Then I started on a trip through California and old Mexico. My health
was broken. My marriage with Lucille was postponed.
On the Nevada desert our train was side-tracked early one morning to
allow the passing of the eastbound express which was late. A vast
level plain stretched its weary way in every direction. Only the twin
lines of steel and the dark-red section house showed that the White
Man’s footsteps had ever found their way into the stillness of the
dreary plains.
We had fifteen minutes to wait. I got out with others and walked up and
down the wind-blown track, smoking my cigar and spinning pebbles, which
I picked up from the road-bed, at a jack-rabbit in the sagebrush across
the way. The wind made a mournful sound through the telegraph wires,
but a wild canary sang sweetly from the top of a tall greasewood--sang
as if to drown the wind’s dirge. Dull grays were about us; and we were
hemmed in by mountains rugged, and rough, and dull gray, with here
and there touches of dull reds and browns. On their very tops patches
of snow lay, far--far up on the heights. Miles down the valley we
could see the coming train. A few minutes later the conductor called
to us “All aboard!” and I swung myself up on the steps of the last
sleeping-car as we began to move slowly down toward the western end of
the switch.
There was a roar and a clatter--a flash of faces at the windows--a rush
of wind and dust whirled up by the whirling wheels--and, as the Eastern
Express shot by, I saw (on the rear platform of the last car) him,
between whom and myself a Soul was shared.
The conductor stepped up on the platform where I stood, and caught me
by the arm as I reeled.
“The high altitude,” he said, “makes a good many folks get dizzy. You’d
better go inside and sit down.”
* * * * *
Then again.
On a ferry-boat crossing the bay from the Oakland pier to San
Francisco. I had just returned that morning from a four-months’ tour
of Mexico. It was raining dismally, and everything about the shipping
on the bay was dripping and dreary. Gray-white sea gulls circled and
screamed; darting and dipping, they followed our wake, or dropped down
into the foam churned up by the wheels. Winds--wet and salty, and fresh
from the sea--tugged at our mackintoshes; and flapped the gowns and
wraps of the women where--huddled together away from the rail--we stood
under shelter. Sheets of flying fog--dense, dark and forbidding--went
by; gray ghosts of the ocean’s uneasy dead. And back of the curtain of
falling waters and fog, whistles shrieked shrilly, and the fog horns
uttered their hideous sounds. Bellowing--moaning; moaning--bellowing;
suddenly still.
The city seemed but an endless succession of terraced, water-washed
houses under an endless rain. The storm lashed the waves in the
harbor into running ridges of foam, and on the billows the ferry-boat
(falling and rising, rising and falling) pushed her way through gray
skeleton-ships at anchor, and into her slip at the wharf. The drivers
of wagons and trucks on the lower deck, wrapped in oilskins yellow or
black and all dripping with wet, drove down the echoing planks. Then
the people began to descend the stairways. With my right hand steadying
me, I had taken three downward steps when the gripping at my heart told
me who was passing at my left (always at the left, it had been; at the
left, always) and he of the smoldering eyes that burned into mine like
live embers passed me quickly, and went on down the stairway and into
the rain-wetted crowd.
* * * * *