing, Mr. Meade," she replied, "in this instance I have come to you."

"I thank heaven you have done so, but unfortunately I shall have to dismiss you."

"Dismiss me, why?"

"You can't go out on a bridge in that gown and those slippers, tramping over dirty tracks, piles of steel, rough wooden planks, paint and----"

"Can't I?" she said, "you just see."

"Really haven't you got anything for rough work that you could put on?"

"I have a walking suit."

"That would do."

"But it would take me half an hour to get out of this and into it and----"

"I hate to see you spoil your dress," he said uncertainly as she stopped.

Really what gown on earth was worth half an hour of her society? At least that is the way he felt about it, and evidently she felt the same way.

"It is settled, then," she said, slipping her arm through his as they walked down the long wooden platform near the siding. "You know," she continued, feeling herself obliged to speak since he was so portentously silent--ordinarily he was a fluent and ready man but something had got hold of him now and he was as shy and speechless as a boy--"You know," she went on, "I have heard so much about that bridge and how wonderful it is by moonlight that I rather felt that I ought to dress the part when I came to inspect it under such auspices."

"What about me?" he asked.

"You are dressed in the part, too," she continued, "yours is the strength and the power and masculinity of the bridge----"

"While you are its grace and beauty," he concluded as she hesitated.

"I didn't like to say it myself and I won't admit it is true, but----"

"You don't have to admit it," he said quickly. "In this half light you look as mystic and ethereal as----"

"And how do I look in the whole light, pray?"

"A trifle more substantial but not less beautiful and winning," was the prompt answer.

Really for a timid man, with women, he was doing very well he thought, and so did she.

"Do you prefer the ethereal woman, the dependent woman of the mid-Victorian period to her self-sufficient descendant of the present day?"

"I like a woman to be all things not to all men, but to me, at different times"--he ran the whole gamut of feminine possibilities in his desires, it seemed!--"There are times when the clinging mid-Victorian 'female' is the sweetest thing on earth to a man and there are times when the woman who can march shoulder to shoulder with you is the one woman you desire. Tears, laughter, submission, mastery--a man wants a woman in all her possible moods," he concluded oracularly.

"You want a great many things, it seems to me," she retorted mockingly.

"Yes, but only one woman."

"Well, you want her to be a great many things, then."

"I just want her to be herself."

Now Meade was perilously near that point when he would describe his love if he ventured to discuss it further in the words trite but true, "I love you because you're you!" That is what he meant anyway, and incidentally although our sense of humor even in our tenderest moments may spare us from the banality of the exact words, it is what all think and most say in one way or another under such circumstances.

"I hope some day you will meet this imaginary creature of infinite variety," said the woman softly.

"I hope so," was the somewhat surprising answer, at which she was not a little chagrined.

"You know you men have so many advantages over poor womankind, you are free to go everywhere and pick and choose," she went on, carefully concealing her discomfiture.

"To tell the truth, I have met the woman," the man admitted.

"Where, in Burma?"

"In America."

"America is a great country and there are a hundred million people in it, possibly half of them my sex.

"Your statistics are sadly in error."

"They are the latest, I believe."

"The latest in this instance are wrong. The population of America, as I see it, is only one."

This was direct and unequivocal. He was gaining courage, fast mastering his timidity. She was by way of being swept off her feet, so that woman-like she temporized. She changed the subject although it was the subject nearest her heart and the one she most wished to discuss; to wit, herself, in relation to him.

They had now reached the end of the platform in their slow progress, and as they turned about the temporary station and storehouse before them rose the bridge. The moon larger and more magnificent than she had ever been before to either of them--for when, since God set the night lights in the firmament, had there ever been an evening like that?--was rising over the high hills that sprang up from the steep cliff-like bank of the other side of the vast river. They saw her round red full face through an interlacing tracery of steel. The lower part of the bridge was still in deep shadow. Indeed the moon had just cleared the hills of the opposite bank of the great gorge cut by the broad river flowing swiftly in its darkness far below.

The base of the truss was yet almost invisible and the effect of the peak of the pyramid of steel brilliantly gilded by the high light and rising out of dark nothing was as wonderful as the picture of a mountain top glowing in the setting sun while all the valley is sunk in the ever deepening shadows. At the further end of the suspended arm extending far over the water the top of the traveler glistened in exactly the same way. The cantilever on the opposite shore, incomplete and sunk under a high rise of land, was still in shadow and not yet discernible.

Instinctively the two people stopped and gazed out and up and across. Unwittingly the woman drew a little near the man. He became more conscious than before of the light touch of her hand upon his arm. It was very still where they stood. The shacks of the workmen had been erected below the bridge about a quarter of a mile to the right along the banks of the little affluent of the main stream. They could hear faint but indistinguishable noises that yet indicated humanity coming from that direction. The fires in the machine house and in the engines were banked. Lazy curls of smoke rose to be blown away in the limitless areas of the upper air. In the darkness all the unsightly evidences of construction work were hidden.

