How beautiful Texas is! And what a future it has! For half a day and a night we have been traversing grazing-land, and for half a day fine timber growing in a soil of intense fertility. And now for half a day we are in a pine country, sometimes with wide levels of turf spreading out among the trees, sometimes with oak and walnut so thickly intermingled with the pines that the whole forms a magnificent forest. Passion-flowers entangle all the lower undergrowth, and up the dead trees climbs that fine scarlet creeper which is such an ornament of well-ordered gardens of some English country houses. But here in Texas the people, as usual, have not had time yet to think of adornments, and their ugly shanties therefore remain bare and wooden. They are of course only ugly in themselves, that is to say, in material, shape, and condition, for their surroundings are delightful and location perfect. There is of course a good deal of "the poetry of malaria," as I heard a charming lady say, about some of these sites. For it is impossible to avoid the suspicion of agues and fevers in those splendid clearings, with the rich foliage mobbing each patch of cotton, grapes, or maize.
Whenever we happen to slacken pace near one of them an interesting glimpse of local life is caught. Negroidal women come to the doors or suddenly stand up in the middle of the crops in which, working, they were unperceived. From the undergrowth, the ditches, and from behind fences, appear dusky children, numbers of them, a swart infantry that seems to me to fill the future with perplexity. Are these swarms going to grow up a credit to the country? Have they it in their breed to be fit companions in progress of the progeny of the best European stocks?
The abundance of wild life, too, is very noticeable. Wherever we stop we become aware of countless butterflies and insects busy among the foliage, and the voices of strange birds resound from the forest depths.
But other sites appear to me perfection. Take Marshall for instance, or Jefferson. Which is the more beautiful of the two? Some of the "commercial" settlements, just beginning life with a railway-station, six drug stores, and seven saloons, have situations that ought to have been reserved for honeymoon Edens. They are "hard" places. Law as yet there is none except revolver law, and that is pitiless and sudden and wicked. For Texas, the beautiful flower state, blessed with turf and blessed with pines, has still the stern commencements of American life before it—that rapid, fierce process of civilization which begins with cards and whisky and murder, which finds its first protection in the "Vigilantes" who hold their grim tribunals under the roadside trees, but which suddenly one day wrenches itself, as it were, from its bad, lawless past, and takes its first firm step on the high road to order and prosperity and the world's respect. For every intelligent traveller these ragged, half-savage, settlements should have a great significance and interest. Before he dies they may be Chicagos or San Franciscos. And these men, with their mouths full of oaths and revolvers on their hips, are the fathers of those future cities. They will have no immortality though in the gratitude of posterity. For they will shoot each other of in those saloons, or the Rangers will shoot them down on the flower prairies beyond the forests. But they will have done their work nevertheless. Nature in every part of her scheme proceeds on the same system of building foundations upon ruins. Whole nations have to be killed off when they have prepared and preserved the ground as it were for those that are to follow. Whether they are nations of men, or of beasts, or of plants, she uses them in exactly the same way. Everything must subserve the ultimate end.
But I did not intend to moralize. The negress waiter at Longview (where we dine very badly) reminds me how practical life should be. She never stops to moralize. On the contrary, she just stands by the window, swallowing all the peaches and fragments of pudding that the travellers leave on their plates. Two he negroes wait upon us. But it looks as if they were there to feed the negress rather than to feed us. For they keep rushing in with full dishes to us and rushing off with the half empty ones to her. And there she stands omnivorous, insatiable, black. Everything that is brought to her of a sweet kind she swallows. Not as if she enjoyed it, but as if she must. It was like throwing things into a sink. She never filled up.
And then, through the splendid tropical country, to Marshall. I must return to Marshall, Texas, some day and be disillusioned, or else I shall go down to my grave accusing myself of having passed Paradise in the train, and not "stopped off" there. What an exasperating reflection for a deathbed! I should never forgive myself. But perhaps it is not so beautiful as it seems. In any case studies "from the life" would be immensely interesting. I caught a few glimpses which entertained me prodigiously. There was the negro dandy walking painfully in patent-leather boots that were made for some man with ordinary feet, with a fan in his hand and a large flower in his button-hole, an old stove-pipe hat on his head, and a very corpulent handleless umbrella under his arm. There was another, similarly caparisoned, escorting three belles for a walk in the neighbouring jungle, the ladies all wearing white cloth gloves and black cloth boots that squelched out spaciously as they put their feet down. And alas! there was the black coquette, with her bunch of crimson flowers behind her ear, her black satin skirt and white muslin jacket, her parasol of black satin lined with crimson—and how she flirts up the green slope, with a half-acre smile on her face! She looks back at every other step to see which, if any, of the black men, or the brown, or the yellow, on the station platform is going to follow her expansive charms, and so she disappears, this piebald siren, into the groves, her parasol flashing back Parthian gleams of crimson as she goes. But every one, man, woman, or child, black, brown, or yellow, was a study, so I must go back to Marshall some day.
