It was now early September. The new term at the School for Utility Cultures would not begin until after the middle of the month, George had not been back to Libya Hill in several years, and he thought he might remain a week or so to see the town again. But he dreaded the prospect of staying with his Joyner relatives, especially at a time like this. Then he remembered Randy Shepperton, who lived next door. Mr. and Mrs. Shepperton were both dead now, and the older girl had married and moved away. Randy had a good job in the town and lived on in the family place with his sister Margaret, who kept house for him. Perhaps they could put him up. They would understand his feelings. So he sent a telegram to Randy, asking for his hospitality, and telling what train he would arrive on.
By the next afternoon, when George went to Pennsylvania Station to catch his train, he had recovered from the first shock of Aunt Maw’s death. The human mind is a fearful instrument of adaptation, and in nothing is this more clearly shown than in its mysterious powers of resilience, self-protection, and self-healing. Unless an event completely shatters the order of one’s life, the mind, if it has youth and health and time enough, accepts the inevitable and gets itself ready for the next happening like a grimly dutiful American tourist who, on arriving at a new town, looks around him, takes his bearings, and says, “Well, where do I go from here?” So it was with George. The prospect of the funeral filled him with dread, but that was still a day off; meanwhile he had a long train ride ahead of him, and he pushed his sombre feelings into the background and allowed himself to savour freely the eager excitement which any journey by train always gave him.
The station, as he entered it, was murmurous with the immense and distant sound of time. Great; slant beams of mottled light fell ponderously athwart the station’s floor, and the calm voice of time hovered along the walls and ceiling of that mighty room, distilled out of the voices and movements of the people who swarmed beneath. It had the murmur of a distant sea, the languorous lapse and flow of waters on a beach. It was elemental, detached, indifferent to the lives of men. They contributed to it as drops of rain contribute to a river that draws its flood and movement majestically from great depths, out of purple hills at evening.
Few buildings are vast enough to hold the sound of time, and now it seemed to George that there was a superb fitness in the fact that the one which held it better than all others should be a railway station. For here, as nowhere else on earth, men were brought together for a moment at the beginning or end of their innumerable journeys, here one saw their greetings and farewells, here, in a single instant, one got the entire picture of the human destiny. Men came and went, they passed and vanished, and all were moving through the moments of their lives to death, all made small tickings in the sound of time—but the voice of time remained aloof and unperturbed, a drowsy and eternal murmur below the immense and distant roof.
Each man and woman was full of his own journey. He had one way’ to go, one end to reach, through all the shifting complexities of the crowd. For each it was his journey, and he cared nothing about the journeys of the others. Here, as George waited, was a traveller who was afraid that he would miss his train. He was excited, his movements were feverish and abrupt, he shouted to his porter, he went to the window to buy his ticket, he had to wait in line, he fairly pranced with nervousness and kept looking at the clock. Then his wife came quickly towards him over the polished floor. When she was still some distance off, she shouted:
“Have you got the tickets? We haven’t much time! We’ll miss the train!”
“Don’t I know it?” he shouted back in an annoyed tone. “I’m doing the best I can!”’ Then he added bitterly and loudly: “We may make it if this man in front of me ever gets done buying his ticket!”
The man in front turned on him menacingly. “Now wait a minute, wait a minute!” he said. “You’re not the only one who has to make a train, you know! I was here before you were! You’ll have to wait your tarn like everybody else!”
A quarrel now developed between them. The other travellers who were waiting for their tickets grew angry and began to mutter. The ticket agent drummed impatiently on his window and peered out at them with a sour visage. Finally some young tough down the line called out in tones of whining irritation:
“Aw, take it outside f’ Chris’ sake! Give the rest of us a chance! You guys are holdin’ up the line!”
At last the man got his tickets and rushed towards his porter, hot and excited. The negro waited suave and smiling, full of easy reassurance: