On The Limited

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Title:     On The Limited
Author: Cy Warman [More Titles by Warman]

One Sabbath evening, not long ago, I went down to the depot in an Ontario town to take the International Limited for Montreal. She was on the blackboard five minutes in disgrace. "Huh!" grunted a commercial traveller. It was Sunday in the aforesaid Ontario town, and would be Sunday in Toronto, toward which he was travelling. Even if we were on time we should not arrive until 9.30--too late for church, too early to go to bed, and the saloons all closed and barred. And yet this restless traveller fretted and grieved because we promised to get into Toronto five minutes late. Alas for the calculation of the train despatchers, she was seven minutes overdue when she swept in and stood for us to mount. The get-away was good, but at the eastern yard limits we lost again. The people from the Pullmans piled into the cafe car and overflowed into the library and parlor cars. The restless traveller snapped his watch again, caught the sleeve of a passing trainman, and asked "'S matter?" and the conductor answered, "Waiting for No. 5." Five minutes passed and not a wheel turned; six, eight, ten minutes, and no sound of the coming west-bound express. Up ahead we could hear the flutter and flap of the blow-off; for the black flier was as restless as the fat drummer who was snapping his watch, grunting "Huh," and washing suppressed profanity down with cafe noir.

Eighteen minutes and No. 5 passed. When the great black steed of steam got them swinging again we were twenty-five minutes to the bad. And how that driver did hit the curves! The impatient traveller snapped his watch again and said, refusing to be comforted, "She'll never make it."

Mayhap the fat and fretful drummer managed to communicate with the engine-driver, or maybe the latter was unhappily married or had an insurance policy; and it is also possible that he is just the devil to drive. Anyway, he whipped that fine train of Pullmans, cafe, and parlor cars through those peaceful, lamplighted, Sabbath-keeping Ontario towns as though the whole show had cost not more than seven dollars, and his own life less.

On a long lounge in the library car a well-nourished lawyer lay sleeping in a way that I had not dreamed a political lawyer could sleep. One gamey M.P.--double P, I was told--had been robbing this same lawyer of a good deal of rest recently, and he was trying at a mile a minute to catch up with his sleep. I could feel the sleeper slam her flanges against the ball of the rail as we rounded the perfectly pitched curves, and the little semi-quaver that tells the trained traveller that the man up ahead is moving the mile-posts, at least one every minute. At the first stop, twenty-five miles out, the fat drummer snapped his watch again, but he did not say, "Huh." We had made up five minutes.

A few passengers swung down here, and a few others swung up; and off we dashed, drilling the darkness. I looked in on the lawyer again, for I would have speech with him; but he was still sleeping the sleep of the virtuous, with the electric light full on his upturned baby face, that reminds me constantly of the late Tom Reed.

A woman I know was putting one of her babies to bed in lower 2, when we wiggled through a reverse curve that was like shooting White Horse Rapids in a Peterboro. The child intended for lower 2 went over into 4. "Never mind," said its mother, "we have enough to go around;" and so she left that one in 4 and put the next one in 2, and so on.

At the next stop where you "Y" and back into the town, the people, impatient, were lined up, ready to board the Limited. When we swung over the switches again, we were only ten minutes late.

As often as the daring driver eased off for a down grade I could hear the hiss of steam through the safety-valve above the back of the black flier, and I could feel the flanges against the ball of the rail, and the little tell-tale semi-quaver of the car.

By now the babies were all abed; and from bunk to bunk she tucked them in, kissed them good-night, and then cuddled down beside the last one, a fair-haired girl who seemed to have caught and kept, in her hair and in her eyes, the sunshine of the three short summers through which she had passed.

Once more I went and stood by the lounge where the lawyer lay, but I had not the nerve to wake him.

The silver moon rose and lit the ripples on the lake that lay below my window as the last of the diners came from the cafe car. Along the shore of the sleeping lake our engine swept like a great, black, wingless bird of night. Presently I felt the frogs of South Parkdale; and when, from her hot throat she called "Toronto," the fat and fretful traveller opened his great gold watch. He did not snap it now, but looked into its open face and almost smiled; for we were touching Toronto on the tick of time.

I stepped from the car, for I was interested in the fat drummer. I wanted to see him meet her, and hold her hand, and tell her what a really, truly, good husband he had been, and how he had hurried home. As he came down the short stair a friend faced him and said "Good-night," where we say "Good-evening." "Hello, Bill," said the fat drummer. They shook hands languidly. The fat man yawned and asked, "Anything doing?" "Not the littlest," said Bill. "Then," said Jim (the fat man), "let us go up to the King Edward, sit down, and have a good, quiet smoke."

[The end]
Cy Warman's short story: On The Limited

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