ALL ABOARD!
A train on the Chicago & Northwestern Road bound for California--a
long, full train--a small world on wheels. Everybody's double is
aboard. The first twenty-four hours settles things. The little bursts
of talk have given out. The great monotone of the wheels sounds over
all. In the second twenty-four the small stock of gossip, brought along
fresh, is consumed with the last crumbs of the home luncheon that was
brought along with it. People begin to show their grain. One man is a
bear. He falls back on the reserves, and sucks his paws for a living,
and _winters_ through the trip. He isn't a playful bruin, but he is
harmless. He entered the car tolerably plump. He leaves it intolerably
lean. He is a Spring bear.
Another falls to devouring books--he eats as a horse eats, incessantly;
he talks as a horse talks, not at all--reads right through States,
Territories and deserts, over rivers, mountains and plains. He might as
well have gone to the Pacific in a tunnel.
See that woman in gray? A dormouse. She sleeps little naps fifty miles
long, several times a day. She is an arrow of a woman--only aims at
what she means to _hit_. A great many people are arrows: they get
through the world with nothing to show for it.
Her neighbor is a knitter. Click, click, go the needles all day long.
She would be glad to "knit up Care's raveled sleeve," or the hose for a
fire-company. Wholesome to look at with her white cap and silver hair,
but no more of a traveling companion than a cat.
Yonder is a motherly old lady, going to see a son in Iowa or Nebraska,
and stay all winter. She lives in a house that has a lean-to and a
great motherly kitchen, where they set the dough down on the hearth in
its big wooden cradle, and make cider apple sauce by the barrel, and
give you good, honest cheer. You can tell all this by her looks.
There's an old-time Eastern grandma. If anybody had told her twenty
years ago she would ever wander beyond the Missouri River, she would
have thought anybody an idiot. The locomotive has done it, and is
whisking her across the continent! She takes snuff. There is a faint
suspicion of "Scotch" on her upper lip. She takes out the shiny black
box from her black silk workbag--the shiny black box with a yellow
picture of Queen Anne, or somebody in a mighty ruff, upon the cover.
She holds that box in her left hand. She takes off the cover and whips
it under the box with her right. She gives the side two little knocks
with a knuckle. The tawny titillative sets itself aright in the box.
There is something in the snuff looking like a discomfited beetle, that
shakes the yellow dust off at her double knock. It is a vanilla bean.
It is a liberal box--liberal as her dear old heart--and holds
seventy-five sneezes! She offers it to everybody within arm's-length. A
true gentleman who abominates snuff takes a dainty pinch with a smile
and a "thank you." So does a genuine lady. But a saucy chit, of modern
make, snuffs contemptuously without taking any, and so does a dashing
sprig of a fellow who never had a grandmother, and deserves none. This
Old-World courtesy over, grandma takes a pinch herself. Watch her. She
touches first this side, then that, in a delicate way, with a thumb and
finger, shuts her eyes, and with two long comforting snuffs disposes
of the allowance. Mrs. James Madison was a lady. So is grandma. Mrs.
James Madison took snuff and displayed two handkerchiefs, one for
preliminaries, and the other, as she herself said, "for polishing off."
So does grandma. One is cotton and blue, and the other is cambric and
white. She sneezes. God bless her! Her life has been as harmless as a
bed of sage, and as wholesome as summer-savory.
_Is_ it a sin to take snuff? Not for grandma. There is no Bible
prohibition for anybody, and not because Sir Walter Raleigh lived a
while after Bible times, either. Neither were there railroads then, but
here is an injunction to railway travelers, in case of accidents, as
old as Hebrew: "_Their strength is in sitting still!_" The writer
saw a man leave a car because it had broken loose from a train, jump
head-first against a wood-pile, and knock his brains out. To make a
cautious statement, he thinks those brains were a severe loss to the
_owner_. The writer has seen a man weighing fourteen stone try to
climb into the hat-rack to get out of harm's way, when the train left
the track. Had the car turned over, there would have been _another_
heavy cerebral calamity.
Yonder is a party of four around a little table. You catch fragments of
talk about "decks" and "right-bowers," as if they were sailors ashore;
"clubs," as if they were policemen; "kings" and "queens," like so many
royalists; "going to Chicago," when they are all bound West; "tricks,"
as if they were conjurors. Then a laugh, somebody says "euchre!" and
the game and the secret are out together. An old man in a home-spun
coat and a puzzled face watches the quartette. It is all Greek to him.
He used to play "old sledge" when he was a boy, on the hay-mow of a
rainy afternoon and nothing to do. The quaint face cards _look_
familiar, but their conduct is inexplicable.
A man needs about as many resources on a long railway journey as
Robinson Crusoe needed on that island of his. He wants a "man Friday"
of some sort. If, like Mark Twain's Holy Land mud-turtles, he cannot
sing himself, he must know how to make others sing. Have you never met
a man who was a sort of _diachylon_ plaster? Who drew you out in
spite of yourself, and put you at your best, till you were not quite
sure what he had been doing to you? That man knows how to travel. Two
prime qualities go to the make-up of a successful tourist: the art of
seeing and the art of listening. If, added to these, he understands the
art of _telling_, then he is a triumph in a locomotive way.
