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.