Before the Titanic

“All this rush, rush, rushing around, it is more than my head can bear”, said John Appleton, depositing their overnight bags, a newspaper, and himself, exhausted, on a bench in Boston’s South Station, and there he wiped perspiration from his brow with a crumpled kerchief. His sister, Margaret perched beside him and offered up a private prayer for small mercies, which being the cleanliness of the rag, and his temporary capitulation to exhaustion. 

Judged by the acerbic commentary that accompanied much of their sight-seeing, Boston had in its crowded modernity driven John to an apoplexy of virtuous outrage, resulting ultimately in his insistence that they take an earlier train back to Bairstow, where he would commit to paper his urgent and necessary thoughts for the benefit of a wider audience.  “The noise and motion impose upon my senses, the poverty and injustice offend my conscience”, he proclaimed in the manner of someone that believes their every thought deserving of expression in carved stone. 

Margaret, though reconciled with her brother’s recalcitrance, would happily have extended their stay at the new and marvelous Copley Square Hotel set in the bustling Back Bay area. She would miss the head-spinning crowds, the window displays, the crashing metal-on-metal noise of the Red Line subway, the hoots of the shiny motor vehicles, the inter-mingling with city folk going about their important and private lives wearing the very latest fashions. But Bairstow it would be, she would extend her stay in civilized society by vicarious means, perusing the Ladies’ Home Journal, and ordering materials from the Sears catalog.

The trip did have its moments of harmonious accord – as the siblings explored the Museum of Fine Arts, or star-gazed at the Harvard College Observatory - but mostly their experience of Boston had diverged.

“You make it sound like Sodom”, said Margaret wearily, checking on the Atrium Clock that they were not going to miss the B&M train.

“Minus the overdue attention of the deity, you have the place rightly pegged”, he replied.

“You don’t think you are perhaps exaggerating a tad”, she said, exasperated by his high and mighty attitude.

“No, not at all. It is the apogee of Hamilton’s dystopic America, a system of systems. There is a hidden and sinister hand driving us toward oblivion, whether it be in the conduct of trade and commerce, the production and consumption of goods and services, or even in the propulsion of engines and the compulsions of humanity itself. We are all just pinion wheels in an infernal engine”.

“I believe you mean cogs in a machine”, she said, checking the Atrium clock again. They had time to spare and could sit a while longer.  John unrolled the Boston Post and started at the front page, affording his sister reading room over his shoulder, though there were soon interrupted by a small commotion at the entrance to the station, where a Model T rolled to a halt beneath the wrought iron awning. From the passenger seat leapt a dapper young man, who strode across the concourse carrying a duffle bag in one hand, clasping a derby hat to his head with the other; he somehow seemed to be the go-getting embodiment of the new age, but he disappeared into a cloud of steam and smoke that billowed from a waiting locomotive, and with him the mystery of his purpose also vanished. 

“First we are here, then we are there” John said, “and between the here and there, we hurtle through space in metal vessels as if launched from a cannon. Chaucer’s tales would have been brief in this day and age”.

“You really are an insufferable, old fogey sometimes”, said Margaret, ever of an optimistic disposition, “Can you not see that this is a time of peace, prosperity and hope, rendered possible by man’s inventiveness?” Margaret, dressed in her Sunday best, tapped the dainty heels of her kid leather boots on the wooden boards, and resolved to change the dynamic. She stood erect, tugged at her embroidered bolero jacket, and demanded that John escort her forthwith to the station tea-room where she would not be denied an ice-cool Coca-Cola before they boarded the B&M train back to Bairstow. 

John seemed not to hear her, he was relentless, “I tell you that free will expired on the altar of capitalism, the laws of nature are under siege, and time itself has been usurped”. He seemed quite pleased with this pontification and accordingly extracted a little notebook from the inside pocket of his jacket, and a pencil.

Margaret slapped the notebook aside, “All tosh and nonsense”, she handed him a coin and demanded that he buy her a refreshment at the concessionary, but John proceeded to demur with a wordiness that would have tested the patience of a biblical Job. His monolog somehow touched on to the subject of pre-agrarian Mesopotamia, which marked the point at which Margaret’s own patience, less than that of Job, snapped, and at the stamping of her black lace-up shoe, he gathered up their things and followed her from the concourse area.

The young woman at the concession stand, her face framed by an abundance of bright orange curls, gave John an inviting smile, which cooled one ardor by sparking another, causing him to linger at the counter where he charmed her with a preposterous tale about an Irish policeman, a string of sausages and a lost dog. In due course, he learned that her name was Kathy, a recent immigrant from Ireland, and she laughed at his nonsense.

John joined his sister at the window-table, overlooking Summer Street, rather pleased with himself. They sat in a more contemplative mood at the table, he stealing a glance at the lovely.  Between brother and sister, lay two glasses of caramel soda, a recent mass-produced innovation, emblematic of the times. Margaret sipped at the glass of Coca-Cola with curiosity, while John chewed on his first mouthful as if considering the whereabouts of a spittoon.

“Oh, how delightful!” said Margaret, “It is the latest in dietary supplements and said to cure an upset stomach and calm the nerves”. Her cheeks puckered as she drew thirstily upon the patent drinking straw.

“I feel my hat about to blow from my head with all this sugar”, said John wistfully, smiling at the girl behind the counter.

John began scratching at the pages of his pocketbook, which inspired in Margaret a more forgiving disposition and a desire to better understand the ferocious intensity that seemed always and forever aflame inside her younger brother, as if kindled by his father’s death. As John’s primary caretaker, a surrogate for their long-dead mother, Margaret fretted constantly at how to tend his febrile mind, and though he irritated her and was unconscionably self-centered, she felt that all things considered, her parents would be proud of the man he was becoming. John, for his part, was focused elsewhere, expressing in verse the beauty of the celestial phenomenon that pulled at the soda fountain and arranged the glassware on the shelf behind the serving counter. And so, time passed, in fact it positively raced by.

