 | IV.
A DAY'S RAILROADING. Their wedding journey |  |
4. IV.
A DAY'S RAILROADING.
Happiness
has commonly
a
good appetite;
and
the thought
of the fortunately
ended adventures
of
the night,
the fresh morning air, and the content of their own
hearts, gifted our friends, by the time the boat
reached Albany, with a wholesome hunger, so that
they debated with spirit the question of breakfast
and the best place of breakfasting in a city which
neither of them knew, save in the most fugitive
and sketchy way.
They decided at last, in view of the early departure
of the train, and the probability that they
would be more hurried at a hotel, to breakfast at
the station, and thither they went and took places
at one of the many tables within, where they seemed
plainly had not looked for them, and for a time
found their presence so incredible that she would
not acknowledge the rattling that Basil was obliged
to make on his glass. Then it appeared that the
cook would not believe in them, and he did not send
them, till they were quite faint, the peppery and
muddy draught which impudently affected to be
coffee, the oily slices of fugacious potatoes slipping
about in their shallow dish and skillfully evading
pursuit, the pieces of beef that simulated steak, the
hot, greasy biscuit, steaming evilly up into the
face when opened, and then soddening into masses
of condensed dyspepsia.
The wedding-journeyers looked at each other
with eyes of sad amaze. They bowed themselves
for a moment to the viands, and then by an equal
impulse refrained. They were sufficiently young,
they were happy, they were hungry; nature is
great and strong, but art is greater, and before
these triumphs of the cook at the Albany depot appetite
succumbed. By a terrible tour de force they
swallowed the fierce and turbid liquor in their cups,
and then speculated fantastically upon the character
and history of the materials of that breakfast.
Presently Isabel paused, played a little with her
knife, and, after a moment, looked up at her husband
with an arch regard and said: “I was just
thinking of a small station somewhere in the South
of France where our train once stopped for breakfast.
everything on the little tables, — the plates, the
napkins, the gleaming half-bottles of wine. They
seemed to have been preparing that breakfast for
us from the beginning of time, and we were hardly
seated before they served us with great cups of caféau-lait,
and the sweetest rolls and butter; then a
delicate cutlet, with an unspeakable gravy, and potatoes,
— such potatoes! Dear me, how little I ate
of it! I wish, for once, I'd had your appetite,
Basil; I do indeed.”
She ended with a heartless laugh, in which, despite
the tragical contrast her words had suggested,
Basil finally joined. So much amazement had
probably never been got before out of the misery
inflicted in that place; but their lightness did not
at all commend them. The waitress had not liked
it from the first, and had served them with reluctance;
and the proprietor did not like it, and kept
his eye upon them as if he believed them about to
escape without payment. Here, then, they had enforced
a great fact of travelling, — that people who
serve the public are kindly and pleasant in proportion
as they serve it well. The unjust and the
inefficient have always that consciousness of evil
which will not let a man forgive his victim, or like
him to be cheerful.
Our friends, however, did not heat themselves
over the fact. There was already such heat from
without, even at eight o'clock in the morning, that
they placidly took their places in the train, which
had been made up for departure. They had deliberately
rejected the notion of a drawing-room car as
affording a less varied prospect of humanity, and as
being less in the spirit of ordinary American travel.
Now, in reward, they found themselves quite comfortable
in the common passenger-car, and disposed
to view the scenery, into which they struck an hour
after leaving the city, with much complacency.
There was sufficient draught through the open window
to make the heat tolerable, and the great
brooding warmth gave to the landscape the charm
which it alone can impart. It is a landscape that I
greatly love for its mild beauty and tranquil picturesqueness,
and it is in honor of our friends that I
say they enjoyed it. There are nowhere any considerable
hills, but everywhere generous slopes and
pleasant hollows and the wide meadows of a grazing
country, with the pretty brown Mohawk River
rippling down through all, and at frequent intervals
the life of the canal, now near, now far away, with
the lazy boats that seem not to stir, and the horses
that the train passes with a whirl, and leaves slowly
stepping forward and swiftly slipping backward.
There are farms that had once, or still have, the
romance to them of being Dutch farms, — if there
is any romance in that, — and one conjectures a
Dutch thrift in their waving grass and grain.
