I took my ticket, and marched proudly up the platform, with my cheeses, the people falling back respectfully on either side. The train was crowded, and I had to get into a carriage where there were already seven other people. One crusty old gentleman objected, but I got in, notwithstanding; and, putting my cheeses upon the rack, squeezed down with a pleasant smile, and said it was a warm day. A few moments passed, and then the old gentleman began to fidget.
“Very close in here,” he said.
“Quite oppressive,” said the man next him.
And then they both began sniffing, and, at the third sniff, they caught it right on the chest, and rose up without another word and went out. And then a stout lady got up, and said it was disgraceful that a respectable married woman should be harried about in this way, and gathered up a bag and eight parcels and went. The remaining four passengers sat on for a while, until a solemn-looking man in the corner who, from his dress and general appearance, seemed to belong to the undertaker class, said it put him in mind of a dead baby; and the other three passengers tried to get out of the door at the same time, and hurt themselves.
I smiled at the black gentleman, and said I thought we were going to have the carriage to ourselves; and he laughed pleasantly and said that some people made such a fuss over a little thing. But even he grew strangely depressed after we had started, and so, when we reached Crewe, I asked him to come and have a drink. He accepted, and we forced our way into the buffet, where we yelled, and stamped, and waved our umbrellas for a quarter of an hour; and then a young lady came and asked us if we wanted anything.
“What’s yours?” I said, turning to my friend.
“I’ll have half-a-crown’s worth of brandy, neat, if you please, miss,” he responded.
And he went off quietly after he had drunk it and got into another carriage, which I thought mean.
From Crewe I had the compartment to myself, though the train was crowded. As we drew up at the different stations, the people, seeing my empty carriage, would rush for it. “Here y’ are, Maria; come along, plenty of room.” “All right, Tom; we’ll get in here” they would shout. And they would run along, carrying heavy bags, and fight round the door to get in first. And one would open the door and mount the steps and stagger back into the arms of the man behind him; and they would all come and have a sniff, and then droop off and squeeze into other carriages, or pay the difference and go first.
From Euston I took the cheeses down to my friend’s house. When his wife came into the room she smelt round for an instant. Then she said:
“What is it? Tell me the worst.”
JEROME K. JEROME,
Three Men in a Boat
The coming of the milk-girl
Sunrise is a necessary concomitant of long railway journeys, just as are hard-boiled eggs, illustrated papers, packs of cards, rivers upon which boats strain but make no progress. At a certain moment, when I was counting over the thoughts that had filled my mind, in the preceding minutes, so as to discover whether I had just been asleep or not (and when the very uncertainty which made me ask myself the question was to furnish me with an affirmative answer), in the pale square of the window, over a small black wood I saw some ragged clouds whose fleecy edges were of a fixed, dead pink, not liable to change, like the colour that dyes the wing which has grown to wear it, or the sketch upon which the artist’s fancy has washed it. But I felt that, unlike them, this colour was due neither to inertia nor to caprice but to necessity and life. Presently there gathered behind it reserves of light. It brightened; the sky turned to a crimson which I strove, glueing my eyes to the window, to see more clearly, for I felt that it was related somehow to the most intimate life of Nature, but, the course of the line altering, the train turned, the morning scene gave place in the frame of the window to a nocturnal village, its roofs still blue with moonlight, its pond encrusted with the opalescent nacre of night, beneath a firmament still powdered with all its stars, and I was lamenting the loss of my strip of pink sky when I caught sight of it afresh, but red this time, in the opposite window which it left at a second bend in the line, so that I spent my time running from one window to the other to reassemble, to collect on a single canvas the intermittent, antipodean fragments of my fine, scarlet, ever-changing morning, and to obtain a comprehensive view of it and a continuous picture.