"Oh," said the woman, drawing a long breath, "I don't wonder that you love it. Isn't it beautiful, flung up in the air that way? One would think it wasn't steel but silver and gold and----"

"Time was," said the man, "when I loved a thing like that above everything except my father, but now----"

In spite of herself the woman looked at him.

"But now?" she whispered as he hesitated, and then she turned her head half fearful of his answer.

"I am almost afraid to say it," he said, lowering his voice to match her own.

"A soldier of steel," she said, "and afraid!"

"Well then, all that was the second now takes the third place."

"And before your father comes?"

But she did not give him time to answer. Atalanta cast the golden apples before Hippomenes, but she delayed her pace while he picked them up. This girl would and would not. She threw her golden personality in his face, and when he reached for it she glided ahead again.

"Come," she said, "let us go out on the bridge."

"It looks beautiful," said the man, "like most things in the moonlight, but----"

"Even women?"

He nodded his head.

"But appearances are deceptive," he went on. "It's a rough place for you. Those little slippers you wear----"

He looked down and as if in obedience to his glance she outthrust her foot from her gown. It was not the smallest foot that ever upbore a woman. Quite the contrary. Which is not saying it was too large, not at all. It was just right for her height and figure, and its shape and shoe left nothing to be desired.

"Never mind the slippers," she said, "they are stronger than they look. They'll serve."

"But the distance between here and the bridge is inches deep in dust."

"Dust!" she exclaimed in dismay. "I don't mind rough walking, but dust----

"I never thought of that," admitted the man. "The fact is I have thought of nothing but you since I saw you, but now we'll have to go back or----"

"I shall not go back," she answered firmly.

"Well then, there is no help for it, pardon me."

He stepped down off the platform and before she knew what he would be at he lifted her straight up in his arms. He did not carry her like a baby, he held her erect, crushed against his breast and before she had time to utter a protest, or even to say a word, he started through the dusty roadway toward the bridge-head.

It was a strange position. There was nothing that she could do. He clasped her with a grip of iron, too tightly for her comfort, indeed, but the pressure he put upon her was due entirely to his own nervousness. She could not kick. She could not even move. Really she did not wish to. It was respectful enough even if a little absurd. What he was doing was so obviously the proper thing to spare her dainty slippers and silk stockings and other finery. And, if it were not, she could not help liking it. She knew she ought to protest, but the words did not come. While she was trying to think them up they had crossed the little desert that intervened between the portal of the bridge and the end of the platform. Then he set her down gently. She felt her feet strike solid plank and she was distinctly sorry that the journey was ended, the crossing had been made.

Another woman might have reproved him then, just as another woman might have screamed or tried to kick or beaten him over the head _en route_. Her arms had been free, but she had attempted none of these things. Perhaps love, perhaps a sense of humor, or both had saved her. He was glad to recognize the difference between her and the ordinary member of the sex. It flattered his discrimination that she had accepted so coolly and quietly, outwardly at least, his services as a matter of course.

"Thank you," she said simply, "that was very nice of you. You are wonderfully strong."

Now a man's bodily strength is something for which in a large measure he has no responsibility, for which he can claim no merit, but there is no subtler form of flattery that a woman may offer a man than to praise him for physical prowess. He feels much more satisfaction in being told that he has a strong arm than in having it pointed out that he carries a great brain, and Meade was pleased beyond measure.

"It's nothing," he said, which was scarcely true, because it was the greatest thing that had ever happened to him so far. "Those shoes of yours will be ruined on this planking, but at least there is little dust. If my feet were not so enormous I----"

Helen Illingworth laughed outright at the idea.

"My own shoes will have to do me and if they are ruined I can get another pair or a dozen."

"Bad lookout for your husband, if he happens to be a poor man."

"Oh, I wouldn't spend my husband's money as I do my father's," laughed the young woman with that indifference to father's money which is characteristic of the relationship, the age, and the sex.

"Could you be happy with a man who couldn't give you dresses like this and slippers and----"

"If I loved him I could be happy with him in rags," was the reckless answer.

They were now walking down the track on the floor of the approach-span of the bridge. There were two railroad tracks running out across the bridge to the end over the river, and the space between the rails was covered with rough planking. The man on guard at the entrance recognized the engineer and, with a word of greeting, the two adventurers passed him and marched down the track. They had now reached the anchor arm of the cantilever proper. On either side of them rose the ribs of the huge diamond-shaped truss, one point resting on the vast shoe on the pier and the other point, both the center and focus of the radiating arms of steel, far above their heads.

The moon, by this time, had passed the floor level and the cross bracing cast a network of shadows over them, upon track and floor beams and stringers. The silence of the half-light, the mystery of it all oppressed them a little. It was with beating hearts that they pressed on.