Spaces of woodland here and there dapple the
side of their capacious red barns. Truly, there is
no ground on which to defend the idleness, and yet
as the train strives furiously onward amid these
scenes of fertility and abundance, I like in fancy
to loiter behind it, and to saunter at will up and
down the landscape. I stop at the farm-yard gates,
and sit upon the porches or thresholds, and am
served with cups of buttermilk by old Dutch ladies
who have done their morning's work and have leisure
to be knitting or sewing; or if there are no old
ladies, with decent caps upon their gray hair, then
I do not complain if the drink is brought me by
some red-cheeked, comely young girl, out of Washington
Irving's pages, with no cap on her golden
braids, who mirrors my diffidence, and takes an attitude
of pretty awkwardness while she waits till I
have done drinking. In the same easily contented
spirit as I lounge through the barn-yard, if I find
the old hens gone about their family affairs, I do
not mind a meadow-lark's singing in the top of the
elm-tree beside the pump. In these excursions the
watch-dogs know me for a harmless person, and will
not open their eyes as they lie coiled up in the sun
before the gate. At all the places, I have the people
keep bees, and, in the garden full of worthy
pot-herbs, such idlers in the vegetable world as
hollyhocks and larkspurs and four-o'clocks, near a
great bed in which the asparagus has gone to sleep
for the season with a dream of delicate spray hanging
tall grass, and ride with him upon the perilous
seat of his voluble mowing-machine, and learn to
my heart's content that his name begins with Van,
and that his family has owned that farm ever since
the days of the Patroon; which I dare say is not
true. Then I fall asleep in a corner of the hayfield,
and wake up on the tow-path of the canal beside
that wonderfully lean horse, whose bones you
cannot count only because they are so many. He
never wakes up, but, with a faltering under-lip and
half-shut eyes, hobbles stiffly on, unconscious of his
anatomical interest. The captain hospitably asks
me on board, with a twist of the rudder swinging
the stern of the boat up to the path, so that I can
step on. She is laden with flour from the valley of
the Genesee, and may have started on her voyage
shortly after the canal was made. She is succinctly
manned by the captain, the driver, and the cook, a
fiery-haired lady of imperfect temper; and the
cabin, which I explore, is plainly furnished with a
cook-stove and a flask of whiskey. Nothing but
profane language is allowed on board; and so, in a
life of wicked jollity and ease, we glide imperceptibly
down the canal, unvexed by the far-off future
of arrival.
Such, I say, are my own unambitious mental
pastimes, but I am aware that less superficial
spirits could not be satisfied with them, and I do
not pretend that my wedding-journeyers were so.
they invited themselves to be reminded of passages
of European travel by it; and they placed villas
and castles and palaces upon all the eligible building-sites.
Ashamed of these devices, presently,
Basil patriotically tried to reconstruct the Dutch
and Indian past of the Mohawk Valley, but here
he was foiled by the immense ignorance of his wife,
who, as a true American woman, knew nothing of
the history of her own country, and less than nothing
of the barbarous regions beyond the borders
of her native province. She proved a bewildering
labyrinth of error concerning the events which
Basil mentioned; and she had never even heard of
the massacres by the French and Indians at Schenectady,
which he in his boyhood had known so
vividly that he was scalped every night in his
dreams, and woke up in the morning expecting to
see marks of the tomahawk on the head-board. So,
failing at last to extract any sentiment from the
scenes without, they turned their faces from the
window, and looked about them for amusement
within the car.
It was in all respects an ordinary carful of human
beings, and it was perhaps the more worthy
to be studied on that account. As in literature
the true artist will shun the use even of real events
if they are of an improbable character, so the sincere
observer of man will not desire to look upon
his heroic or occasional phases, but will seek him in
To me, at any rate, he is at such times very precious;
and I never perceive him to be so much a
man and a brother as when I feel the pressure of
his vast, natural, unaffected dullness. Then I am
able to enter confidently into his life and inhabit
there, to think his shallow and feeble thoughts, to
be moved by his dumb, stupid desires, to be dimly
illumined by his stinted inspirations, to share his
foolish prejudices, to practice his obtuse selfishness.
