bell, the short explosive blasts of its hard labour, now muted almost into silence, now growing near, immediate as it laboured out across the night from the enclosure of a railway cut down by the river’s edge; and for an instant she heard the lonely wailing and receding cry of the train’s whistle, and then the long heavy rumble of its wheels; and then nothing but silence, darkness, the huge hush and secrecy of night again.
And still plucking at her chin, thinking absently, but scarcely conscious of her thinking, like a child in reverie, she thought:
“There is a freight-train going west along the river. Now, by the sound, it should be passing below Patton Hill, just across from where Riverside Park used to be before the flood came and washed it all away…. Now it is getting farther off, across the river from the casket factory…. Now it is almost gone, I can hear nothing but the sound of wheels… it is going west toward Boiling Springs… and after that it will come to Wilson City, Tennessee… and then to Dover…. Knoxville… Memphis—after that? I wonder where the train is going… where it will be tomorrow night?… Perhaps across the Mississippi River, and then on through Arkansas… perhaps to St. Louis… and then on to—what comes next?” she thought absently, plucking at her chin—“to Kansas City, I suppose… and then to Denver… and across the Rocky Mountains… and across the desert… and then across more mountains and then at last to California.”
And still plucking at her chin, and scarcely conscious of her thought—not thinking, indeed, so much as reflecting by a series of broken but powerful images all cogent to a central intuition about life—her mind resumed again its sleepless patient speculation:
“How strange and full of mystery life is…. Tomorrow we shall all get up, dress, go out on the streets, see and speak to one another—and yet we shall know absolutely nothing about anyone else…. I know almost everyone in town—the bankers, the lawyers, the butchers, the bakers, the grocers, the clerks in the stores, the Greek restaurant man, Tony Scarsati the fruit dealer, even the niggers down in Niggertown—I know them all, as well as their wives and children—where they came from, what they are doing, all the lies and scandals and jokes and mean stories, whether true or false, that are told about them—and yet I really know nothing about any of them. I know nothing about anyone, not even about myself—” and, suddenly, this fact seemed terrible and grotesque to her, and she thought desperately:
