I Travel by Train | Page 4

its many attractive spires and towers, would let somebody erect a great square hulk of a yellow building just across from the state-house and dwarf the graceful older building until it seemed to be shouldered off its hill
At Westerly a little dried-leaf of an old lady who must have been at least eighty-five came shakily into the car. As the train started, it tottered her into a seat on the wrong side of the aisle.
"Oh," she exclaimed with a startling clearness, and rather eagerly, as if she were not always heard attentively, "I didn't mean to do that. I want over there, on that side where I belong."
The very courteous, very black porter helped her over.
"Now!" she said. "Now! Now I can see them when we pass. It is so comfortable, too. So if it wants to storm now" the sky was a little heavy "well just let it storm."
The boy had watched her. He gave his upper lip a twitch of contempt. "She's an old devil, that's what she is!"
"Why, sweetheart, dearest!" his mother protested softly. "You shouldn't say that. Don't you see, she might be your own nice grandmother."
"I don't want any grandmother!" he shouted at the top of his voice.
A waiter came through from the dining-car hammering out some musical notes every so often and announcing that this was the last call for luncheon. I remembered that I had meant to eat a bite after I got aboard. Could there be a more appropriate hour?
A man can put in a lot of time in a dining-car if he is experienced. He can order item by item as he eats, and then eat very slowly, with full pauses now and then to read two or three consecutive pages in some interesting book, and with other pauses for the passing landscape. So for an hour and a half I sat a&d ate lettuce salad, and belated blueberry pie, and ice-cream, and read a little, and reordered coffee that was hot, and looked out at the sea, and heard, without trying, the conversation of the two youths at the other side of the table who professed ardently to believe that their prep, school had more class than either Groton or St. Mark's. One of them had just bought a yacht for which he had paid more than I in an entire lifetime had ever earned or at least had ever received. He felt sure that his father would be able to stampede somebody into buying several blocks of stock at a good fat advance and by so doing pay for the boat without any drain whatever upon the established treasury.
Back in the sleeping-car I grew weary of the rhythmic jungle cries, and decided to seek out a place in the observation-car. I have made the test through a dozen years, but I made it yet again with the same result: on these Boston- New York trains, as one walks through, there are more people reading books than on any other trains in the United States. It must be said also that there are more feet stuck out in the aisle, more people who glance up in disgust at you when you wish to put the aisle to other use.
There were no unoccupied chairs in the observation-car, and I immediately walked the full length of the train in the other direction. In the coach smoker close up against the section devoted to baggage I sat on the sleek oilcloth upholstery all the rest of the way to New York and enjoyed the bronzed reds of the Connecticut hills, the lighthouses on rocky points, the gulls flying everywhere, and listened with approval from some vague emotional depth of myself to two battered old pugs with heavy cauliflower ears while they declared with many variations that it was the good old sock right on the corner of the chin that made the world go round at least for the other fellow in the ring.
Somewhere in the region of Hell Gate Bridge the train moved hesitantly for a time, and then made a broad sweep to the southward as if it were trying to find a way of getting around New York. It was exploring as it sped along. As it circled into open space, one of the fighters they had both been silent for a time looked off to the westward with a puzzled, interested stare as though he were seeing something that was beyond his understanding. Then I saw. The whole of New York from the region of Forty-second Street on downtown stood up in a leaden sunset sky like the dream of some brilliant madman. In a moment everybody in the car was silent and looking. It was something pagan, yet something unearthly. What had men been celebrating when they built