The Railway Police and the Last Trolley Ride (16 page)

“All sorts here,” said Jim, his eyes roving; then his hands came out of their pockets, having found what they were looking for. “I know what it is,” he said, smacking his thighs. “We forgot lunch.” They hadn’t forgotten to bring it; they hadn’t made it. Domestic as they could be inside the house, outside it, like bachelors, they forgot.

“There’ll be hawkers surely,” said the mate comfortably. “Or the Women’s Auxiliary, with a bang-up supper. Can’t be bothered ourselves with aught of that, today.” Jim had never heard him speak like this, British but not his own Lancashire, more like one of their comics. The mate’s forelock went up, as he surveyed crowd, trees, women, men and children—the world. The small exclamation he made then might have been in his own woolly, boyhood dialect.

“What is it?” said Jim. For a moment he had half an idea that it was Riefel, here after all for his honoring. A charge of disappointment—as of a hero dropped—went over him. The mate saw it, and understood it too, and shook his head. “No, Jim. Going toward the rear car.” He lowered his voice. “Am I right? Look there.”

He was right of course, about the women if not the hawkers. A buzzing line of them, burdened with salad bowls, pitchers and the like, were climbing one after the other into the rear car, surely setting up a commissary there. But this wasn’t what made the mate’s hand clamp Jim’s nape in a vise, forcing him to stare only one way. Tag at the end of the line, a procession of three straggled after. The two girls in front might have been any young pair, sisters or not, one thin and striding, one full-blown—but the thin one had a large wire strainer on top of her bundles, and the rosy one held in her arms a cannonball pot. The sun glinted through the trees now on this strange armor, as the pair came shyly but steadily forward. A boy with a handcart pushed after them. The potbellied iron affair in the cart might have been the sisters’ catapult, trundled along to storm a town’s ramparts. It was too small to be Bismarck, but it was a stove.

The mate came around from behind Jim and stood in front of him, watching, and continued so all the time the stove was being hauled up onto the platform of the car, though the girls had long since disappeared inside. His hands crept to his tie and he spoke thickly to the tip of it. “We’ll eat, luv,” he said. “Ohh, we’ll eat.”

By the time the ten o’clock departure hour had stretched on, in the way of outings, to eleven, the mate had managed everything, Jim following behind. Inside the commissary car, a few tame husbands and boys at their mothers’ apron strings were helping make things fast for the journey, and the mate, quickly attaching himself and Jim, in short order found himself at the head of the crew. The day’s plans were for a box-lunch on the way or there, an evening supper at Otselica, for which the women had brought everything from Sterno heaters to wrapped ice, and a moonlit journey home; it was the full-moon part of the month. There would be swimming, of the mild, foot-or-two-deep water which mothers love, if the dryish Little Otselica would cooperate, and opinions were that after such a moist summer it would. For, just as it sometimes happens with a certain dinner-party, a regatta, or any other form of social endeavor which may or may not revolve around some science of human motion, every portent for this day on the Batavia Line—even the gradual gilding of the sun through the trees as the cars waited there—foreshadowed success.

The rear car had been singled out because, unlike the ordinary ones whose seats were arranged toast-rack style from stem to stern, it had an open middle section where two pew-style slatted wooden seats faced one another, leaving a space between where the picnic goods could be piled; Riefel had a car like it in his system at home. Front and back of the center, the seats were like the trolley-style anywhere, made of that old yellow cane which wore forever—or would have—and with a metal handle at the aisle-side top corner of each, so that the seat might be reversed for the return ride. In the last seat, forward of the platform where the stove stood in readiness for unloading again, the Pardee girls were sitting. Both of them had a high color, whether from pleasure at the committee’s having remembered to invite them, or over their own business initiative in getting themselves here, who could say? Jim, for the life of him, couldn’t walk straight over; he didn’t even want to begin all that doubletalk again, but in front of him the mate was working steadily toward that end of the car, and might have made it first if a sweet, Quakerish old lady-hen with a round eye, tight skin and china teeth—I can see her yet—hadn’t stopped him for talk and then proclaimed—“Why these poor boys have no lunch along!” In the general banter—“Now just who were you counting on?”—Jim found himself facing the girls. He’d only got as far as a nod when the mate came up the rear, close behind him. Jim turned—yes, that’s how it was, Jim turned—and the mate, coming abreast of him, stopped short, and gave the two girls the onceover. He meant to treat them as ladies, then and later, but a little of the waitressy warmth came through. Lottie had her plump little hand in the box-lunch; perhaps that was why she raised her eyes full wide, while Emily, for all her spirit, lowered hers. The mate’s eyes were on Emily, no doubt of it.

