Ariel Custer (4 page)

He seated her at a little white table and summoned a waiter. Ariel looked around anxiously at the palm-decked room and deft waiters. A meal in a place like this would cost more than she ought to afford from her scanty store, but what could she do? The man was very kind, and quite matter of fact. He had not taken advantage of her situation in the least. Well, she needed the food, and perhaps she might venture to ask this gentleman a few questions.

The young man gave an order and then turned back to her.

“He’s bringing you the tea at once,” he said pleasantly, “but I’m getting a steak for myself and they’re always too big for one. You’ll eat a little of it, I’m sure, and then you’ll be more fitted to decide what to do. Here comes the tea now.”

The hot tea brought the color to Ariel’s white cheeks. As the young man watched the life come back into her face, with satisfaction he smiled. “Now,” said he, leaning across the table with a confidential tone, “my name is Granniss, and I live in Glenside, ten miles out. I wish you’d just consider that I’m your brother for a few minutes and tell me how I can serve you. I don’t see leaving you here to sit in the station indefinitely after a fall like that. You ought to be put to bed and have someone to look after you. If you haven’t a train, you must live in the city, and if you haven’t a friend, won’t you just consider me that until you get to your home? I can easily call a cab and see you to your boarding place or take you in the trolley car if you insist on that, but you ought to be looked after, and I’m going to do it until someone else better fitted turns up. Now tell me, please, where are you staying?”

T
here was something grave and reassuring about the young man’s voice that made her trust him. She wondered if she ought to tell him her situation. It was against all her upbringing and principles to confide her troubles to a stranger, especially a man, and a young one; yet she sorely needed advice, and she needn’t take it if she didn’t like it.

“You’re very kind, Mr. Granniss,” she said at length in a quaintly formal tone. “But I’m not staying anywhere. I’ve just come today. I’m Miss Custer of Virginia—” There was something in the sweet dignity with which she spoke the name that demanded respect. It seemed to summon the long line of noble Custers to speak for her in this informal introduction.

The color swept into Jud’s face, and for a moment he felt almost as if he had presumed, yet it was not anything in her tone or manner that made him feel she looked down upon him. It was perhaps the little lifting of her head, patrician born, that made him feel somehow her fineness. He almost wondered at himself for speaking so freely with her. He who had always held aloof from girls.

“I came up to take a position in a library that a friend had, I
thought
, secured for me, but when I reached here I found the friend had been suddenly called far away to care for a sick mother and had resigned her position. The letter she wrote me telling me not to come did not reach me, and I find someone else has the position. So you see my plans are somewhat upset. I was absorbed in the perplexity of what I should do next when I was crossing that street, or I probably would not have done such a foolish thing as to be run over by a bicycle and make all this trouble.”

“Say, that’s tough luck!” said Jud, all interest again. “What are you going to do? Have you a place to stop tonight?”

“No,” said Ariel, quite composed now and self-possessed, “and perhaps you can advise me, since you’re so kind as to offer. I was to stay with my friend, but I haven’t an idea where, as I was to meet her at the station, or come to the library if we missed each other. But I’ve read about the YWCA. Is there one near here?”

Jud’s face lightened. “There is, of course,” he said briskly, “and there’s such a thing as a Traveler’s Aid agent right here in the station. If I am not mistaken, a friend of someone I know is on duty in the evening here. She would know where was the best place for you to go, and you could talk to her all about your problems. That’s what she’s here for. Just excuse me a minute and I’ll see if she’s at her desk.”

Granniss hurried through the swinging doors and Ariel sat alone, feeling suddenly forlorn in a strange world. Suspicious too, a little, now that he was out of her sight, of the stranger who seemed so determined to help her. She had been so earnestly warned before she left home that she was inclined almost to run away while he was gone, and so be free from him. Yet her innate courtesy would not let her do so in spite of her fears. He had been too kind to treat so shabbily.

Granniss was back in a short time just as the waiter arrived with a well-laden tray. “Yes, Miss Darcy’s here,” he said in a relieved tone. “I spoke to her about you, and she says there’s a nice room vacant in a girls’ club tonight, just for the night, that you can take. The new occupant comes tomorrow. Then tomorrow Miss Darcy thinks she can find something for you more permanent if you want it. She’s coming in as soon as she meets a girl on the New York train and sends her to her friends. You’ll like her, and she will advise you about anything. You know about the Traveler’s Aid, don’t you?”

Ariel shook her head.

