“It might be—fun.”
“But here’s the picture. Here’s
where you come in.”
A photograph of a forest clearing: pathetic new
furrows straggling among stumps, a clumsy log cabin
chinked with mud and roofed with hay. In front
of it a sagging woman with tight-drawn hair, and a
baby bedraggled, smeary, glorious-eyed.
“Those are the kind of folks I practise among,
good share of the time. Nels Erdstrom, fine clean
young Svenska. He’ll have a corking farm
in ten years, but now——I operated
his wife on a kitchen table, with my driver giving
the anesthetic. Look at that scared baby!
Needs some woman with hands like yours. Waiting
for you! Just look at that baby’s eyes,
look how he’s begging——”
“Don’t! They hurt me. Oh, it
would be sweet to help him—so sweet.”
As his arms moved toward her she answered all her
doubts with “Sweet, so sweet.”
Under the rolling clouds of the prairie a moving
mass of steel. An irritable clank and rattle
beneath a prolonged roar. The sharp scent of
oranges cutting the soggy smell of unbathed people
and ancient baggage.
Towns as planless as a scattering of pasteboard boxes
on an attic floor. The stretch of faded gold
stubble broken only by clumps of willows encircling
white houses and red barns.
No. 7, the way train, grumbling through Minnesota,
imperceptibly climbing the giant tableland that slopes
in a thousand-mile rise from hot Mississippi bottoms
to the Rockies.
It is September, hot, very dusty.
There is no smug Pullman attached to the train, and
the day coaches of the East are replaced by free chair
cars, with each seat cut into two adjustable plush
chairs, the head-rests covered with doubtful linen
towels. Halfway down the car is a semi-partition
of carved oak columns, but the aisle is of bare, splintery,
grease-blackened wood. There is no porter, no
pillows, no provision for beds, but all today and all
tonight they will ride in this long steel box-farmers
with perpetually tired wives and children who seem
all to be of the same age; workmen going to new jobs;
traveling salesmen with derbies and freshly shined
shoes.
They are parched and cramped, the lines of their hands
filled with grime; they go to sleep curled in distorted
attitudes, heads against the window-panes or propped
on rolled coats on seat-arms, and legs thrust into
the aisle. They do not read; apparently they do
not think. They wait. An early-wrinkled,
young-old mother, moving as though her joints were
dry, opens a suit-case in which are seen creased blouses,
a pair of slippers worn through at the toes, a bottle
of patent medicine, a tin cup, a paper-covered book
about dreams which the news-butcher has coaxed her
into buying. She brings out a graham cracker which
she feeds to a baby lying flat on a seat and wailing
hopelessly. Most of the crumbs drop on the red
plush of the seat, and the woman sighs and tries to
brush them away, but they leap up impishly and fall
back on the plush.
