A soiled man and woman munch sandwiches and throw
the crusts on the floor. A large brick-colored
Norwegian takes off his shoes, grunts in relief, and
props his feet in their thick gray socks against the
seat in front of him.
An old woman whose toothless mouth shuts like a mud-turtle’s,
and whose hair is not so much white as yellow like
moldy linen, with bands of pink skull apparent between
the tresses, anxiously lifts her bag, opens it, peers
in, closes it, puts it under the seat, and hastily
picks it up and opens it and hides it all over again.
The bag is full of treasures and of memories:
a leather buckle, an ancient band-concert program,
scraps of ribbon, lace, satin. In the aisle beside
her is an extremely indignant parrakeet in a cage.
Two facing seats, overflowing with a Slovene iron-miner’s
family, are littered with shoes, dolls, whisky bottles,
bundles wrapped in newspapers, a sewing bag.
The oldest boy takes a mouth-organ out of his coat
pocket, wipes the tobacco crumbs off, and plays “Marching
through Georgia” till every head in the car
begins to ache.
The news-butcher comes through selling chocolate bars
and lemon drops. A girl-child ceaselessly trots
down to the water-cooler and back to her seat.
The stiff paper envelope which she uses for cup drips
in the aisle as she goes, and on each trip she stumbles
over the feet of a carpenter, who grunts, “Ouch!
Look out!”
The dust-caked doors are open, and from the smoking-car
drifts back a visible blue line of stinging tobacco
smoke, and with it a crackle of laughter over the
story which the young man in the bright blue suit and
lavender tie and light yellow shoes has just told to
the squat man in garage overalls.
The smell grows constantly thicker, more stale.
To each of the passengers his seat was his temporary
home, and most of the passengers were slatternly housekeepers.
But one seat looked clean and deceptively cool.
In it were an obviously prosperous man and a black-haired,
fine-skinned girl whose pumps rested on an immaculate
horsehide bag.
They were Dr. Will Kennicott and his bride, Carol.
They had been married at the end of a year of conversational
courtship, and they were on their way to Gopher Prairie
after a wedding journey in the Colorado mountains.
The hordes of the way-train were not altogether new
to Carol. She had seen them on trips from St.
Paul to Chicago. But now that they had become
her own people, to bathe and encourage and adorn, she
had an acute and uncomfortable interest in them.
They distressed her. They were so stolid.
She had always maintained that there is no American
peasantry, and she sought now to defend her faith by
seeing imagination and enterprise in the young Swedish
farmers, and in a traveling man working over his order-blanks.
But the older people, Yankees as well as Norwegians,
Germans, Finns, Canucks, had settled into submission
to poverty. They were peasants, she groaned.
