As the train was pounding north across New Jersey another train upon the inside track began to race with it, and for a distance of ten miles the two trains thundered down the tracks in an even, thrilling, and tremendous contest of steel and smoke and pistoned wheel that blotted out everything, the vision of the earth, the thought of the journey, the memory of the city, for all who saw it.
The other train, which was bound from Philadelphia, appeared so calmly and naturally that at first no one suspected that a race was on. It came banging up slowly, its big black snout swaying and bucking with a clumsy movement as it came on, its shining pistons swinging free and loose, and with short intermittent blasts of smoke from its squat funnel. It came up so slowly and naturally, past their windows, that at first it was hard to understand at what terrific speed the train was running, until one looked out of the windows on the other side and saw the flat, formless and uncharactered earth of New Jersey whipping by like pickets on a fence.
The other train came slowly on with that huge banging movement of the terrific locomotive, eating its way up past the windows, until the engine cab was level with Eugene and he could look across two or three scant feet of space and see the engineer. He was a young man cleanly jacketed in striped blue and wearing goggles. He had a ruddy colour and his strong pleasant face, which bore on it the character of courage, dignity, and the immense and expert knowledge these men have, was set in a good-natured and determined grin, as with one gloved hand held steady on the throttle he leaned upon his sill, with every energy and perception in him fixed with a focal concentration on the rails. Behind him his fireman, balanced on the swaying floor, his face black and grinning, his eyes goggled like a demon, and lit by the savage flare of his terrific furnace, was shovelling coal with all his might. Meanwhile, the train came on, came on, eating its way past, foot by foot, until the engine cab had disappeared from sight and the first coaches of the train drew by.
And now a wonderful thing occurred. As the heavy rust-red coaches of the other train came up and began to pass them, the passengers of both trains suddenly became aware that a race between the trains was taking place. A tremendous excitement surged up in them, working its instant magic upon all these travellers, with their grey hats, their grey, worn city faces, and their dull tired eyes, which just the moment before had been fastened wearily on the pages of a newspaper, as if, having been hurled along this way beneath the lonely skies so many times, the desolate face of the earth had long since grown too familiar to them, and they never looked out of windows any more.
But now the faces that had been so grey and dead were flushed with colour, the dull and lustreless eyes had begun to burn with joy and interest. The passengers of both trains crowded to the windows, grinning like children for delight and jubilation.
Eugene’s train, which for a space had been holding its rival even, now began to fall behind. The other train began to slide past the windows with increasing speed, and when this happened the joy and triumph of its passengers were almost unbelievable. Meanwhile their own faces had turned black and bitter with defeat. They cursed, they muttered, they scowled malevolently, they turned away with an appearance of indifference, as if they had no further interest in the thing, only to come back again with a fascinated and bitter look as their accursed windows slid by them with the inevitability of death and destiny.
Throughout, the crews of the two trains had shown as keen and passionate an interest, as intense a rivalry, as had the passengers. The guards and porters were clustered at the windows or against the door in the car-ends, and they grinned and jeered just as the rest of them had done; but their interest was more professional, their knowledge more intimate and exact. The guard on the train would say to the porter —“Whose train is that? Did you see John McIntyre aboard?” And the negro would answer positively, “No, sah! Dat ain’t Cap’n McIntyre. Ole man Rigsby’s got her. Dere he is now!” he cried, as another coach moved past and the grizzled and grinning face of an old guard came in sight.
Then the guard would go away, shaking his head, and the negro would mutter and chuckle to himself by turns. He was a fat enormous darkey, with an ink-black skin, a huge broad bottom, teeth of solid grinning white, and with a big fatty growth on the back of his thick neck. He shook like jelly when he laughed. Eugene had known him for years, because he came from his native town, and the Pullman car in which he rode, which was known as K 19, was the car that always made the journey of 700 miles between his home town and the city. Now the negro sprawled upon the green upholstery of the end seat in the Pullman and grinned and muttered at his fellows in the other train.
“All right, boy. All right, you ole slew-footed niggah!” he would growl at a grinning darkey in the other train. “Uh! Uh!” he would grunt ironically. “Don’t you think you’s somp’n, dough! You’s pullin’ dat train yo’self, you is!” he would laugh sarcastically, and then sullenly and impatiently conclude, “Go on, boy! Go on! I sees you! I don’t care how soon I loses you! Go on, niggah! Go on! Git dat ugly ole livah-lipped face o’ yo’n out o’ my way!”
