Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town
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.