§tandby - The Kindness

The cold had got into the carriage and stayed.

The bulb in the roof flickered and held. His left side was a cold weight he sat beside. His right hand lay on his knee. The gray went by the window and he went by with it, still, giving the gray back nothing, a man gone the color of the glass.

He did not wait for anyone now. There was no one to come and nothing to ask. When a door opened he would carry the thing or set the thing down, and between the doors he sat, and the sitting was easy, and the gray was easy, and he was getting on nicely.

Then there was a man in the seat across from him.

The man had not been there. Now he was. His coat was still on him and done up wrong, a button off, and he was wet down one side as if he had come in out of weather, though there was no weather now, only the gray. His hands would not be still. They went over each other and plucked at the coat. His head turned and turned.

"Where is this," he said. "Where do we stop. I've to be somewhere. I've a girl expecting me." The word came to him still; he was new. "She'll not know where I've got to."

His voice went up at the end of every bit of it, climbing, the climb of a man who still believes the asking will get him an answer that helps. He looked at Stanley. He wanted Stanley to be someone who knew a thing and would say it.

Something in Stanley came up. The chest where the warmth had been was empty and gave nothing. It came from lower, from the part the train had been working all this time, the part that had learned. His right hand lifted off his knee. It did not ask him first. It crossed the cold space between the seats and came down on the man's wrist, light, settling, a weight that said be still, that said easy, and the man went quiet under it, the small startled quiet of a thing touched in the dark.

"They know what they're about," Stanley said.

The words came off the live side of his mouth, thick and slow. He did not choose them. They were in him where his own words had been, and they came up to be said because the man had a hole in him and a hole wanted filling.

"Don't you fret," Stanley said. "You're getting on nicely."

He did not know they were the woman's words. He did not know there had been a woman with a bag. He looked at the man with a face gone level and pleasant, a good face, a face with the lamp behind the blind, and he held the man's wrist and said the easy thing and watched it go in.

The man's hands slowed. The climb went out of his voice. "They know what they're about," he said, trying the words, and they fit him. Stanley watched them fit. The man's shoulders came down off his ears, and his face began, at the edges, to go smooth.

Stanley's hand came back to his own knee. The job was done. He did not know it for a job.

He turned his face to the window, to the gray that did not end. The man across from him sat a little stiller, started now, going the color of the glass by inches. The train did not slow. The light at the edge of the window stood where it stood, and the two of them rode on into it, the one almost finished and the one just begun, and neither of them counted anything at all.

~End~

§§ : https://www.abctales.com/collection/period-pieces