“Why, it’s an organization to take care of travelers, especially women and young girls, who are alone and don’t know where to go or how to find their friends. There is always someone on duty day and night at all big railroad stations to help those who need them. They wear a badge like a policeman’s with ‘Traveler’s Aid’ on it, and they have a desk in the women’s waiting room. There are notices here and there, around, in several languages, telling where to find the agent and bearing a copy of her badge so strangers or foreigners will not be afraid to trust her.”

Ariel’s eyes were dreamy with thought. “That is wonderful,” she said, an almost startled look on her face.

“A pretty good system,” said Granniss. “I don’t know that it’s especially wonderful. It’s the right thing. It ought to have been done years before it was.”

“Yes, but—well, you don’t understand,” said the girl, smiling. “It’s a little private wonder all to myself this time. You see, I was just a little frightened over coming away from home all alone for the first time in my life, and last night I found a verse in my grandmother’s Bible that said, ‘Fear thou not; for I am with thee,’ and somehow all along the way I’ve had that proved to me again and again. First there were some friends at the station this morning who planned for my comfort, and then there was you who picked me up, and now there is this agent. I’m beginning to think God has His agents posted all the way ahead where I have to go, for so far one has met me at every turn of the way.”

Granniss looked at the young girl across from him as if she were a creature from another world. “Do you really believe that, that God is like that? Caring for people in little things?”

“Why, surely,” said Ariel, lifting clear eyes without a shade of doubt to his questioning ones. “Don’t you?”

“If I did, it would make a whole lifetime’s difference with me,” and there was a wistfulness about his tone that struck deep into the girl’s heart.

“I’m sorry you don’t,” said the girl simply. “I don’t know what I’d do without Him. I’ve always known He was that way. It isn’t just that I believe it’s so; I
know
it’s so. Why, He’s
taken care of me
!”

The leather doors swung open, and a little woman with hair tinged with gray under a small black hat and wearing a shining silver badge entered, stood an instant taking a keen survey of the room, then came swiftly to their table. Judson Granniss arose with a quick deference and drew back a chair for her.

“Miss Darcy, this is Miss Custer,” he said, and Ariel liked the easy gravity of his speech.

Miss Darcy gave Ariel one swift, searching glance and smiled with a softening of the lines of eyes and mouth. “Judson says you need my help, dear,” she said crisply and sat down.

“Now you’ll take a cup of tea with us,” said Granniss. “Or would you rather have coffee?”

“Just a little tea if you have it there, Jud. I mustn’t stay but a minute. There’s another train coming in shortly now, and I’m due outside. I just wanted to make sure what this girl needed.”

She turned to Ariel and asked a few questions. “Well,” she said when she was satisfied, “I have to meet the eight thirty-five and take a girl to Fifty-Second Street. Suppose you wait and go with me. We’ll take a taxi, and I can leave you at the club and introduce you so you won’t have any more trouble. Jud, you’re going home on the eight five, I suppose? Well, you bring her in to my desk, and she can sit there till I come if I’m away. Sorry I have to keep you waiting, dear. You look as if you needed a good night’s rest, but it won’t be long now. You sure you don’t need to see a doctor? Any bad bruises, do you think? You’ll feel stiff and sore in the morning likely. Better rest late. Meantime, Jud, you say you heard of a position she might be able to get. Suppose you phone me in the morning, and I’ll show her the way before I go out home. Here’s my morning number. Say about eight o’clock if you can find out early in the morning.”

“I may be able to see the man tonight,” said Granniss.

“So much the better. You can reach me here after half past nine.”

Miss Darcy vanished, and the man and girl finished their repast slowly. It did not seem to them that they were new acquaintances, and now that the agent had given a sort of background to their introduction, Ariel felt much better about their irregular meeting.

It was evident that the young man was in no hurry to conclude the little meal. He sat watching Ariel for a minute or two, almost as if he were not hearing the eager thanks she was uttering.

“Do you know,” he said, leaning over a bit toward her and speaking in that low, confidential tone again, “I’m awfully interested in what you said awhile ago. You’re somehow different from any girl I ever met before. I wish you’d tell me what makes you so sure you are being taken care of by God. It’s always seemed to me He didn’t care a hang what became of us all, if there is any God.”

“Oh, please don’t speak that way,” said Ariel, as if his words had hurt her. “It’s just because you don’t know Him. I’m sure it is. You couldn’t be uncertain about it if you did. Why, He’s my best Friend, my Savior, my Guide, my Companion. I’m certain because I
know Him
, that’s all. It’s just like knowing people, only more so. And there isn’t any other way to find out but just to get to know Him.”

