I Travel by Train | Page 5

it? A moment later when the train carried us along slowly where a veil of smoke in the foreground subdued the fading sunlight even more subtly than the clouds in the background had, the gray of the towers was less of the earth still. Soon afterward the train came to a full stop. There was no confusion near us outside, and everybody in the car for the moment was as silent as if he slept. We participated in something fantastic.
Evidently the train decided that there was no way of getting around. The only thing left to do was to go under. It gave us a violent jerk, swerved sharply to the right, and made a dive into a roaring tunnel which eventually brought us into the bowels of the Pennsylvania Station.
I went up for air. I bought the latest edition of three or four papers. I bought a magazine or two. I bought a book. And I received the welcome reassurance that New Yorkers are just as childlike as anybody else, by watching hundreds of them solemnly ride a newly opened escalator down, since they were not going at the end of the day in the direction that would enable them to ride it up.
But it is never a journey until one is beyond New York. From New York it is still possible to telephone back home in a jiffy. And always among the pushing millions there are some of your friends. When I take a bedtime train in this direction I always find a vague inappropriateness in going to bed until we are past New York at two o'clock or so. And if I do go, I do not feel that I can settle down to solid sleep until after the long stop and the quick coming of the tingling pressure in the ears as the train drops swiftly beneath the Hudson. But when we are beyond the Hudson we are away-regardless of the hour. We have left behind everything peninsular and known. We are facing something vastly expansive. The train moves as if it had plenty of room.
The next morning when I awoke the light was squeezing in at my window. I pushed the shade up to see where we were. We were racing along a winding river among rounded hills, and two old women in sunbonnets fished from a flatboat. The maple trees on the hillsides beyond the river were as much green as yellow or red. When the train sliced off a piece of corn-field to save the trouble of keeping to the river, the ground from which the corn had been cut was matted with white and pink and purple morning-glories--and the fences were covered,
We swung out into more open country. Far in the distance I saw a dark train as long as our own, and racing as swiftly. I could tell by the design of the cars that they were sleepers. As day grew bright, today and every day, how many of them were there, racing everywhere in the United States, carrying whole towns of people along in their beds and preparing breakfast for them? I tried to visualize a map of the United States with every long-distance train designated, as we mark the daily location of ships on the Atlantic. There they were, speeding everywhere up from the South, across the Alleghenies, along the Great Lakes, down the Mississippi, across the Great Plains, through the Rockies, across the sands, up and down the Pacific coast.
When I was up and dressed and fed and ready to leave the breakfast table, our train slowed down and was cut over to the eastbound track. A moment later we passed scores of foreign-looking laborers who were busy putting down new steel on the track that normally would have been ours. Almost before we were at full speed again there were wild shrieks of the whistle, and a jolting, shuddering grind of brakes which brought us to such an abrupt stop that tableware crashed to the floor.
Since I had finished eating, anyhow, I went to the nearest open vestibule to lean out and see what had happened. There were fifteen cars or so in the train, and the diner was in the middle. I saw the conductor hurrying along on the ground from far in the rear, looking intently under the train as he ran. Far forward, the engineer in clean-looking striped overalls was coming back, looking under a bit more deliberately. Three or four porters had swung down and were standing back on the turf so that they might see farther alongside.
I swung down and walked forward toward the engineer. Before I came quite up to him, he stopped, looked back toward the conductor, and with a single easy lift of his stout arm signaled for him