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A Sleeping-Car Experience
by
I had noticed a peculiar Aeolian harp-like cry that ran through the whole train as we settled to rest at last after a long run–an almost sigh of infinite relief, a musical sigh that began in C and ran gradually up to F natural, which I think most observant travelers have noticed day and night. No railway official has ever given me a satisfactory explanation of it. As the car, in a rapid run, is always slightly projected forward of its trucks, a practical friend once suggested to me that it was the gradual settling back of the car body to a state of inertia, which, of course, every poetical traveler would reject. Four o’clock the sound of boot-blacking by the porter faintly apparent from the toilet-room. Why not talk to him? But, fortunately, I remembered that any attempt at extended conversation with conductor or porter was always resented by them as implied disloyalty to the company they represented. I recalled that once I had endeavored to impress upon a conductor the absolute folly of a midnight inspection of tickets, and had been treated by him as an escaped lunatic. No, there was no relief from this suffocating and insupportable loneliness to be gained then. I raised the window-blind and looked out. We were passing a farm-house. A light, evidently the lantern of a farm-hand, was swung beside a barn. Yes, the faintest tinge of rose in the far horizon. Morning, surely, at last.
We had stopped at a station. Two men had got into the car, and had taken seats in the one vacant section, yawning occasionally and conversing in a languid, perfunctory sort of way. They sat opposite each other, occasionally looking out of the window, but always giving the strong impression that they were tired of each other’s company. As I looked out of my curtains at them, the One Man said, with a feebly concealed yawn:–
“Yes, well, I reckon he was at one time as poplar an ondertaker ez I knew.”
The Other Man (inventing a question rather than giving an answer, out of some languid, social impulse): “But was he–this yer ondertaker–a Christian–hed he jined the church?”
The One Man (reflectively): “Well, I don’t know ez you might call him a purfessin’ Christian; but he hed–yes, he hed conviction. I think Dr. Wylie hed him under conviction. Et least that was the way I got it from HIM.”
A long, dreary pause. The Other Man (feeling it was incumbent upon him to say something): “But why was he poplar ez an ondertaker?”
The One Man (lazily): “Well, he was kinder poplar with widders and widderers–sorter soothen ’em a kinder, keerless way; slung ’em suthin’ here and there, sometimes outer the Book, sometimes outer hisself, ez a man of experience as hed hed sorror. Hed, they say (VERY CAUTIOUSLY), lost three wives hisself, and five children by this yer new disease–dipthery–out in Wisconsin. I don’t know the facts, but that’s what’s got round.”
The Other Man: “But how did he lose his poplarity?”
The One Man: “Well, that’s the question. You see he interduced some things into ondertaking that waz new. He hed, for instance, a way, as he called it, of manniperlating the features of the deceased.”
The Other Man (quietly): “How manniperlating?”
The One Man (struck with a bright and aggressive thought): “Look yer, did ye ever notiss how, generally speakin’, onhandsome a corpse is?”
The Other Man had noticed this fact.
The One Man (returning to his fact): “Why there was Mary Peebles, ez was daughter of my wife’s bosom friend–a mighty pooty girl and a professing Christian–died of scarlet fever. Well, that gal–I was one of the mourners, being my wife’s friend–well, that gal, though I hedn’t, perhaps, oughter say–lying in that casket, fetched all the way from some A1 establishment in Chicago, filled with flowers and furbelows–didn’t really seem to be of much account. Well, although my wife’s friend, and me a mourner–well, now, I was–disappointed and discouraged.”