What gave her a cold grue was the suddenly grasped fact that all this great mechanism of life, cities, towns, roaring railways, agricultural lands, manufacturing districts filled with English speaking people—that all this was alien, knew nothing of Ireland or England, except as it might know of Japan or a dream of the past.
The people in the train were talking English—were English to all intents and purposes, and yet, as far as England and Ireland were concerned, she knew them to be dead.
It had been freezing in New York, a great rainstorm was blowing across the world as they crossed the Delaware; it passed, sweeping away east under the arch of a vast rainbow, even the rainbow seemed alien and different to Irish rainbows—it was too big.
Then came Philadelphia, where some of the dead folk left the train and others got in. One had an Irish voice and accent. He was a big man with a hard, pushful face and a great under jaw. Phyl knew him at once for what he was, and that he had died to Ireland long years ago.
Then came Wilmington and Baltimore, and then, long after sunset in the dark, a warmer air that entered the train like a viewless passenger, nerve soothing and mind lulling—the first breath of the South.
Next morning, looking from the windows of the car, she saw the South. Vast spaces of low-lying land broken by river and bayou, flooded by the light of the new risen sun and touched by a vague mist from the sea, soft as a haze of summer, warm with light and everywhere hinting at the blue deep sky beyond.
Youth, morning, and the spirit of the sea all lay in that luminous haze, that warm light filled with the laziness of June; and, for one delightful moment, it seemed to Phyl that summer days long forgotten, rapturous mornings half remembered were here again.
The rumble of trestle and boom of bridge filled the train, and now the masts of ships showed thready against the hazy blue of the sky; frame houses sprang up by the track and fences with black children roosting on them; then the mean streets of the coloured quarter and now, as the cars slackened speed, came the bustle that marks the end of a journey. People were getting their light luggage together, and as Phyl was strapping the bundle that held her travelling rug and books, a waft of tepid, salt-scented air came through the compartment and on it the voice of the negro attendant rousing some drowsy passenger.
“Charleston, sah.”
She got out, dazed and numbed by the journey, and stood with the rug bundle in her hand looking about her, half undecided what to do, half absorbed by the bustle and movement of the platform.