I Travel by Train | Page 3

is there in readiness twenty minutes before leaving time. It immediately quiets the nerves to go into a car that is standing as if it meant to stay. And it increases a man's self-respect to walk to his space, see his luggage slipped under the berth, and then sit in the calm of green upholstery for ten minutes just as if only a half-hour before he had not been raging at everybody because his shirts had been smudged in the laundry. I had done pretty well in packing up and so had my wife. I could think of nothing at all that I had left behind. Yet I pretended that I thought of something. Yes, it was something that would justify me in going to the rear of the train to telephone back to the house. I wanted my wife to hear me say in perfectly restrained voice that I was there and settled and all ready to go.
Even if it does sound like writing a testimonial for somebody, I must confess that I enjoy this traveling on a train. For a journey, as I like to think of it, consists not only of getting there, but of going. In the course of a week, a month, I shall be able to use all my spare time in seeing what kind of country it is that I live in.
Immediately, too, I began to see it. For within five minutes after the engineer had given us the none-too-gentle jerk which assured us that we were on our way, we were coming into the Back Bay Station. Crowds of competently dressed men and women with dogs and children were saying good-bye on the platform. No fringes of any other classes of people were in sight. It was--and always is America's best cross-section of a Brahmin population. In a crisp atmosphere that is a blending of the acquisitive and the intellectual, they are at perfect ease among themselves. Their language on such occasions, when they speak a little excitedly as if they were doing something unusual, has a flavoring that is more European than American. It is not precisely British the British would be the first to tell you so yet there is in it something that is more like Charing Cross or Bowness than Broad Street or Mackinac.
Only a few of them came into the car. They usually stick so close to the Atlantic seaboard that it is unnecessary for them to take a sleeper except on those rare occasions when they go to Washington, and those rarer ones when they go to Miami. When they are sailing from New York they can ride down in a parlor-car. Yet when the last redcap had rushed from the starting train, our passenger list in the sleeper had been increased. In front of me was a little girl of four with her mother. They were going to Elizabeth, New Jersey, and thought a section in the sleeping-car would be more comfortable for so long a journey. Across the aisle a boy of six and his mother adjusted their belongings for a trip as far as Newark, Ohio. The mother was not a Bostonian; she had only married one.
I felt perturbed. I had had in mind looking over some jottings. There might not be great quiet. But I fortified myself. I like children. I recalled proudly how I had always been able to work with children playing--though not fighting--right beneath my window in Cambridge. And the little girl smiled at me with great blue eyes round the corner of her high-backed seat.
The boy saw her smile, and felt that he must participate. But he was less subtle. He walked over and wanted to know what my name was, and where I was going. His mother, who tried to look unadorned and sheer, very mildly reprimanded him. Then he asked the little girl. Soon they were playing in the aisle and looking out at my window, and the two mothers were discussing education or rather, schools. The boy began a demonstration of what his school had already done for him by swinging between his seat and mine and turning flip-flops to the constantly accelerated accompaniment of a school chant. Then he began to yell very rhythmically as if he had learned that through teaching, also. I began to feel the least bit caged in. Instead of looking at my jottings, I concentrated on what was outside my window. The blueberry bushes were clumps of scarlet, the oaks beyond them were a brown that still somehow suggested life. It seemed a long hour before we had passed enough factories to be at Providence. I was on the state-house side of the train, and spent the five minutes allowed for the stop in wondering why Providence, with all