"How's the book?" he said.
"I don't know," Candy said, and laughed.
He pinched her thigh; something caught in his throat when he tried to laugh with her. She pinched his thigh in return--a pinch of the exact same passion and pressure as the one he'd given her. Oh, how relieved he was that they were so alike!
Through the ever-poorer, gawking towns, as the sun rose and rose, they drove like lost royalty--the oyster-white Cadillac with its dazzling passengers was a head-turner. That scarlet upholstery, so curiously mottled by Senior's accident with the chemicals, was unique. Everyone who saw them pass would not forget them.
"Not much farther," Wally said. This time he knew better than to pinch her thigh; he simply let his hand rest in her lap, near Little Dorrit. Candy put her hand on top of his, while Melony--stalking through the girls' division lobby with more than usual purpose--caught Mrs. Grogan's generous and watchful eye.
"What's going on, dear?" Mrs. Grogan asked Melony.
"I don't know," Melony said, shrugging. "You can bet it ain't a new boy in town, or nothing," which was a mild remark for Melony; Mrs. Grogan thought, How the girl has mellowed. She had mellowed--a little. A very little.
Something about the big young woman's determination made Mrs. Grogan follow her outside. "My, what a wind!" Mrs. Grogan exclaimed. Where have you been? Melony thought, but she didn't utter a word; the degree that she had mellowed could be confused with not caring much anymore.
"It's the stationmaster," said Homer Wells, who was the first to find the body.
"That moron!" Wilbur Larch muttered.
"Well, he's dead, anyway," Homer informed Dr. Larch, who was still struggling through the weeds, en route to the body. Dr. Larch refrained from saying that by dying in this manner the stationmaster was intending a further inconvenience to the orphanage. If Wilbur Larch was mellowing, he was also mellowing very little.
St. Cloud's was not a place that mellowed you.
Homer Wells looked over the weeds that concealed the dead stationmaster and saw Melony striding toward him.
Oh, please! he felt his heart say to him. Oh, please, let me leave! The powerful wind swept his hair away from his face; he leaned his chest into the wind, as if he stood on the deck of a ship heading into the wind, slicing through the waves of an ocean he'd not yet seen.
Wilbur Larch was thinking about the weak heart he had invented for Homer Wells. Larch was wondering how he should tell Homer about having a weak heart without frightening the young man or reminding him of the vision frozen upon the face of the stationmaster. What in Hell had that fool imagined he'd seen? Dr. Larch wondered, as he helped the others lug the stationmaster's stiffened body to the hospital entrance.
Curly Day, who enjoyed being kept busy, had already been sent to the railroad station; young Copperfield had gone with him, which slowed Curly down considerably--yet Curly was grateful for the company. Curly was slightly confused about the message he was sent to deliver, and Copperfield at least presented Curly with a model listener. Curly practiced the message he thought he was supposed to deliver by saying it aloud to David Copperfield; the message had no visible effect on Copperfield, but Curly found the repetition of the message soothing and the practice helped him to understand it, or so he thought.
"The stationmaster is dead!" Curly announced, dragging Copperfield down the hill--Copperfield's head either nodding agreement or just bouncing loosely between the boy's jerking shoulders. The downhill pace was hard for Copperfield, whose balance wasn't the best, and his left hand (grasped in Curly Day's hand) was pulled high above his left ear.
"Doctor Larch says he had a heart attack for several hours!" Curly Day added, which didn't sound quite right to him, but after he repeated it a few times it sounded more reasonable. What Larch had said was that the stationmaster appeared to have had a heart attack several hours ago, but Curly's version felt more or less correct to Curly--the more he said it.
"Tell the relatives and friends that there's soon gonna be an automobile!" said Curly Day, and David Copperfield bobbed in agreement. This didn't sound right to Curly, either, no matter how many times he repeated it, but he was sure he'd been told to say something like that. The word was "autopsy," not "automobile"; Curly had part of the word right. Perhaps, he thought, there was some special car coming to carry the dead. It made a little sense, and a little sense was sense enough for Curly Day--and more sense than Curly saw in most things.
"Dead!" David Copperfield cried happily as they approached the train station. Two of the usual oafs were lounging on the bench that faced away from the tracks; they were the sort of louts who hung around the station all day, as if the station were a house of beautiful women and the women were known to grant favors to all the town's untidy and unemployed. They paid no attention to Curly Day and David Copperfield. ("Dead!" David Copperfield called out to them, with no effect.)
The assistant to the stationmaster was a young man who had modeled his particularly unlikable officiousness upon the officiousness of the stationmaster, so that he had a completely inappropriate old-fart, complaining, curmudgeonly aspect to his youthfulness--this in combination with the mean-spiritedness of a dogcatcher who enjoys his work. He was a stupid young man, who shared with the stationmaster an aspect of the bully: he would holler at children to keep their feet off the benches, but he would simper before anyone better dressed than himself and he tolerated any rudeness from anyone who had any advantage over him. He was without exception cold and superior to the women who got off the train and asked for directions to the orphanage, and he had not once taken the arm of even one of those women and offered his assistance when they mounted the stairs to the return train; and that first step was a high one--many of the women who'd been scraped clean had obvious trouble with that first step.
This morning the stationmaster's assistant was feeling especially virtuous and disagreeable. He had given fifteen cents to one of the louts to go to the stationmaster's house and find him, but the clod had returned with no more information than that the stationmaster's bicycle had fallen over and been left where it had fallen. Ominous, thought the assistant, but frustrating. He was half irritated at having to do the stationmaster's chores, which he'd done poorly, and half thrilled at the prospect of being in charge. When he saw those two dirty urchins from the orphanage crossing the main road in front of the station and coming his way, the stationmaster's assistant felt his authority swell. Curly Day, wiping his nose on one arm, dragging David Copperfield with the other, seemed on the verge of speaking, but the stationmaster's assistant spoke first.
"Beat it," he said. "You don't belong here."
Curly halted; young Copperfield collided with him and staggered from the suddenness of the collision. Curly fully believed he "belonged" nowhere, but he gathered his confidence and delivered, quite loudly, his rehearsed message: "The stationmaster is dead! Doctor Larch says he had a heart attack for several hours! Tell the relatives and friends that there's soon gonna be an automobile!"
Even the oafs took notice. The assistant was stricken by a flood of sudden and conflicting feelings: that the stationmaster was dead might mean that he, the assistant, would be the next stationmaster; that it was possible for someone to suffer a heart attack lasting several hours was unimaginably painful; and what was this promise--or threat--about an automobile?
What relatives, what friends? the two louts wondered.
"What's that
about an automobile?" the assistant asked Curly Day. Curly suspected that he'd made a mistake but decided to bluff it out. It was not advisable to display weakness or indecision before a bully, and Curly's crafty instincts for survival led him to choose confidence over the truth.
"It means there's a car coming for him," said Curly Day. The two clods looked mildly impressed; they had not thought the stationmaster was important enough to warrant a car to carry him away.
"You mean a hearse?" asked the assistant. There was a hearse in Three Mile Falls--he had seen it once: a long, black car that moved slowly enough to have been pulled by mules.