I Travel by Train | Page 2

what people endure, in what they dream, in what comes true and in what it all seems to mean when you try to put it together.
"I get you!" he said. "The low-down on about everybody."
No, I protested; it would not be a book of such pretensions. But it would at least be about the United States which one long-distance train traveler had eventually come to see and think about.
R. W. B.

Contents
FOREWORD
I. COLOR
II. DISCOVERY
III. SUSTENANCE
IV. SOUTHBOUND
V. HUNGER
VI. PARASITE
VII. HEAT
VIII. EVERGREEN
IX. SMOKE
X. DUST
XI. WASTE
XII. CREOLE
XIII. HOME
XIV. RAIN
XV. DETOUR
XVI. FERMENT
XVII. SUNLIGHT
XVIII. NOVELTY
XIX. PANORAMA

I
Color
WHENEVER I think of traveling, I see the United States as merging areas of color. For I always begin my travels in the autumn. It was so a dozen years ago; it was so the year before last; it was so last year.
The day of departure carried its own announcement. Chill winds swept across the New Hampshire hills from Mount Monadnock and whirled the showering maple-leaves everywhere. The last lingering bluebirds sought the protected side of the barn and chirred regretfully in the afternoon sun. Shining pheasants, a dozen strong, marched boldly into the open meadow, stopped, and while the wind almost blew them off their feet, looked toward the house as if to say, "What? You still here?" By the next morning I was without regrets at going. For the wind had left the hills only dull, colorless pinnacles that were rendered all the more desolate by occasional areas of evergreen and clumps of birches the least bit too white in their fresh nakedness.
Down in the edge of Massachusetts the maples still provided a little color until you came too near and in Concord and Arlington and Cambridge there were almost as many yellowing leaves on the elms as in the streets beneath them.
There was much to be done in Cambridge in two short hours if I were to catch the noon train. As I hurried to the haberdasher's I was reminded at the end of the summer I never fail to be that I had reverted to type. For when all sorts of persons looked at me as though there were a reason for doing so, I began to wonder what was wrong. Did I have shaving cream in my ear? Did my last year's hat look worse than I had thought? Or was I merely looking in general like the provincial that I was? But when one man stopped me on the sunny side of Harvard Square, introduced himself, and told me that he had read my latest book, I felt so immeasurably better that as soon as I had visited the barber's I ventured over into the Harvard Yard just for one brief minute, to see how it felt. I met many old friends, and I snatched a second from all thought of unwaiting trains to survey the trees. After the sight of natural woodland all summer, these trees in the Yard looked carefully pruned, a trifle over-civilized, as if they lived too constantly in an intellectual air.
Just when I was about to rush away and take a taxi to the house, a stranger came up to me and timidly wondered if I would be good enough to tell him how to get to the new chapel. There it was in plain view, but many distant, impersonal smiles along the paths had made him hesitant. I glanced at the clock to see if I had still a precious minute or two that I could spare. "But perhaps I shouldn't have troubled you either," he began. I protested that it was no trouble; that I was only thinking of a train that I had to catch; that I should have just time enough to go with him.
Inside, while he stood and looked awesomely about, I enjoyed the quiet. It is a white and sterilized quiet, but quiet none the less. I once came upon the architect of the building sitting in there alone. He told me that he never knew how he happened to produce that great sense of quiet, but that it was there, and that he sometimes came and sat for fifteen minutes just to enjoy it. When the stranger at last regained speech, he felt a little better toward the people in the Yard. We said good-bye, and I sped to the house to rediscover a half-dozen things after our six months' absence things that I had suddenly thought of in the quiet of the chapel.
Nobody of consequence in Boston ever takes his train in South Station. It is not so much of a station, as stations come and go, and it is surrounded by an atmosphere of leather, wool, roasting coffee, and dank sea water. But the traveler who is not too much in social bondage knows that it has its advantages. The sleeping-car