CHAPTER XVI

AN ICICLE

My room at the hotel was as dreary as a stubble-field upon a November evening.  The whole house was new, varnished, and hard.  My bedroom was small.  A piece of new ingrain carpet covered part of the hard varnished floor.  Four hard walls and a ceiling, deadly white, surrounded me.  The hard varnished bedstead (the mattress felt as if it were varnished) nearly filled the little room.  Two stiff chairs, and a yellow window-shade which looked as if it were made of varnished wood, glittered in the feeble light of a glass lamp, while the ghastly grayish pallor of the ewer and basin on the wash-stand was thrown into bold relief by the intenser whiteness of the wall behind it.

I put out my light as soon as possible and resolutely closed my eyes, for a street lamp opposite my window would not allow the room to fade into obscurity, and, as long as the hardness of the bed prevented me from sleeping, my thoughts ran back to the chamber of the favored guest, but my conscience stood by me.  Cathay is a country where it is necessary to be very careful.

I did not leave Waterton until after nine o’clock the next day, for, although I was early at the shop to which my bicycle had been sent, it was not quite ready for me, and I had to wait.  Fortunately no Willoughby came that way.

But when at last I mounted my wheel I sped away rapidly towards the north.  I had ordered my baggage expressed to a town fifty miles away, and I hoped that if I rode steadily and kept my eyes straight in front of me I might safely get out of Cathay, for the boundaries of that fateful territory could not extend themselves indefinitely.

Towards the close of the afternoon I saw a female in front of me, her back to me, walking, and pushing a bicycle.

“Now,” said I to myself, “she is doing that because she likes it, and it is none of my business.”  I gazed over the fields on the other side of the road, but as I passed her I could not help giving a glance at her machine.  The air was gone from the tire of the hind wheel.

“Ah,” said I to myself, “perhaps her pump is out of order, or it may be that she does not know how to work it.  It is getting late.  She may have to go a long distance.  I could pump it up for her in no time.  Even if there is a hole in it I could mend it.”  But I did not stop.  I had steeled my heart against any more adventures in Cathay.

But my conscience did not stand by me.  I could not forget that poor woman plodding along the weary road and darkness not far away.  I went slower and slower, and at last I turned.

“It would not take me five minutes to help her,” I said.  “I must be careful, but I need not be a churl.”  And I rode rapidly back.

I came in sight of her just as she was turning into the gateway of a pretty house yard.  Doubtless she lived there.  I turned again and spun away faster than I had gone that day.