I Travel by Train | Page 5

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 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