“You’re not … Lottie?” he said.

She shook her head, smiling slightly, but her eyes on Jim now, as if to inquire what story he’d been handing his friend.

“Why no … she’s Emily.” Lottie had just swallowed, and now she laughed comfortably.
“I’m
…” A few crumbs clung to her small, freshwater-pearl teeth. And it was Lottie, the behindhand one, who moved over easily and made room between her and her sister for the two men. The two men looked at each other; for the space of a breath perhaps they gave each other the once-over. Then Jim, the behindhand one, slipped in front of the mate and sat down beside Emily, and the mate slipped in docilely after, next to Lottie—after all, he was only wanting a wife. Her dress wasn’t lowcut, but that bust of hers made any dress seem so, and the mate, being the shorter man, would have the closer view of it. On his other side, Jim was floundering in that worst of doubletalk, when a woman isn’t saying anything at all. He had a feeling that whatever he said would set the tone for everything ahead of him—maybe they all did; the feeling itself was acknowledgment that a moment of choice had passed forever by. When his remark came it was another of those nothings. “You got to town,” he said.

At first, the picnic in itself wasn’t too much for personality over and above what a hundred years of lemon tea, and chocolate cake for the ants to eat, has trodden into memory’s communal ground. Even eating in a trolley car—or auto, or aeroplane; just
plane,
you boys say—doesn’t much change the reflections common to eaters of the hard-boiled egg. But here, once everybody relaxed into the riding, which happens in any vehicle, then they had the novelty of an outing in one in which they had ridden unthinking on daily errand and jaunt; it was the way it would be if the New York subway should stop forever, and the populace have a day of picnic there. There were stops for comfort along the way, with much hopping on and off of children and one almost-left-behind nursing mother who ran out to flag the lead car just in time; at each stop everybody remarked how well the committee had done its work, in even going ahead yesterday to Otselica, to set up facilities there. Everybody also reminded everybody else that the route was now being observed for the last, the very last, time, since when traversed again, it would be dark.

So far, there hadn’t been any wonders of the world, only the two bordering townlets where they had stopped off, separated by a country road; for most, this was as far out on the Batavia line as any had ever been. But as soon as they had left behind these two hamlets, the leafage and the gradual wildness began; soon they were running along handily through a lovely vale, between arching trees which now and then met and tangled high above. It was a tingling pleasure to feel lost this way, probing a limited unknown, with the car grinding and swaying along its high wire, between one’s legs that secret teasing of the motion, and all around one the caravan’s sense of good provisions hard by one, and homely friends. There were no houses here to hold the span wires between them as in Germany; this was unoccupied land. The little boys aboard made a game of counting the poles.

The air grew cooler, delicious with vines, and those who had brought sweaters were wondering whether they should be the first to fuss themselves into them, when—the lead car stopped, with a lurch that sent people and packages against one another, but nothing broken, just one little boy down in the aisle. The news came relayed back, after an ominous quiet of precisely two and a half minutes; there was a jam in the overhead wires due to overgrowth not having been pruned—nothing was wrong with the current however, all would duly be well. And in a few minutes, with a crackle from above, and a sizzle of the sparks the children complained were so hard to see in the daytime, they were off—a picnic scare, a picnic adventure, precisely to scale.

