TWELVE
L'Envoi. The Train to Mariposa
It leaves the city every day about five o'clock in the evening, the
train for Mariposa.
Strange that you did not know of it, though you come from the little
town--or did, long years ago.
Odd that you never knew, in all these years, that the train was there
every afternoon, puffing up steam in the city station, and that you
might have boarded it any day and gone home. No, not "home,"--of
course you couldn't call it "home" now; "home" means that big red
sandstone house of yours in the costlier part of the city. "Home"
means, in a way, this Mausoleum Club where you sometimes talk with me
of the times that you had as a boy in Mariposa.
But of course "home" would hardly be the word you would apply to the
little town, unless perhaps, late at night, when you'd been sitting
reading in a quiet corner somewhere such a book as the present one.
Naturally you don't know of the Mariposa train now. Years ago, when
you first came to the city as a boy with your way to make, you knew
of it well enough, only too well. The price of a ticket counted in
those days, and though you knew of the train you couldn't take it,
but sometimes from sheer homesickness you used to wander down to the
station on a Friday afternoon after your work, and watch the Mariposa
people getting on the train and wish that you could go.
Why, you knew that train at one time better, I suppose, than any
other single thing in the city, and loved it too for the little town
in the sunshine that it ran to.
Do you remember how when you first began to make money you used to
plan that just as soon as you were rich, really rich, you'd go back
home again to the little town and build a great big house with a fine
verandah,--no stint about it, the best that money could buy, planed
lumber, every square foot of it, and a fine picket fence in front of
it.
It was to be one of the grandest and finest houses that thought could
conceive; much finer, in true reality, than that vast palace of
sandstone with the porte cochere and the sweeping conservatories that
you afterwards built in the costlier part of the city.
But if you have half forgotten Mariposa, and long since lost the way
to it, you are only like the greater part of the men here in this
Mausoleum Club in the city. Would you believe it that practically
every one of them came from Mariposa once upon a time, and that there
isn't one of them that doesn't sometimes dream in the dull quiet of
the long evening here in the club, that some day he will go back and
see the place.
They all do. Only they're half ashamed to own it.
Ask your neighbour there at the next table whether the partridge that
they sometimes serve to you here can be compared for a moment to the
birds that he and you, or he and some one else, used to shoot as boys
in the spruce thickets along the lake. Ask him if he ever tasted duck
that could for a moment be compared to the black ducks in the rice
marsh along the Ossawippi. And as for fish, and fishing,--no, don't
ask him about that, for if he ever starts telling you of the chub
they used to catch below the mill dam and the green bass that used to
lie in the water-shadow of the rocks beside the Indian's Island, not
even the long dull evening in this club would be long enough for the
telling of it.
But no wonder they don't know about the five o'clock train for
Mariposa. Very few people know about it. Hundreds of them know that
there is a train that goes out at five o'clock, but they mistake it.
Ever so many of them think it's just a suburban train. Lots of people
that take it every day think it's only the train to the golf grounds,
but the joke is that after it passes out of the city and the suburbs
and the golf grounds, it turns itself little by little into the
Mariposa train, thundering and pounding towards the north with
hemlock sparks pouring out into the darkness from the funnel of it.
Of course you can't tell it just at first. All those people that are
crowding into it with golf clubs, and wearing knickerbockers and flat
caps, would deceive anybody. That crowd of suburban people going home
on commutation tickets and sometimes standing thick in the aisles,
those are, of course, not Mariposa people. But look round a little
bit and you'll find them easily enough. Here and there in the crowd
those people with the clothes that are perfectly all right and yet
look odd in some way, the women with the peculiar hats and the--what
do you say?--last year's fashions? Ah yes, of course, that must be
it.
Anyway, those are the Mariposa people all right enough. That man
with the two-dollar panama and the glaring spectacles is one of the
greatest judges that ever adorned the bench of Missinaba County. That
clerical gentleman with the wide black hat, who is explaining to the
man with him the marvellous mechanism of the new air brake (one of
the most conspicuous illustrations of the divine structure of the
physical universe), surely you have seen him before. Mariposa people!
Oh yes, there are any number of them on the train every day.
But of course you hardly recognize them while the train is still
passing through the suburbs and the golf district and the outlying
parts of the city area. But wait a little, and you will see that when
the city is well behind you, bit by bit the train changes its
character. The electric locomotive that took you through the city
tunnels is off now and the old wood engine is hitched on in its
place. I suppose, very probably, you haven't seen one of these wood
engines since you were a boy forty years ago,--the old engine with a
wide top like a hat on its funnel, and with sparks enough to light up
a suit for damages once in every mile.
