Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 830
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 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 cochère 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 neighbor 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 knicker-bockers 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 tamarack and red scrub willow, and with a tangled undergrowth of brush 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 the 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 depôt.
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.
— Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town.
THE LITTLE GIRL IN GREEN
“COME,” SAID MR. Newberry; “there are Mrs. Newberry and the girls on the verandah. Let’s go and join them.” A few minutes later Mr. Spillikins was talking with Mrs. Newberry and Dulphemia Rasselyer-Brown, and telling Mrs. Newberry what a beautiful house she had. Beside them stood Philippa Furlong, and she had her arm around Dulphemia’s waist; and the picture that they thus made, with their heads close together, Dulphemia’s hair being golden and Philippa’s chestnut-brown, was such that Mr. Spillikins had no eyes for Mrs. Newberry nor for Castel Casteggio, nor for anything. So much so that he practically didn’t see at all the little girl in green who stood unobtrusively on the further side of Mrs. Newberry. Indeed, though somebody had murmured her name in introduction, he couldn’t have repeated it if asked two minutes afterwards. His eyes and his mind were elsewhere.
But hers were not.
For the Little Girl in Green looked at Mr. Spillikins with wide eyes, and when she looked at him she saw all at once such wonderful things about him as nobody had ever seen before.
For she could see from the poise of his head how awfully clever he was; and from the way he stood with his hands in his side pockets she could see how manly and brave he must be; and of course there was firmness and strength written all over him. In short, she saw as she looked such a Peter Spillikins as truly never existed, or could exist — or at least such a Peter Spillikins as no one else in the world had ever suspected before.
All in a moment she was ever so glad that she accepted Mrs. Newberry’s invitation to Castel Casteggio and hadn’t been afraid to come. For the Little Girl in Green, whose Christian name was Norah, was only what is called a poor relation of Mrs. Newberry, and her father was a person of no account whatever, who didn’t belong to the Mausoleum Club or to any other club, and who lived, with Norah, on a street that nobody who was anybody lived upon. Norah had been asked up a few days before out of the city to give her air — which is the only thing that can be safely and freely given to poor relations. Thus she had arrived at Castel Casteggio with one diminutive trunk, so small and shabby that even the servants who carried it upstairs were ashamed of it. In it were a pair of brand new tennis shoes (at ninety cents reduced to seventy-five), and a white dress of the kind that is called “almost evening,” and such few other things as poor relations might bring with fear and trembling, to join in the simple rusticity of the rich.
Thus stood Norah, looking at Mr. Spillikins.
As for him, such is the contrariety of human things, he had no eyes for her at all.
“What a perfectly charming house this is,” Mr. Spillikins was saying. He always said this on such occasions, but it seemed to the Little Girl in Green that he spoke with wonderful social ease.
“I am so glad you think so,” said Mrs. Newberry (this was what she always answered).
The whole thing from the point of view of Mr. Spillikins or Dulphemia or Philippa represented rusticity itself.
To the Little Girl in Green it seemed as brilliant as the Court of Versailles, especially evening dinner — a plain home meal, as the others thought it — when she had four glasses to drink out of and used to wonder over such problems as whether you were supposed, when Franklin poured out wine, to tell him to stop or to wait till he stopped without being told to stop, and other similar mysteries, such as people before and after have meditated upon.
During all this time Mr. Spillikins was nerving himself to propose to Dulphemia Rasselyer-Brown. In fact, he spent part of his time walking up and down under the trees with Philippa Furlong and discussing with her the proposal that he meant to make, together with such topics as marriage in general and his own unworthiness.
He might have waited indefinitely had he not learned, on the third day of his visit, that Dulphemia was to go away in the morning to join her father at Nagahakett.
That evening he found the necessary nerve to speak, and the proposal in almost every aspect of it was most successful.
“By Jove!” Spillikins said to Philippa Furlong next morning, in explaining what had happened, “she was awfully nice about it. I think she must have guessed, in a way, don’t you, what I was going to say? But at any rate she was awfully nice — let me say everything I wanted, and when I explained what a fool I was, she said she didn’t think I was half such a fool as people thought me. But it’s all right. It turns out that she isn’t thinking of getting married. I asked her if I might always go on thinking of her, and she said I might.”
And that morning, when Dulphemia was carried off in the motor to the station, Mr. Spillikins, without exactly being aware how he had done it, had somehow transferred himself to Philippa.
“Isn’t she a splendid girl?” he said at least ten times a day to Norah, the Little Girl in Green. And Norah always agreed, because she really thought Philippa a perfectly wonderful creature.
There is no doubt that, but for a slight shift of circumstances, Mr. Spillikins would have proposed to Miss Furlong. Indeed, he spent a good part of his time rehearsing little speeches that began, “Of course I know I’m an awful ass in a way,” or, “Of course I know that I’m not at all the sort of fellow,” and so on.
But not one of them ever was delivered.
For it so happened that on the Thursday, one week after Mr. Spillikin’s arrival, Philippa went again to the station in the motor. And when she came back there was another passenger with her, a tall young man in tweed, and they both began calling out to the Newberrys from a distance of at least a hundred yards.
And both the Newberrys suddenly exclaimed “Why, it’s Tom!” and rushed off to meet the motor. And there was such a laughing and jubilation as the two descended and carried Tom’s valises to the verandah, that Mr. Spillikins felt as suddenly and completely out of it as the Little Girl in Green herself — especially as his ear had caught, among the first things said, the words, “Congratulate us, Mrs. Newberry, we’re engaged.”
After which Mr. Spillikins had the pleasure of sitting and listening while it was explained, in wicker chairs on the verandah, that Philippa and Tom had been engaged already for ever so long — in fact, nearly two weeks — only they had agreed not to say a word to anybody till Tom had gone to North Carolina and back to see his people.
So the next day Tom and Philippa vanished together.
“We shall be quite a small party now,” said Mrs. Newberry; “in fact, quite by ourselves till Mrs. Everleigh comes, and she won’t be here for a fortnight.”
At which the heart of the Little Girl in Green was glad, because she had been afraid that other girls might be coming, whereas she knew that Mrs. Everleigh was a widow with four sons and must be ever so old — past forty.
The next few days were spent by Mr. Spillikins almost entirely in the society of Norah. He thought them on the whole rather pleasant days, but slow. To her they were an uninterrupted dream of happiness never to be forgotten.
The Newberrys left them to themselves; not with any intent; it was merely that they were perpetually busy walking about the grounds of Castel Casteggio, blowing up things with dynamite, throwing steel bridges over gullies, and hoisting heavy timber with derricks.
They left Peter and Norah to themselves all day. Even after dinner, in the evening, Mr. Newberry was very apt to call to his wife in the dusk from some distant corner of the lawn.
“Margaret, come over here and tell me if you don’t think we might cut down this elm, tear the stump out by the roots, and throw it into the ravine.”
And the answer was, “One minute, Edward; just wait till I get a wrap.”
Before they came back the dusk had grown to darkness, and they had redynamited half the estate.
During all of which time Mr. Spillikins sat with Norah on the piazza. He talked and she listened. He told her, for instance, all about his terrific experiences in the oil business, and about his exciting career at college; or presently they went indoors, and Norah played the piano, and Mr. Spillikins sat and smoked and listened. In such a house as the Newberry’s, where dynamite and the greater explosives were every-day matters, a little thing like the use of tobacco in the drawing-room didn’t count. As for the music, “Go right ahead,” said Mr. Spillikins; “I’m not musical, but I don’t mind music a bit.”