“What o’clock is it,” asked John, reminded of affairs elsewhere.

“Oh no!” Margaret held her hands to her face in shock when she looked at the Atrium clock, “We’ve missed our train for heaven’s sake!”. She looked at John, fearing that he might explode, but against her expectations, he was surprisingly philosophical, in the manner of the English, that is, emotionally uninvested and cooly calculating, “well I suppose we must take a later train, then” he said, which was not the response Margaret was expecting. “Perhaps I should order another bottle of this delicious caramel Pepto from the young lady at the counter?”, added John, thoughtfully.

“Oh, John, we must call the housekeeper on the mechanical pay phone in the booth by the ticket office and tell her we will be late!” said Margaret, removing a handful of coins for John’s use.

John jolted back into contrariness for a moment, “What purpose is there informing Mrs. Evans that we will be late in advance, won’t she discover that for herself in due course, anyway?” Margaret was pondering the notion of being ‘late in advance’ when her riposte was snuffed out by her brother’s relentless logic. “It just seems to me that you are eliminating the notion of late and early, because neither can be true if we constantly revise our expectations. We will always be on time under such circumstances” he disclaimed.

 “John, you are a bounder, and your concern for your fellow man selective at best. It might save Evans time and effort, preparing a meal, not to mention the courtesy it extends to Old Aimsley, who will otherwise be waiting with the horse and trap for hours, out in the chilly night air.

“Smoking and drinking at the Bairstow public house more likely, I’d wager”, he said, then left the table to make the phone call, dallying for several minutes at the counter, where he and Kathy engaged in lively banter, giggling at things.

Margaret had bought a whimsey at a small dusty bric-a-brac store tucked away in a Back Bay alleyway. It was a precious thing, of no value beyond itself. In this moment of solitude, she removed it from her valise revealing a delicate glass globe in which a skilled craftsman had constructed a fabulous diorama; a fairytale castle adorned by towers, turrets, gables, balconies, and pinnacles, set atop a mountain, surrounded by pine forest through which a turbulent river cascaded. It was an impossible thing in an improbable place that she contemplated from every angle.

John returned to the table with another bottle caramel soda in hand. “Do you think we might one day visit Europe?” she asked of him, “it is such an enchanted place, I imagine?”

“When not warring with itself” said John absentmindedly, without his usual excess of conviction. He’d withdrawn the notebook from his pocket again and was busy scribbling something that looked suspiciously like a sonnet.

That far away continent was a subject that Margaret wished to pursue further; recent news had elevated the idea of a European tour from fanciful dream to a realistic possibility, “look here”, she pointed at a small column on the front page of the Boston Post, “an ocean liner left Southampton, England, yesterday carrying three thousand passengers, heading for New York. Three thousand!  The journey is expected to take less than six days! The world is shrinking John!”

“Lucky devils”, John acknowledged absently, busying away at his little black book, “the way things are headed, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they build a tunnel beneath the ocean and we’ll all be taking vacations to Paris and Prague in our Model T Fords”.

“Or flying on great kites across the ocean!”, Margaret was rather enjoying this discussion, “upon my word John, perchance one day we might conquer space itself and colonize the moon, whereat the poor might feast upon cheese at their convenience”, with which Margaret reawakened a debate regarding the composition of the lunar orb that had followed their trip to the observatory.

“Sister, you are worse than that Wells fellow, or the Frenchman, Jules Verne, what with your phantastic imaginings”, John said, looking at her with mild concern, “perhaps you’ve had a bit too much of this Cola?”. Her drinking glass was empty, and she seemed engrossed by the silly globe paperweight owing to the way the light played upon the ramparts of the miniature castle.

“Oh, the pot is calling the kettle black, brother”, she mused, then pointed at his journal, “I do believe you are building your own castle in the sky”.

John blushed, closed the book with a snap, “On the contrary, I am tearing down the walls of oppression, whether European monarchs or our home-grown oligarchs.  Taft is meek in his pursuit of the monopolists.  All must go... Now this fellow Marx…”, he huffed.

“No stop, John, I cannot bear another lecture”, she felt horrible for interrupting the course of love, “forgive me for prying”. 

She looked around the tearoom. The ginger-haired girl behind the counter was talking to a new customer, a young man in a snappy tweed jacket, and she noted that her brother seemed greatly bothered by it, but sharp words were spoken, and the man dissolved into the gathering crowd in the station concourse. The girl grinned apologetically at John, who slipped the book back into his jacket pocket, close to his melting heart. 

“Perhaps we should tarry a while?” suggested John, whose stupefying transformation into a puppy-dog was amusing Margaret.

“Or take a later train?" she suggested, warming to the prospect of further dalliance, “there’s a Vermeer that I really must see at the new museum in Fenway”.

"Splendid idea!" exclaimed John, almost leaping from his seat, "we may never get this chance again". Apparently, their opinions of Boston had now converged, but suddenly a weighty thought occupied his mind and he frowned, “I have in mind a companion for the afternoon, would you mind terribly?”.

“That’s a very modern idea!” said Margaret, not minding in the least. The frown was instantly erased from her brother’s brow.

Margaret sat at the table and sipped at the glass of ice-cool Coca-Cola. She placed the glass whimsy back in her bag observing the shadow that fell upon the little castle, and she wondered to herself whether those lunar colonists would consume so much cheese that the moon might wane, and never again wax.