Do you see, too, that the trim little cars that came out of the city
on the electric suburban express are being discarded now at the way
stations, one by one, and in their place is the old familiar car with
the stuff cushions in red plush (how gorgeous it once seemed!) and
with a box stove set up in one end of it? The stove is burning
furiously at its sticks this autumn evening, for the air sets in
chill as you get clear away from the city and are rising up to the
higher ground of the country of the pines and the lakes.
Look from the window as you go. The city is far behind now and right
and left of you there are trim farms with elms and maples near them
and with tall windmills beside the barns that you can still see in
the gathering dusk. There is a dull red light from the windows of
the farmstead. It must be comfortable there after the roar and
clatter of the city, and only think of the still quiet of it.
As you sit back half dreaming in the car, you keep wondering why it
is that you never came up before in all these years. Ever so many
times you planned that just as soon as the rush and strain of
business eased up a little, you would take the train and go back to
the little town to see what it was like now, and if things had
changed much since your day. But each time when your holidays came,
somehow you changed your mind and went down to Naragansett or
Nagahuckett or Nagasomething, and left over the visit to Mariposa for
another time.
It is almost night now. You can still see the trees and the fences
and the farmsteads, but they are fading fast in the twilight. They
have lengthened out the train by this time with a string of flat cars
and freight cars between where we are sitting and the engine. But at
every crossway we can hear the long muffled roar of the whistle,
dying to a melancholy wail that echoes into the woods; the woods, I
say, for the farms are thinning out and the track plunges here and
there into great stretches of bush,--tall tamerack and red scrub
willow and with a tangled undergrowth of bush that has defied for two
generations all attempts to clear it into the form of fields.
Why, look, that great space that seems to open out in the half-dark
of the falling evening,--why, surely yes,--Lake Ossawippi, the big
lake, as they used to call it, from which the river runs down to the
smaller lake,--Lake Wissanotti,--where the town of Mariposa has lain
waiting for you there for thirty years.
This is Lake Ossawippi surely enough. You would know it anywhere by
the broad, still, black water with hardly a ripple, and with the grip
of the coming frost already on it. Such a great sheet of blackness it
looks as the train thunders along the side, swinging the curve of the
embankment at a breakneck speed as it rounds the corner of the lake.
How fast the train goes this autumn night! You have travelled, I know
you have; in the Empire State Express, and the New Limited and the
Maritime Express that holds the record of six hundred whirling miles
from Paris to Marseilles. But what are they to this, this mad career,
this breakneck speed, this thundering roar of the Mariposa local
driving hard to its home! Don't tell me that the speed is only
twenty-five miles an hour. I don't care what it is. I tell you, and
you can prove it for yourself if you will, that that train of mingled
flat cars and coaches that goes tearing into the night, its engine
whistle shrieking out its warning into the silent woods and echoing
over the dull still lake, is the fastest train in the whole world.
Yes, and the best too,--the most comfortable, the most reliable, the
most luxurious and the speediest train that ever turned a wheel.
And the most genial, the most sociable too. See how the passengers
all turn and talk to one another now as they get nearer and nearer to
the little town. That dull reserve that seemed to hold the passengers
in the electric suburban has clean vanished and gone. They are
talking,--listen,--of the harvest, and the late election, and of how
the local member is mentioned for the cabinet and all the old
familiar topics of the sort. Already the conductor has changed his
glazed hat for an ordinary round Christie and you can hear the
passengers calling him and the brakesman "Bill" and "Sam" as if they
were all one family.
What is it now--nine thirty? Ah, then we must be nearing the
town,--this big bush that we are passing through, you remember it
surely as the great swamp just this side of the bridge over the
Ossawippi? There is the bridge itself, and the long roar of the train
as it rushes sounding over the trestle work that rises above the
marsh. Hear the clatter as we pass the semaphores and switch lights!
We must be close in now!
What? it feels nervous and strange to be coming here again after all
these years? It must indeed. No, don't bother to look at the
reflection of your face in the window-pane shadowed by the night
outside. Nobody could tell you now after all these years. Your face
has changed in these long years of money-getting in the city. Perhaps
if you had come back now and again, just at odd times, it wouldn't
have been so.
There,--you hear it?--the long whistle of the locomotive, one, two,
three! You feel the sharp slackening of the train as it swings round
the curve of the last embankment that brings it to the Mariposa
station. See, too, as we round the curve, the row of the flashing
lights, the bright windows of the depot.
How vivid and plain it all is. Just as it used to be thirty years
ago. There is the string of the hotel 'buses, drawn up all ready for
the train, and as the train rounds in and stops hissing and panting
at the platform, you can hear above all other sounds the cry of the
brakesmen and the porters:
"MARIPOSA! MARIPOSA!"
And as we listen, the cry grows fainter and fainter in our ears and
we are sitting here again in the leather chairs of the Mausoleum
Club, talking of the little Town in the Sunshine that once we knew.
