Читать книгу The World on Wheels, and Other Sketches - Benjamin F. Taylor - Страница 9

Table of Contents

A great many animals get on board first-class passenger trains that should have been shipped in box-cars, with sliding doors on the sides. There is Your Railway Hog—the man who takes two seats, turns them vis-a-vis, and makes a letter X of himself, so as to keep them all. Meanwhile, women, old enough to be his mother, pass feebly along the crowded car, vainly seeking a seat, but he gives a threatening grunt, and they timidly look the other way. He is generally rotund as to voice and person, well-fed, but not well-bred. Not always, however. I have seen a meek-faced man, as thin and pale as an ivory paper-cutter, who looked as if he had just gone with the consumption, who made an X of himself as if he were the displayed emblem of porcine starvation. Have you ever thought of taking up burglary for a livelihood? Be a burglar if you must, but a Railway Hog never! Had the ancestors of this type of creature only been among the herd that ran down that "steep place into the sea," what a comfort it would have been!

Did you ever see the Bouncers? They are young, they are girls, they always go in pairs, and they bring a breeze. Like the man whose voice in secret prayer could be heard throughout the neighborhood, they discuss private affairs in a public manner. They throw scraps of loud, laughing talk at you much as if they were eating a luncheon. It is November. The wind comes out of the keen North. Be-shawled, be-cloaked, be-furred, never laying off fur or feather, they open the windows with a bounce, and there they sit snug as Russian bears, and the wind blowing full upon you seated just behind. You venture to beg, after freezing through, that they will close the windows and let you come to a thaw. What a word "supercilious" is, to be sure! Up go their two pairs of eyebrows, and down come the windows, both with a bounce. Then they grow sultry, and one whisks off "a cloud" or something square in your eyes, and the other flings back her fur cape on to the top of your head, sees what she has done, brushes the garment a little, and says nothing—to you. The train halts at some station. Up go the windows and out the two heads, and a rattling fire of talk is exchanged with more Bouncers on the platform—all loud, talk and talkers, as a scarlet vest and a saffron neck-tie. By-and-by they fall to fixing their back-hair, smoothing their eyebrows with a licked finger, and making other preparations to leave the poor company they have managed to get into.

Lest they be forgotten, let me impound certain offending people in a few paragraphs just here, that, like that place in the Valley of Hinnom, shall be a sort of Railway Travelers' Tophet. Capital punishment should not be abolished until they have all been executed at least once:

The man whose salivary glands are the most active part of him, who spits on your side of the aisle when you are not looking, and spoils the lady's dress who occupies the seat after him.

The man who puts a pair of feet, guiltless of water as a dromedary's, upon the back of your seat, and wants you to beg his pardon for being so near them.

The man who eats Switzer cheese, onions and sausages from over the sea, in the night time.

The man who prowls from car to car, and leaves the doors wide open in the winter time.

The boy who pulls the distracted accordion by the tail, he having several mothers and six small sisters to feed, and then wishes you to pay him something for "cruelty to animals."

The boy who throws prize packages of imposition at you, and insists you shall buy the "Banditti of the Prairie," or the "Life of Ellen Jewett," or the pictorial edition of the Walworth Family, or a needlebook, or a bag of popped corn, or some vegetable ivory, and wakes you out of a pleasant doze to see if you wouldn't like a Railroad guide.

The man who, with a metallic voice, in which brass is as plain as a brass knuckle, does the wit for the car; who tells the train-boy he'll get his growth before the train gets through; who talks of stepping off to pick whortleberries, and then stepping on again; who says that orders have been issued to the engineer never to heat the water hot enough to scald anybody; who talks in the night, and makes it hideous. There is no apparent reason why this man may not be made shorter by a head immediately. Let him be guillotined. "Brevity is the soul of wit."

What shall we do with her?—the woman who sails through the crowded car, and brings to beside you like a monument, looks as if you had no business to be born without her consent, and says in a clear, incisive voice, that cuts you like a knife, "I know a gentleman when I see him!" Is there a needle or something in the cushion? You are seventy, and have the rheumatism. She is twenty-five, full of strength and health, and with a pair of supporters of her own as sturdy as the legs of a piano. But what can you do? You feel red, and draw your head into your coat-collar like a modest and retiring mud-turtle, and pretend not to hear. But there she stands, and a young fellow across the way with a sky-blue necktie just lighted under his chin, laughs out loud at the situation, and you think, as pretty much all the blood you have, has gone into your head and ears, you will go and warm your feet. So you get up, with joints creaking like a gate, and hobble to the stove, where you stand and bow to the stove-pipe in an extraordinary way, and catch it around the waist now and then, and all the while she sits in your place like a fallen angel. "What shall we do with her?" Send her to the tailor to be measured, and "let her pass for a man!"