This happened untold times before the morning was over. It was impossible not to feel better acquainted all-round, characters emerging ever stronger, naming themselves from the settled corners of the car: the lady and children in seat Left Two, the couple up ahead with the big basket, the little Quaker hen forever nodding, the motorman up ahead, whom all were shy of speaking to, because he was to lose his job. The sagest heads of all nodded over the line’s demise; clearly it had been the costly upkeep which had done it; no, said others, not with patronage it wouldn’t have; it was because the line didn’t go anywhere. “Twenty-nine miles to nowhere!” somebody said. “Unfinished, if it had been
finished—
” said another. Whose fault was that? Nobody was heard to mention Riefel by name in any connection, but several spoke of the buses to come, most with contempt; where cars as handsome as the one they were on had failed because people simply wouldn’t, didn’t, how would buses—and on a roadbed as wild and unpopulated as this? They were drawing along now, for once uninterruptedly, through the last few miles before the terminus; some wag had put up a sign which said “Shin Hollow,” and a little farther on “Great Bear Mountain,” which was in fact the name of the hill. Now the car swayed and ground on through darkest woodland; the committee had had a man on the tracks clearing for a week before the excursion—buses
here?
Nobody could visualize it. Then the motorman spoke up, nasally proud; indeed he had been promised a job with the new buses, which however were going another route, and everybody was relieved for him yet irritated, since if he had been listening why couldn’t he have volunteered this information earlier? Conversation on this point all but stopped; appetites had started. A few voices persisted, halfhearted, on the subject of progress; consider how their own town had grown; since when had so many people in it barely known each other’s names, as some here? Since the
war.
The children meanwhile, hearing all this above their heads, looked wise without knowing it; something new was going to be added to the life ahead of them; they were on the voyage they had all along known they were, the original voyage,
out.
Box-lunches opened everywhere, decided on quicker than sweaters, and with food, the talk swung round again to character; there were those two boys down in back to be kidded, the ones without lunch. But they’re provided for—“Watch it, you boys.” Livery stable, a voice remembered. Boys? They’re men, those two boys. “Veterans,” whispered someone, and character sank again before this most remembering word. “It’s the last time,” mothers said to children who already had the look of those who had been kissed by governors of the state, and would grow up to shake the hand of some President. Remember it. It’ll be different, it’ll be dark—going back.

The Little Otselica. The creek and the hill. At about two o’clock in the afternoon they reached it, that perfected moment on trolleybed, roadbed or airstrip—the
stop.
There, broadside of the road, was the big bear of a hill which had provided the bygone stockholders an excuse to desert and curtail (though in Riefel’s home system it was tunneled through), against Riefel’s professional counsel that a transportation system cannot curtail, none of them can, being wars against nature; like wars, they must grow or fail. But now, the central carbarn, from whose peaked weathercock a flag had been lifted, and all the other outbuildings, all built of good stone, trellised and guttered in that homelike style in which small provincial railroad stations and their ilk used to be, stood out against the hillside like a village whose inhabitants, piped away by some pied spell and now released, were thronging back. The committee went first, in their black garb rather like a funeral it was true, but right behind them the women came marveling, gingering up everybody’s spirits, including their own, with their polkadots and kangaroo-pockets full of children; the spirit of picnics, and cemetery visits, is always feminine. Certainly there was reason to marvel; from comfort stations to water fountains, to stalls, tables and even a dais in the “main hall” of the carbarn, the whole effect was that of a village built for one day. Even the creek had come up to snatch, with a three-and-a-half-foot depth of water, just enough for a child’s scream to convince its mother it was drowning. Only the stationmaster’s dried garden, lacking a resident these two years past could not be revived. In the office behind it, the committeemen retired at once to huddle over their speeches, thus at once creating a government and a populace—everybody else could go free.

The two buddies and the two sisters could now devote themselves seriously, in a circle on the grass, to the eating which had begun, at Lottie’s insistent offers, in the car, and now advanced from mere sandwiches to a spread that required damask napkins and got them; where other women reached the heights via cold chickenlegs, the Pardees’ hamper, an affair which ran to real cutlery and continuous magic disclosure, opened on a capon still warm in its juices, and a creamy oyster pie. Thanks to Lottie’s provenance—for though she quoted no recipes, gave no sign other than the loving way she patted the cloth like bedlinen and cradled the food in its napery, surely the feast was her doing—there was enough for everyone, except perhaps Lottie herself. But on this one afternoon perhaps she didn’t mind; what she clearly asked of any hour was to be able to nibble it away in company under the perfect excuse of such an occasion; if the two bachelors had had any early squeamishness about “accepting” it was eased, in watching oysters go down Lottie’s throat as if to their duty, and that posy mouth redden, as if with rouge. She was a dainty eater always, and also—if the flow of food and the prospect was constant—could acquire a kind of conversation. Articles were often read by her, as she ate alone sometimes, at home; did they chance to know that some cows in Japan were kept in stalls, fed beer, even massaged, to make the most succulent beef in the world? She didn’t know but that she’d almost be willing to be a cow, in Japan.