Granniss looked puzzled, hopeless, as if her words meant nothing to him, as if she were a mere child babbling. There was a tinge of disappointment in his eagerness, as if he saw from her words that after all it was just as he expected, a matter of tradition, stock phrases that she had been taught, nothing experimentally practical.

“How could one get to know a God, a Supreme Being away off in His heaven? How
could
one know?”

“Why, of course it’s a spiritual thing,” said Ariel gravely. “‘God is a Spirit: and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth.’ It isn’t a material thing. But then so are our earthly friendships: you can’t take hold of what it is that makes us care for one another. It’s something outside the flesh. We can express some of it with a smile, a glance of the eye, but friendship is beyond that; it is deeper, more intangible—spiritual. It is how we tell our mother loves us even when she is not near to help us. We are sure because we’ve tried her. We have known her love. We’ve tested it. We’ve been one with her in our daily life. My father used to say there was really only one way to get rid of doubts about God and that was the Bible way. ‘If any man will do His will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God’—just take Him at His word and do His will, you know, and try Him. Put Him to the test.”

The young man looked at her as if she spoke a foreign tongue.

“You mean to say that by doing certain things you come to know an invisible Being?”

“Doing His will. Trying to please Him. Isn’t that the way we get to know other people? Study what they like, be much in their company, do what they want us to do? Isn’t that a test of even an earthly friendship, whether we are willing to do what they want us to do?”

“But how could you possibly know what God wanted you to do? I should say that was beating round the bush. That would be as impossible as knowing Him.”

“Why, it’s all written down in His Book. He’s told us there everything He wants. He told us to search it, to know it by heart, to have it on our tongues that we might observe to do it, because it was the way of eternal life.”

“Do you mean to say that you still believe in the Bible?”

“Oh, of course,” said Ariel. “One has to if he wants to know God. There isn’t any other way to find out His will. Of course I know the world is trying to prove that the Bible is just like any other book, but that is so silly to one who knows it, and has found God through it. It wouldn’t make any difference to me how much people tried to prove scientifically that I had never had a mother who loved me. They might bring all the arguments and theories in the world and it wouldn’t make any difference, because I
knew
her. I have felt her love. She is mine forever! But I’m talking just like a preacher, and—aren’t you going to miss your train, Mr. Granniss? I’ve kept you too long!”

Granniss gave a quick glance at his watch and exclaimed, “Yes, I must go. I had no idea the time had gone by so swiftly. I mustn’t miss that train, for I want to find out about that place for you tonight if I can. But I hope you’ll let me call on you when you get located. I’d like to talk more with you about this. I never heard anybody talk this way before. It sounds like the real thing, only it’s too good to be true.”

He summoned the waiter, gathered up his coat and hat and Ariel’s bundle, and hurried her out to Miss Darcy’s desk. He had only a moment to take his leave, and he found a strange reluctance to go.

“I really want to talk some more about this,” he said as he left her. “May I come and see you?”

“Why, surely, if I stay here,” she said and flashed him a lovely smile.

“I’ll do my best to have you stay here,” he said and, lifting his hat, was gone.

She watched him stride away into the throng of train goers and suddenly felt very much alone. How well acquainted they had become in a few short hours. How strange that he should have stepped out of the crowds to care for her, when it might have been any one of the others who were passing, who would never have taken a thought but to set her on her feet and hurry away. But he, how kind he had been! She had a conviction that he had been on his way home by an earlier train and had delayed on her account. And now she remembered that she had forgotten to offer to pay her share of the meal. She couldn’t quite remember when he had paid the check, they had been talking so earnestly. Her cheeks grew hot over the omission. When she thought of it, it was rather awful of her to accept a dinner from an utter stranger. What must he think of her when he got away and thought over the evening! Yet he had said he would come again, and she must wait until then—or no, she had his address. She might send it to him, only how did she know how much to send? Well, she could find that out very likely by going to that room for another meal and examining the menu card.

She sat in Miss Darcy’s big armchair and watched the crowds come and go; watched the ladies climbing into the high chairs nearby to have their shoes cleaned; watched the tired women with babies in their arms, the giddy ones with too much powder on their noses, the cross men who were waiting for their womenfolks. It was like a great panorama to her country-trained eyes. She had traveled a little with her father and mother while she was quite young, but the last five years had been spent very quietly with her grandmother in the old home, and it almost dazed her to be thus suddenly dropped down into the noise and bustle of city life.