The scenery became broken, abrupt, the train stopped at a little station between two mountains. Far down the gorge, on the edge of a hurrying stream, one could see only a solitary watch-house, deep-planted in the water which ran past on a level with its windows. If a person can be the product of a soil the peculiar charm of which one distinguishes in that person, more even than the peasant girl whom I had so desperately longed to see appear when I wandered by myself along the Méséglise way, in the woods of Roussainville, such a person must be the big girl whom I now saw emerge from the house and, climbing a path lighted by the first slanting rays of the sun, come towards the station carrying a jar of milk. In her valley from which its congregated summits hid the rest of the world, she could never see anyone save in these trains which stopped for a moment only. She passed down the line of windows, offering coffee and milk to a few awakened passengers. Purpled with the glow of morning, her face was rosier than the sky. I felt in her presence that desire to live which is reborn in us whenever we become conscious anew of beauty and of happiness. We invariably forget that these are individual qualities, and, substituting for them in our mind a conventional type at which we arrive by striking a sort of mean amongst the different faces that have taken our fancy, the pleasures we have known, we are left with mere abstract images which are lifeless and dull because they are lacking in precisely that element of novelty, different from anything we have known, that element which is proper to beauty and to happiness. And we deliver on life a pessimistic judgment which we suppose to be fair, for we believed that we were taking into account when we formed it happiness and beauty, whereas in fact we left them out and replaced them by syntheses in which there is not a single atom of either. So it is that a well-read man will at once begin to yawn with boredom when anyone speaks to him of a new “good book,” because he imagines a sort of composite of all the good books that he has read and knows already, whereas a good book is something special, something incalculable, and is made up not of the sum of all previous masterpieces but of something which the most thorough assimilation of every one of them would not enable him to discover, since it exists not in their sum but beyond it. Once he has become acquainted with this new work, the well-read man, till then apathetic, feels his interest awaken in the reality which it depicts. So, alien to the models of beauty which my fancy was wont to sketch when I was by myself, this strapping girl gave me at once the sensation of a certain happiness (the sole form, always different, in which we may learn the sensation of happiness), of a happiness that would be realised by my staying and living there by her side. But in this again the temporary cessation of Habit played a great part. I was giving the milk-girl the benefit of what was really my own entire being, ready to taste the keenest joys, which now confronted her. As a rule it is with our being reduced to a minimum that we live, most of our faculties lie dormant because they can rely upon Habit, which knows what there is to be done and has no need of their services. But on this morning of travel, the interruption of the routine of my existence, the change of place and time had made their presence indispensable. My habits, which were sedentary and not matutinal, played me false, and all my faculties came hurrying to take their place, vieing with one another in their zeal, rising, each of them, like waves in a storm, to the same unaccustomed level, from the basest to the most exalted, from breath, appetite, the circulation of my blood to receptivity and imagination. I cannot say whether, so as to make me believe that this girl was unlike the rest of women, the rugged charm of these barren tracts had been added to her own, but if so she gave it back to them. Life would have seemed an exquisite thing to me if only I had been free to spend it, hour aft
er hour, with her, to go with her to the stream, to the cow, to the train, to be always at her side, to feel that I was known to her, had my place in her thoughts. She would have initiated me into the delights of country life and of the first hours of the day. I signalled to her to give me some of her coffee. I felt that I must be noticed by her. She did not see me; I called to her. Above her body, which was of massive build, the complexion of her face was so burnished and so ruddy that she appeared almost as though I were looking at her through a lighted window. She had turned and was coming towards me; I could not take my eyes from her face which grew larger as she approached, like a sun which it was somehow possible to arrest in its course and draw towards one, letting itself be seen at close quarters, blinding the eyes with its blaze of red and gold. She fastened on me her penetrating stare, but while the porters ran along