Betrothal -- Fiction; Courtship -- Fiction; Middle West -- Fiction; United States -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
Marley wished the passengers would wake up and end the indecencies they
had tried to hide earlier in the night. Glancing up and down the long
car he could recognize none of them as having been there when he had
boarded the car at Macochee; those who had got on with him had gone
short distances, and then got off, breaking the last tie that bound him
to his home. He found it impossible now to conceive of the car as having
been in Macochee so short a time before.
Presently he saw an old lady sitting up in the remote end of the car;
she was winding her thin wisp of gray hair in a little knob at the back
of her head. Then, feeling that he might bestir himself, Marley got up
and went forward; he washed his face, and tried to escape the discomfort
of clothes he had worn all the night by readjusting them. The train was
evidently approaching the city; now and then he saw a building, lonely
and out of place: on the hideous sand-dunes, as if it waited for the
city, in the growth it boasted, to catch up with it.
The train ran on; it had reached an ever-widening web of tracks; it
passed long lines of freight-cars, stock-cars from the west, empty
gondolas that had come with coal from the Hocking Valley; a switch tower
swept by, its bell jangling peevishly in alarm; long processions of
working-men trooped with their dinner-pails between the tracks. The
train stopped, finally, still far from its destination. The air in the
car was foul from the feculence of all those bodies that had lain in it
through the night, and Marley went out on the platform. He could hear
the engine wheezing--the only sound to break the silence of the dawn.
The cool morning air was grateful to Marley, though it was not the air
of the spring they were already having in Macochee. He risked getting
down off the platform and looked ahead. Beyond the long train, coated
with its black cinders, he saw Chicago, dim through the morning light,
lying dark, mysterious and grim under its pall of smoke. He shuddered
and went back into the car. After a while the train creaked and strained
and pulled on again.
The passengers had begun to stir, and now were hastening to rehabilitate
themselves in the eyes of the world; the woman with the baby fastened
her dress, the drummer put on his collar and coat, the men drew on their
boots, but it was long before they felt themselves presentable again.
The women could achieve but half a toilet, and though they were all
concerned about their hair, they could not make themselves tidy.
The train was running swiftly, now that it was in the city, where it
seemed it should have run more slowly; the newsboy came in with the
morning papers, followed by the baggage agent with his jingling bunch of
brass checks. The porter doffed his white jacket and donned his blue,
and waited now for the end of his labors, so near at hand. He made no
pretense of brushing his passengers, for those in his charge were
plainly not of the kind with tips to bestow.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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