Yes, it is a very amusing world, if you do not refuse
to be amused; and our friends were very willing
to be entertained. They delighted in the precise,
thick-fingered old ladies who bought sweet
apples of the boys come aboard with baskets, and
who were so long in finding the right change, that
our travellers, leaping in thought with the boys
from the moving train, felt that they did so at the
peril of their lives. Then they were interested in
people who went out and found their friends waiting
for them, or else did not find them, and wandered
disconsolately up and down before the country
stations, carpet-bag in hand; in women who
came aboard, and were awkwardly shaken hands
with or sheepishly kissed by those who hastily got
seats for them, and placed their bags or their babies
in their laps, and turned for a nod at the
door; in young ladies who were seen to places by
young men (the latter seemed not to care if the
train did go off with them), and then threw up
platform without, till the train began to move, and
at last turned with gleaming eyes and moist red
lips, and panted hard in the excitement of thinking
about it, and could not calm
themselves to the dull level of
the travel around them; in the
conductor, coldly and inaccessibly
vigilant, as he went his
rounds, reaching blindly for the
tickets with one hand while
he bent his head from time to
time, and listened with a faint,
sarcastic smile to the questions of passengers who
supposed they were going to get some information
out of him; in the train-boy, who passed through
on his many errands with prize candies, gum-drops,
pop-corn, papers and magazines, and distributed
books and the police journals with a blind impartiality,
or a prodigious ignorance, or a supernatural
perception of character in those who received
them.
A through train from East to West presents
some peculiar features as well as the traits common
to all railway travel; and our friends decided that
this was not a very well-dressed company, and
would contrast with the people on an express-train
between Boston and New York to no better advantage
than these would show beside the average
passengers between London and Paris. And it
fades gradually from the boots, the hat softens and
sinks, the coat loses its rigor of cut, and the whole
person lounges into increasing informality of costume.
I speak of the undressful sex alone: woman,
wherever she is, appears in the last attainable effects
of fashion, which are now all but telegraphic
and universal. But most of the passengers here
were men, and they were plainly of the free-and
easy West rather than the dapper East. They
wore faces thoughtful with the problem of buying
cheap and selling dear, and they could be known
by their silence from the loquacious, acquaintance-making
way-travellers. In these, the mere coming
aboard seemed to beget an aggressively confidential
mood. Perhaps they clutched recklessly at any
means of relieving their ennui; or they felt that
they might here indulge safely in the pleasures of
autobiography, so dear to all of us; or else, in view
of the many possible catastrophes, they desired to
leave some little memory of themselves behind.
At any rate, whenever the train stopped, the wedding-journeyers
caught fragments of the personal
histories of their fellow-passengers which had been
rehearsing to those that sat next the narrators. It
was no more than fair that these should somewhat
magnify themselves, and put the best complexion
on their actions and the worst upon their sufferings;
that they should all appear the luckiest or
the unluckiest, the healthiest or the sickest, people
the most money. There was a prevailing desire
among them to make out that they came from or
were going to some very large place; and our
friends fancied an actual mortification in the face
of a modest gentleman who got out at Penelope
(or some other insignificant classical station, in the
ancient Greek and Roman part of New York
State), after having listened to the life of a somewhat
rustic-looking person who had described himself
as belonging near New York City.
Basil also found diversion in the tender couples,
who publicly comported themselves as if in a
sylvan solitude, and, as it had been on the bank of
some umbrageous stream, far from the ken of envious
or unsympathetic eyes, reclined upon each
other's shoulders and slept; but Isabel declared
that this behavior was perfectly indecent. She
granted, of course, that they were foolish, innocent
people, who meant no offense, and did not feel
guilty of an impropriety, but she said that this sort
of thing was a national reproach. If it were
merely rustic lovers, she should not care so much;
but you saw people who ought to know better,
well-dressed, stylish people, flaunting their devotion
in the face of the world, and going to sleep on
each other's shoulders on every railroad train. It
was outrageous, it was scandalous, it was really infamous.
Before she would allow herself to do such
a thing she would — well, she hardly knew what
any rate. She wondered that Basil could laugh at
it; and he would make her hate him if he kept on.
From the seat behind their own they were now
made listeners to the history of a ten weeks' typhoid
fever, from the moment when the narrator
noticed that he had not felt very well for a day
or two back, and all at once a kind of shiver
took him, till he lay fourteen days perfectly insensible,
and could eat nothing but a little pounded
ice — and his wife — a small woman, too — used to
lift him back and forth between the bed and sofa
like a feather, and the neighbors did not know half
the time whether he was dead or alive. This history,
from which not the smallest particular or the
least significant symptom of the case was omitted,
occupied an hour in recital, and was told, as it
seemed, for the entertainment of one who had been
five minutes before it began a stranger to the historian.
At last the train came to a stand, and Isabel
wailed forth in accents of desperation the words,
“O, disgusting!” The monotony of the narrative
in the seat behind, fatally combining with the heat
of the day, had lulled her into slumbers from which
she awoke at the stopping of the train, to find her
head resting tenderly upon her husband's shoulder.