the platform shutting doors the train had begun to move. I saw her leave the station and go down the hill to her home; it was broad daylight now; I was speeding away from the dawn. Whether my exaltation had been produced by this girl or had on the other hand been responsible for most of the pleasure that I had found in the sight of her, in the sense of her presence, in either event she was so closely associated with it that my desire to see her again was really not so much a physical as a mental desire, not to allow this state of enthusiasm to perish utterly, not to be separated for ever from the person who, although quite unconsciously, had participated in it. It was not only because this state was a pleasant one. It was principally because (just as increased tension upon a cord or accelerated vibration of a nerve produces a different sound or colour) it gave another tonality to all that I saw, introduced me as an actor upon the stage of an unknown and infinitely more interesting universe; that handsome girl whom I still could see, while the train gathered speed, was like part of a life other than the life that I knew, separated from it by a clear boundary, in which the sensations that things produced in me were no longer the same, from which to return now to my old life would be almost suicide. To procure myself the pleasure of feeling that I had at least an attachment to this new life, it would suffice that I should live near enough to the little station to be able to come to it every morning for a cup of coffee from the girl. But alas, she must be for ever absent from the other life towards which I was being borne with ever increasing swiftness, a life to the prospect of which I resigned myself only by weaving plans that would enable me to take the same train again some day and to stop at the same station, a project which would have the further advantage of providing with subject matter the selfish, active, practical, mechanical, indolent, centrifugal tendency which is that of the human mind; for our mind turns readily aside from the effort which is required if it is to analyse in itself, in a general and disinterested manner, a pleasant impression which we have received. And as, on the other hand, we wish to continue to think of that impression, the mind prefers to imagine it in the future tense, which while it gives us no clue as to the real nature of the thing, saves us the trouble of recreating it in our own consciousness and allows us to hope that we may receive it afresh from without.
Trains in the Snow (Claude Monet, 1875)
MARCEL PROUST,
Remembrance of Things Past Within a Budding Grove (trans. C. M. Scott-Moncrieff)
FAINTHEART IN A RAILWAY TRAIN
At nine in the morning there passed a church,
At ten there passed me by the sea,
At twelve a town of smoke and smirch,
At two a forest of oak and birch,
And then, on a platform, she:
A radiant stranger, who saw not me.
I said, “Get out to her do I dare?”
But I kept my seat in my search for a plea,
And the wheels move on. O could it but be
That I had alighted there!
THOMAS HARDY
Death of a hobo
Mac went down to the water tank beyond the yards to wait for a chance to hop a freight. The old man’s hat and his ruptured shoes were ashen grey with dust; he was sitting all hunched up with his head between his knees and didn’t make a move until Mac was right up to him. Mac sat down beside him. A rank smell of feverish sweat came from the old man. “What’s the trouble daddy?”
“I’m through, that’s all... I been a lunger all my life an I guess it’s got me now.” His mouth twisted in a spasm of pain. He let his head droop between his knees. After a minute he raised his head again, making little feeble gasps with his mouth like a dying fish. When he got his breath he said, “It’s a razor a’ slicin’ off my lungs every time. Stand by, will you kid.” “Sure I will,” said Mac.
“Listen kid, I wanna go west to where there’s trees an’ stuff... You got to help me into one o’ them cars. I’m too weak for the rods... Don’t let me lay down... I’ll start bleedin’ if I lay down, see.” He choked again.
“I got a coupla bucks. I’ll square it with the brakeman maybe.”
“You don’t talk like no vag.”
“I’m a printer. I wanto make San Francisco soon as I can.”
“A workin’ man. I’ll be a son of a bitch. Listen here kid... I ain’t worked in seventeen years.”
The train came in and the engine stood hissing by the water-tank.
Mac helped the old man to his feet and got him propped in the corner of a flatcar that was loaded with machine parts covered with a tarpaulin. He saw the fireman and the engineer looking at them out of the cab, but they didn’t say anything.
When the train started the wind was cold. Mac took off his coat and put it behind the old man’s head to keep it from jiggling with the rattling of the car. The old man sat with his eyes closed and his head thrown back. Mac didn’t know whether he was dead or not. It got to be night. Mac was terribly cold and huddled shivering in a fold of tarpaulin in the other end of the car.