And that grinning and derisive face would also vanish and be gone, until the whole train had passed them, pulled ahead of them, and vanished from their sight. And their porter sat there staring out of the window, chuckling and shaking his head from time to time, as he said to himself, with a tone of reproof and disbelief:
“Dey ain’t got no right to do dat! Dey ain’t go no right to run right by us like we wasn’t here!” he chuckled. “Dey ain’t nothin’ but a little ole Philadelphia local! Dey’re not supposed to make de time we is! We’s de Limited! We got de outside rail!” he bragged, but immediately, shaking his head, he said: “But Lawd, Lawd! Dat didn’t help us none today. Dey’ve gone right on by us! We’ll never ketch dem now!” he said mournfully, and it seemed that he was right.
Eugene’s train was running in free light and open country now, and the passengers, resigned finally to defeat, had settled back into their former dozing apathy. But suddenly the train seemed to start and leap below them with a living energy, its speed increased visibly, the earth began to rush by with an ever-faster stroke, the passengers looked up and at one another with a question in their eyes and an awakened interest.
And now their fortune was reversed, the train was running through the country at terrific speed, and in a moment more they began to come up on the rival train again. And now, just as the other train had slid by them, they began to walk by its windows with the calm imperious stride of their awakened and irresistible power. But where, before, the passengers of both trains had mocked and jeered at one another, they now smiled quietly and good-naturedly, with a friendly, almost affectionate, interest. For it seemed that they — the people in the other train — now felt that their train had done its best and made a manful showing against its mighty and distinguished competitor, and that they were now cheerfully resigned to let the Limited have its way.
And now their train walked up past the windows of the dining-car of the other: they could see the smiling white-jacketed waiters, the tables covered with their snowy-white linen and gleaming silver, and the people eating, smiling and looking toward them in a friendly manner as they ate. And then they were abreast the heavy parlour cars: a lovely girl, blonde-haired, with a red silk dress and slender shapely legs crossed carelessly, holding an opened magazine face downward in one hand and with the slender tapering fingers of the other curved inward towards her belly where they fumbled with a charm or locket hanging from a chain, was looking at them for a moment with a tender and good-natured smile. And opposite her, with his chair turned towards her, an old man, dressed elegantly in a thin, finely-woven and expensive-looking suit of grey, and with a meagre, weary, and distinguished face that had brown spots upon it, was sitting with his thin phthisical shanks crossed, and for a moment Eugene could see his lean hands, palsied, stiff, and folded on his lap, and the brown spots on them, and he could see a corded, brittle-looking vein upon the back of one old hand.
And outside there was the raw and desolate-looking country, there were the great steel coaches, the terrific locomotives, the shining rails, the sweep of the tracks, the vast indifferent dinginess and rust of colours, the powerful mechanical expertness, and the huge indifference to suave finish. And inside there were the opulent green and luxury of the Pullman cars, the soft glow of the lights, and people fixed there for an instant in incomparably rich and vivid little pictures of their life and destiny, as they were all hurled onward, a thousand atoms, to their journey’s end somewhere upon the mighty continent, across the immense and lonely visage of the everlasting earth.
And they looked at one another for a moment, they passed and vanished and were gone for ever, yet it seemed to him that he had known these people, that he knew them better than the people in his own train, and that, having met them for an instant under immense and timeless skies, as they were hurled across the continent to a thousand destinations, they had met, passed, vanished, yet would remember this for ever. And he thought the people in the two trains felt this, also: slowly they passed each other now, and their mouths smiled and their eyes grew friendly, but he thought there was some sorrow and regret in what they felt. For, having lived together as strangers in the immense and swarming city, they now had met upon the everlasting earth, hurled past each other for a moment between two points in time upon the shining rails, never to meet, to speak, to know each other any more, and the briefness of their days, the destiny of man, was in that instant greeting and farewell.