She confronted his merriment with eyes of
mournful rebuke; but as she could not find him,
by the harshest construction, in the least to blame,
she was silent.
“Never mind, dear, never mind,” he coaxed,
“you were really not responsible. It was fatigue,
destiny, the spite of fortune, — whatever you like.
In the case of the others, whom you despise so
justly, I dare say it is sheer, disgraceful affection.
But see that ravishing placard, swinging from the
roof: `This train stops twenty minutes for dinner
at Utica.' In a few minutes more we shall be at
Utica. If they have anything edible there, it shall
never contract my powers. I could dine at the
Albany station, even.”
In a little while they found themselves in an
airy, comfortable dining-room, eating a dinner,
which it seemed to them France in the flush of her
prosperity need not have blushed to serve; for if it
wanted a little in the last graces of art, it redeemed
At the elbow of every famishing passenger stood a
beneficent coal-black glossy fairy, in a white linen
apron and jacket, serving him with that alacrity
and kindliness and grace which make the negro
waiter the master, not the
slave of his calling, which
disenthrall it of servility,
and constitute him your
eager host, not your menial,
for the moment. From
table to table passed a calming
influence in the person
of the proprietor, who, as
he took his richly earned
money, checked the rising
fears of the guests by repeated
proclamations that
there was plenty of time,
and that he would give
them due warning before the train started. Those
who had flocked out of the cars, to prey with beak
and claw, as the vulture-like fashion is, upon everything
in reach, remained to eat like Christians;
and even a poor, scantily-Englished Frenchman,
who wasted half his time in trying to ask how long
the cars stopped and in looking at his watch, made
a good dinner in spite of himself.
“O Basil, Basil!” cried Isabel, when the train
was again in motion, “have we really dined once
plenty, wholesomeness, civility! Yes, as you say,
they cannot be civil where they are not just; honesty
and courtesy go together; and wherever they
give you outrageous things to eat, they add indigestible
insults. Basil, dear, don't be jealous;
I shall never meet him again; but I'm in love with
that black waiter at our table. I never saw such
perfect manners, such a winning and affectionate
politeness. He made me feel that every mouthful
I ate was a personal favor to him. What a complete
gentleman! There ought never to be a white
waiter. None but negroes are able to render their
service a pleasure and distinction to you.”
So they prattled on, doing, in their eagerness to
be satisfied, a homage perhaps beyond its desert to
the good dinner and the decent service of it. But
here they erred in the right direction, and I find
nothing more admirable in their behavior throughout
a wedding journey which certainly had its
trials, than their willingness to make the very best
of whatever would suffer itself to be made anything
at all of. They celebrated its pleasures with
magnanimous excess, they passed over its griefs
with a wise forbearance. That which they found
the most difficult of management was the want of
incident for the most part of the time; and I who
write their history might also sink under it, but
that I am supported by the fact that it is so typical
in this respect. I even imagine that ideal reader
details with the life-like weariness of an actual
travelling companion of theirs. Their own silence
often sufficed my wedded lovers, or then, when
there was absolutely nothing to engage them, they
fell back upon the story of their love, which they
were never tired of hearing as they severally knew
it. Let it not be a reproach to human nature or to
me if I say that there was something in the comfort
of having well dined which now touched the
springs of sentiment with magical effect, and that
they had never so rejoiced in these tender reminiscences.
They had planned to stop over at Rochester till
the morrow, that they might arrive at Niagara by
daylight, and at Utica they had suddenly resolved
to make the rest of the day's journey in a drawing-room
car. The change gave them an added reason
for content; and they realized how much they had
previously sacrificed to the idea of travelling in the
most American manner, without achieving it after
all, for this seemed a touch of Americanism beyond
the old-fashioned car. They reclined in luxury
upon the easy-cushioned, revolving chairs; they
surveyed with infinite satisfaction the elegance of
the flying-parlor in which they sat, or turned their
contented regard through the broad plate-glass
windows upon the landscape without. They said
that none but Americans or enchanted princes in
the “Arabian Nights” ever travelled in such state;
with tropical fruits, ice-creams, and claret-punches,
they felt a heightened assurance that they
were either enchanted princes — or Americans.
There were more ladies and more fashion than in
the other cars; and prettily dressed children played
about on the carpet; but the general appearance
of the passengers hardly suggested greater wealth
than elsewhere; and they were plainly in that car
because they were of the American race, which
finds nothing too good for it that its money can
buy.
| IV.
A DAY'S RAILROADING. Their wedding journey | |