In the grey of dawn Mac woke up from a doze with his teeth chattering. The train had stopped on a siding. His legs were so numb it was some time before he could stand on them. He went to look at the old man, but he couldn’t tell whether he was alive or not. It got a little lighter and the east began to glow like the edge of a piece of iron in a forge. Mac jumped to the ground and walked back along the train to the caboose.
The brakeman was drowsing beside his lantern. Mac told him that an old tramp was dying in one of the flatcars. The brakeman had a small flask of whiskey in his good coat that hung on a nail in the caboose. They walked together up the track again. When they got to the flatcar it was almost day. The old man had flopped over on his side. His face looked white and grave like the face of a statue of a civil war general. Mac opened his coat and the filthy torn shirts and underclothes and put his hand on the old man’s chest. It was cold and lifeless as a board. When he took his hand away there was sticky blood on it.
“Hemorrhage,” said the brakeman, making a perfunctory clucking noise in his mouth.
The brakeman said they’d have to get the body off the train. They laid him down flat in the ditch beside the ballast with his hat over his face. Mac asked of the brakeman if he had a spade so that they could bury him, so that the buzzards wouldn’t get him, but he said no that the mandywalkers would find him and bury him. He took Mac back to the caboose and gave him a drink and asked him all about how the old man had died.
JOHN DOS PASSOS,
42nd Parallel
On the trail of the thief
Emil woke up just as the train was pulling out of a station, and found himself on the floor, feeling very frightened. He must have been asleep, he thought, and slipped off the seat. Now, for some reason, his heart was beating like a sledgehammer. He could not remember where he was at first, then gradually it all came back to him. Of course, he was in a train, going to Berlin, in a compartment with a man in a bowler hat—and he had fallen asleep too.
The man in the bowler hat! That brought Emil’s wits back. He sat up and rubbed his eyes. The man was gone. Emil got slowly to his feet, feeling quite shaky. Then, from sheer force of habit,
he began to brush the dust off his trousers and jacket—and that reminded him of the money. Was it safe? He could not bear to feel for it in case it was gone. He leaned against the door, too anxious to raise a finger, just staring at the seat where that man called Grundeis had been sitting, and had gone to sleep, and snored. Now Grundeis was gone.
It was silly to take the worst for granted like this, just because the man had left the train while Emil himself was asleep. Naturally the passengers would not all be going as far as the Friedrich Street station where he was to get out. Of course not. And he had pinned the money in its envelope securely on to the lining of his jacket, so surely it must be safe. He had only to put his hand into that inner pocket on the right-hand side... His hand went slowly towards it... and felt about in it.
The pocket was empty! The money had gone.
He felt right into the corners of that pocket, and searched frantically through all his other pockets too. He ran his hands over the outside of his jacket—but there was nothing there to crackle. The notes were gone. He gave one last frantic rummage round the inner pocket, and cried out. The pin was still there, and had run into his finger. It stuck in, and left a bead of red blood when he pulled it out.
He wound his handkerchief round the finger, and a tear trickled down the side of his nose—not because of the pinprick, of course. He did not cry for such trifles. Why, a fortnight ago he ran into a lamp post so hard that he almost knocked it over. He still had the bruise on his forehead, and even that hadn’t made him cry.
No, it was the money, and because of his mother. You can understand that. It had taken his mother months to save that seven pounds to take him to Berlin. He knew all about that—yet he had fallen asleep as soon as he was in the train! And while he was having that crazy dream, that pig of a man was actually stealing the money. It was enough to make anyone cry. What was to be done about it? Had he got to go on to Berlin and say to his grandmother, “I’ve come, but I may as well tell you right away that I haven’t brought any money, and I’m afraid you’ll even have to give me some to buy my return ticket when I go home again.”
A Book of Railway Journeys Page 28