But the wheels are beating the iron bars like a hundred hammers. It is
a November night, and the icy rain drives sharply against the windows.
The out-look is dreary enough. The Argumentative Man--there is almost
always one on board--has gone to sleep. You know him. He's the man
who sits upon the seat in front of you, and overhears you make some
statement to a friend--perhaps doctrinal. Your Argumentative Man is
strong on doctrine. He wheels about on the seat, throws one leg over
the arm, and picks you up. He addresses you as "Neighbor," or
"Stranger,"--possibly "Colonel." If the last, you know whence he comes,
and wish he would make himself the second, and are glad he is not the
first. But he begins upon you. He quotes Paul at you, or Isaiah, or
Genesis, or somebody. He crows over you. He gets upon his hind feet,
and stands in the aisle and raises his voice, and looks around upon the
half-dozen within ear-shot to challenge their admiration when he thinks
he makes a point. He is the man that always lays his argument upon the
thumb-nail of his left hand, leveled like an anvil, and then forges it
every second or two with the thumb-nail of his right hand, and when he
thinks he has you fast just holds one nail on the other a little while,
as if it were _you_ he had finished and was holding there till you
got cool.
That man is exasperating. It is next to impossible to be a Christian
where he is, and very hard to be a decent man. They give penny-royal
tea to bring out the measles. He is a decoction of _human_
penny-royal, and brings to the surface all the ill humors there are in
you. Sometimes your Argumentative Man is a clergyman, sometimes a
layman, but you wish the train was a ship bound for Tarshish, and the
Man's name was Jonah, and a convenient whale alongside, though you are
sorry for the whale--but then we are all selfish, if we are _not_
whales! But the Man is asleep, and the knitting-work put away, and the
cards have had their last shuffle, and grandma is dreaming of home, and
ever so many more are gazing up at the car lights in a stupid way, or
looking out through the blank windows at--nothing. The man with the
black bottle is low-spirited, so is the bottle, and he has settled his
head down between his shoulders--shut up like a telescope. It is all
dull and stupid enough.
There are two women seated together, plain women, say forty-five or
fifty years old. They have good, open, friendly faces. Plainly dressed,
modest, and silent save when they conversed with each other, you had
hardly noticed them. Perhaps there was the least touch of rural life
about them. They would make capital country aunts to visit in
mid-summer, or mid-winter for that matter. If they were mothers at all,
they were good ones. So much you see, if you know how.
Well, it was wearing on towards twelve o'clock--the reader is requested
to believe that this is no fancy sketch--when through the dull silence
there rose a voice as clear and mellow and flexible as a girl's, of the
quality that goes to the heart like the greeting of a true friend. It
belonged to one of those women. She sat with her white face, a little
seamed with time and trouble, turned neither to the right nor the left,
seemingly unconscious that she had a listener. They were the old songs
she sang--the most of them,--songs of the conference and the camp--such
as the sweet young Methodists, and Baptists withal, with their hair
combed back, used to sing in the years that are gone.
First it was
"Rock of Ages! cleft for me,"
and then,
"Our days are gliding swiftly on."
The clear tones grew rounder and sweeter. Those that were awake
listened; those that were asleep awoke all around her. Some left their
seats and came nearer, but she never noticed them. A brakeman, who had
not heard a "psalm tune" since his mother led him to church by the hand
when he was a little boy, and who was rattling the stove as if he were
fighting a chained maniac, laid down the poker and stood still.
Then it was:
"A charge to keep I have,"
and so hymn after hymn, until at last she struck up:
"I will sing you a song of that Beautiful Land,
The far-away home of the soul,
Where no storms ever beat on the glittering strand,
While the years of eternity roll.
"O, that home of the soul in my visions and dreams
Its bright jasper walls I can see,
And I fancy but dimly the veil intervenes
Between that fair city and me."
The car was a wakeful hush long before she had ended; it was as if a
beautiful spirit were floating through the air. None that heard will
ever forget. Philip Phillips can never bring that "home of the soul"
any nearer to anybody. And never, I think, was quite so sweet a voice
lifted in the storm of a November night on the rolling plains of Iowa.
It is a year ago. The singer's name, home and destination no one
learned, but the thought of one listener follows her with an
affectionate interest. Is she living? Surely singing, wherever she is.
I bid her Godspeed. She charmed and cheered the November gloom with
carols of the Celestial City. She passed with the full dawn of the
coming morning out of our lives, and there is a strange ache at the
heart as we think so. Whoever heard her that night could write her
epitaph. They could say--they could write:
SACRED
TO THE MEMORY
OF THE
WOMAN WITH THE SONGS
IN THE NIGHT.