GREGORY'S DREAM
295
busy chattering and eating, the whole moment was a tautology, if I
may say so-perlectly obvious and evident, and I content, in it.
"I remember two instances that I must mention here. It was
morning or forenoon--or have I already said it? Perhaps the descrip–
tion of the landscape has made this clear. But at one time of the
journey I looked out from the window or the platform, rather, and to
the left, on another track, saw a single carriage, like those on our train,
run in a direction slightly divergent from ours, but almost parallel.
Yet the carriage was obviously a freight car, representing the freight
edition of the passenger models which were ours.
As
it ran away from
us, the bright evening sun made it glow vividly; it ran along and
away, an orange-burning wooden funnel on rails.
As
if to make quite
sure that I had not missed this car, a second one soon followed it on
the same track. I never bothered to find out how each was driven–
they rode by themselves, perhaps under the impact of the push from
a distant locomotive the existence of which I didn't try to ascertain,
however. Directly I found myself behind the front view of our train
and, still in the evening light, saw that at a small crossing laundry,
of various darkish glowing colors, was hung low across the tracks.
This is indeed a very quiet line, I thought, because the train was
actually slowing down to allow the people to remove their wash
before it passed. Yet it was fast enough to make me fear we should
tear it down or at least soil it, and at the next moment I was even
afraid that we might run over the girls and the old man (the station
master probably) who had come to take it off. But then I saw that
after having started to busy themselves with the laundry on the
tracks, they thought better and stepped aside hastily, turning the
wheels on which the washline was running, thus moving the laundry
toward them and taking it off before it would be squeezed between
the line or wire and the wheel. (Now I know I had seen this in Genoa
between rows of high houses across the deep narrow streets.) While
I was wondering why the people, instead of drying the laundry away
from the tracks, had chosen this insecure spot, thinking that perhaps
the steel rails reflected the sun and thus hastened the drying process
or even made for purity of color, or that it was a wise thought to
expose the laundry, just before withdrawing it, to some hot puffs of
the locomotive, I was struck by the fact that the washline was very
low. I wondered whether it was going to be tom to pieces by the
train or whether it would entangle, like a Iiana, the locomotive itself.
But I had no time to think about this problem, for we had already
passed the crossing, God knows how, and when I looked back I saw
the people busily rehanging their laundry, this time not using their