Therefore, in this way, they passed and vanished, the coaches slipped away from them until again they came up level with the cab of the other locomotive. And now the young engineer no longer sat in his high window with a determined grin, and with his hard blue eyes fixed on the rail. Rather, he stood now in the door, his engine banging away deliberately, slowed down, bucking and rocking loosely as they passed. His attitude was that of a man who has just given up a race. He had turned to shout something at his fireman who stood there balanced, arms akimbo, black and grinning, as they moved up by them. The engineer had one gloved hand thrust out against the cab to support him, he held the other on his hip and he was grinning broadly at them, with solid teeth edged with one molar of bright gold — a fine, free, generous, and good-humoured smile, which said more plainly than any words could do: “Well, it’s over, now! You fellows win! But you’ll have to admit we gave you a run for your money while it lasted!”
Then they drew away and lost the train for ever. And presently their own train came in to Newark, where it stopped. And suddenly, as Eugene was looking at some negroes working there with picks and shovels on the track beside the train, one looked up and spoke quietly to the fat porter, without surprise or any greeting, as casually and naturally as a man could speak to someone who has been in the same room with him for hours.
“When you comin’ back dis way, boy?” he said.
“I’ll be comin’ back again on Tuesday,” said the porter.
“Did you see dat ole long gal yet? Did you tell huh what I said?”
“Not yet,” the porter said, “but I’ll be seein’ huh fo’ long! I’ll tell yo’ what she says.”
“I’ll be lookin’ fo’ you,” said the other negro.
“Don’t fo’git now,” said the fat black porter, chuckling; and the train started, the man calmly returned to work again; and this was all. What that astounding meeting of two black atoms underneath the skies, that casual incredible conversation meant, he never knew; but he did not forget it.
And the whole memory of this journey, of this race between the trains, of the negroes, of the passengers who came to life like magic, crowding and laughing at the windows, and particularly of the girl and of the vein upon the old man’s hand, was fixed in Eugene’s brain for ever. And like everything he did or saw that year, like every journey that he made, it became a part of his whole memory of the city.
And the city would always be the same when he came back. He would rush through the immense and glorious stations, murmurous with their million destinies and the everlasting sound of time, that was caught up for ever in their roof — he would rush out into the street, and instantly it would be the same as it had always been, and yet for ever strange and new.
He felt as if by being gone from it an instant he had missed something priceless and irrecoverable. He felt instantly that nothing had changed a bit, and yet it was changing furiously, unbelievably, every second before his eyes. It seemed stranger than a dream, and more familiar than his mother’s face. He could not believe in it — and he could not believe in anything else on earth. He hated it, he loved it, he was instantly engulfed and overwhelmed by it.
He brought to it the whole packed glory of the earth — the splendour, power, and beauty of the nation. He brought back to it a tremendous memory of space, and power, and of exultant distances; a vision of trains that smashed and pounded at the rails, a memory of people hurled past the window of his vision in another train, of people eating sumptuously from gleaming silver in the dining cars, of cities waking in the first light of the morning, and of a thousand little sleeping towns built across the land, lonely and small and silent in the night, huddled below the desolation of immense and cruel skies.
He brought to it a memory of the loaded box-cars slatting past at fifty miles an hour, of swift breaks like openings in a wall when coal cars came between, and the sudden feeling of release and freedom when the last caboose whipped past. He remembered the dull rusty red, like dried blood, of the freight cars, the lettering on them, and their huge gaping emptiness and joy as they curved in among raw piny land upon a rusty track, waiting for great destinies in the old red light of evening upon the lonely, savage, and indifferent earth; and he remembered the cindery look of road-beds and the raw and barren spaces in the land that ended nowhere; the red clay of railway cuts, and the small hard lights of semaphores — green, red, and yellow — as in the heart of the enormous dark they shone, for great trains smashing at the rails, their small and passionate assurances.
He brought to it the heart, the eye, the vision of the everlasting stranger, who had walked its stones, and breathed its air, and, as a stranger, looked into its million dark and driven faces, and who could never make the city’s life his own.
And finally he brought to it the million memories of his fathers who were great men and knew the wilderness, but who had never lived in cities: three hundred of his blood and bone, who sowed their blood and sperm across the continent, walked beneath its broad and lonely lights, were frozen by its bitter cold, burned by the heat of its fierce suns, withered, gnarled, and broken by its savage weathers, and who fought like lions with its gigantic strength, its wildness, its limitless savagery and beauty, until with one stroke of its paw it broke their backs and killed them.
He brought to it the memory and inheritance of all these men and women who had worked, fought, drunk, loved, whored, striven, lived and died, letting their blood soak down like silence in the ............