Then they softly crash together and pass on--two or three quiet whiffs at each other--as if nothing had happened.
I always feel afterward as if something splendid, some great human act of faith, had been done in my presence. Those two looming, mighty engines, bearing down on each other, making an aim so, at twenty inches from death, and nothing to depend on but those two gleaming dainty strips or ribbons of iron--a few eighths of an inch on the edge of a wheel--I never can get used to it: the two great glowing creatures, full of thunder and trust, leaping up the telegraph poles through the still valley, each of them with its little streak of souls behind it; immortal souls, children, fathers, mothers, smiling, chattering along through Infinity--it all keeps on being boundless to me, and full of a glad boyish terror and faith. And under and through it all there is a kind of stern singing.
I know well enough, of course, that it is a platitude, this meeting of two trains in a meadow, but it never acts like one. I sometimes stand and watch the engineer afterward. I wonder if he knows he enjoys it. Perhaps he would have to stop to know how happy he was, and not meet trains for a while. Then he would miss something, I think; he would miss his deep joyous daily acts of faith, his daily habits of believing in things--in steam, and in air, and in himself, and in the switchman, and in God.
I see him in his cab window, he swings out his blue sleeve at me! I like the way he stakes everything on what he believes. Nothing between him and death but a few telegraph ticks--the flange of a wheel.... Suddenly the swing of his train comes up like the swing and the rhythm of a great creed. It sounds like a chant down between the mountains. I come into the house lifted with it. I have heard a man believing, believing mile after mile down the valley. I have heard a man believing in a Pennsylvania rolling mill, in a white vapour, in compressed air and a whistle, the way Calvin believed in God.
_"Great Spirit--Thou who in my being's burning mesh Hath wrought the shining of the mist through and through the flesh, Who, through the double-wondered glory of the dust Hast thrust Habits of skies upon me, souls of days and nights, Where are the deeds that needs must be, The dreams, the high delights, That I once more may hear my voice From cloudy door to door rejoice-- May stretch the boundaries of love Beyond the mumbling, mock horizons of my fears To the faint-remembered glory of those years-- May lift my soul And reach this Heaven of thine With mine?"