At present, however, we are whirling away again through the lovely woodland, and the whole afternoon passes in an unbroken panorama of forest views, with great glades of meadow breaking away to right and left, and patches of maize and cotton suddenly interrupting the stately procession of timber. And then Jefferson. Is Jefferson more prettily situated than Marshall? I cannot say. But Jefferson lies back among the trees with an interval of orchard and corn-land between it and the railway line, and looks a very charming retreat indeed. A fat negro comes on board on duty of some kind connected with the brake, and a witty little half-breed boy comes on after him. The fat negro is the brown boy's butt. And he nearly bursts with wrath at the hybrid urchin's chaff, and threatens, between gasps, a retaliation that cannot find utterance in words. But the brown boy is relentless, and though the train is rapidly increasing in its speed, he clings to the step and taunts the negro who dare not leave his look-out post. But he knows very well where the fat man will get off, and suddenly, with a parting personality, the little wretch drops off the step, just as a ripe apple might drop off a branch. And then the fat man has to get off. The speed is really dangerous, but he climbs down the steps backwards, thinking apparently only of his tormentor, and still breathing forth fire and slaughter; and then lets go. Is he killed? Not a bit of it. He lands on his feet without apparently even jarring his obese person, and when we look back, we see that he is already throwing stones at the small boy, whose batteries are replying briskly. I wonder if the hippopotamus ever caught the flea? And if he did, what he did to him?
And I remember how the Somali boys in Aden used to drive the bo'sun to the verge of despair by clambering on to the ship and pretending not to see him working his way round towards them with a rope's end behind his back, and how at the very last moment, almost as the arm was raised to strike, the young monkeys used to drop off backwards into the sea, like snails off a wall.
But is this Bengal or Texas that we are traveling through? The vegetation about us is almost that of suburban Calcutta, and the heat, the damp steamy heat of low-lying land, might be the Soonderbuns. And here befell an adventure. We were nearing Atalanta. The train was on a down grade and going very fast indeed, perhaps half a mile a minute. I was sitting on my seat in the Pullman with the table up in front of me and reading. At the other end of the car was a lady with some children sitting with their backs to me. Further off, but also with his back to me, was the conductor. Each "section" of a car has two windows. The one at my left elbow had the blind drawn down. The other had not. On a sudden at my ear, as it seemed, there was a report as of a rifle; the thick double glass of the window in front of me flew into fragments all over me, and the woodwork fell in splinters upon my book. I instantly pulled up the blind of the other window and looked out to see who had "fired." But of course at the speed we were going, there was no one in sight. I called out to the conductor that some one had fired through the window. He had not heard the explosion, nor had the lady. So their surprise was considerable. And while I was looking in the woodwork for the bullet I expected to find, the conductor picked off my table a railway spike! Some wretch had thrown it at the passing train, and the great velocity at which we were travelling gave the missile all the deadly force of a bullet. "An inch more towards the centre of the window, sir, and you might have been killed," said the brakeman. A look at the splintered woodwork, and the bullet-like groove which the sharp-pointed abomination had cut for itself, was suffcient to assure me that he was right. But think of the atrocious character of such mischief. The man who did it probably never thought of hurting any one. And yet he narrowly missed having a horrible crime on his head. "If we could have stopped the train and caught him, we would have lynched him," said the conductor. "A year or two ago a miscreant threw a corn cob into a window, very near this spot too. It struck a lady, breaking her cheek bone, and bursting the ball of her left eye. We stopped the train, caught the man, and hanged him by the side of the track then and there."
And then Atalanta, in a country that is very beautiful, but with that poetry of malaria which suggests a peril in such beauty. And gradually the land becomes swampy, and the old trees, hung with moss, stand ankle-deep in brown stagnant water. The glades are all pools, and where-ever a vista opens, there is a long bayou stretching down between aisles of sombre trees. It is wonderful in its unnatural beauty, this forest standing in a lagoon. The world was like this when the Deluge was subsiding. There is a mysterious silence about the gloomy trees. Not a bird lives among them. But in the sullen water, there are turtles moving, and now and then a snake makes a moment's ripple on the dull pools. Sunlight never strikes in, and as I looked, I could not help remembering all the horrors of the slave-hunt, and the murder at the end of it, in the dark depths of some such horrid brake as these we pass. What a spot for legends to gather round! Has no one ever invented the swamp-goblin?