Everybody has met the man on a railway train who, as no one ever learned his name because no one ever cared to, may be designated as "Might I?" with a rising slide. All sorts of a man to look at, he is but one sort of a man to encounter, to-wit: an animated cork-screw, forever trying to pull the cork from the bottle of your personal identity. "Might I?" begins his acquaintance by stealing; stealing a look at you out of the tail of his eye, the meanest kind of pilfering, though the law doesn't mention it. Then he begins upon you. He says, "Might I ask how far you are traveling? Might I inquire what business you follow? Might I inquire if you are married? Might I ask your name?" His talk is as lively as a mite-y cheese, and he assaults you like the New England Catechism. This man has been growled at, snapped at, requested to go beyond the possible limit of frost, but he cuts and comes again the very first opportunity. "Might I?" has never been put to death by anybody. The remedy could be tried once, and if it failed to quiet, and only killed him, we should know better than to try it again.

The Railway Opossum is not vicious but he is amusing. He enters a car that is rapidly filling, drops into a whole seat, adjusts his blanket, chucks his soft hat under his head, swings up his feet to a horizontal—all this in two minutes—and is asleep! Objurgations fall upon him like the sweet rain. Shakes fail to disturb him, and no one ever tried Shakespeare. Tender women passing by say, "O, he's asleep—perhaps worn out with long travel;" and not till that swarm settles, and he thinks himself sure of his elbow-room, does he open an eye and "come to," and grow as lively as opossums ever get.

They board the train—they two—he in white gloves, new clothes, and a white satin necktie; she in a lavender silk, a bridal hat, and a small blush. Seated, they incline towards each other like the slanting side-pieces of the letter A. He throws one arm around her, and she reclines on his shoulder like a lily-pad. They whisper, they giggle, they talk low, they contemplate each other like a couple of china cats on a mantle-piece. He takes a gentle pinch of her cheek as if she were maccaboy, when she is only a very verdant girl. She sits with her hand in his, like a mourner at a funeral—the funeral of propriety. They punctuate their twitter of talk with pouncing kisses. They fly at each other like a brace of humming-birds. The sun shines. The car is filled with strangers. They are the target for thirty pairs of eyes. They smell of cologne or patchouly or—musquashes! They are the sorghum of the honeymoon—saccharine lunatics, and there they are—turned loose upon the public!

The Union Pacific Company has made provision to shut such people up. They have just begun to run a lunatic asylum with every San Francisco train, but they give it an astronomical name. They call it a "honeymoon car." The Company deserves well of the public for keeping traveling idiots out of sight. In certain circumstances it is difficult for some people to avoid being fools.

The ? that wears clothes, and goes away from home by the cars, and afflicts the conductor and the brakeman and his traveling companions—he is of recent origin. There is no account of him in Job. The Patriarch had a great many uncomfortable things, but he didn't have him. Had he been let loose upon Pharaoh, that stiff-necked Egyptian would have "let the people go" before breakfast. His natural diet is conductors and brakemen, but he will not refuse anybody. He has told the man before him and the woman behind him where he wants to go, and shown his ticket and his trunk check, and asked if this is the right train, and if the check is good, and when he will get there, and how far it is, and whether he knows anybody there. His victim pronounces the check genuine, gets out his "Guide," hunts up the place, ascertains the distance, tells him the time, and doesn't know anybody there.

The conductor enters, collecting tickets and fare, has a heavy train, and it is only five miles to the first station. ? makes for him on sight, tries to get him by the collar or button or elbow, and tells him where he wants to go, and shows his check, and inquires if this is the right train, and when he will get there, and how far it is. The conductor answers him, nips a spiteful nick out of his ticket, and hurries on. ? returns to his seat, and watches for a brakeman. Him he catches by the coat-tail, and he asks him if he is on the right train, and if the check is good, and if he thinks his baggage is aboard, and when he will get there, and how far it is. The brake-man has seen him before, and his replies are too short for a weak stomach, but he tells him.

The last morsel finished, he turns to you, and he says, as a woman who deliberates and is therefore lost, "I think now I am on the wrong train. I thought so all the while," and then he tells you where he wants to go, and shows you his check, and asks you if you think it is good for the trunk, and how far it is, and when he will get there, and you tell him. The conductor returns, he makes a grab at him, and he wants him to tell him when he will get there, and who keeps the best house, and how far it is from the depot, and whether that is really the best house or some other, and whether he meant three o'clock in the forenoon or afternoon, and the conductor doesn't tell him.