The Train From Rhodesia

“Creaking, jerking, jostling, gasping, the train filled the station.” 

The train in the story is often described in language that suggests a living creature rather than a machine. The verbs in this sentence suggest discomfort as if the train’s great size and power is a burden and paradoxically make it vulnerable.

“Between its vandyke teeth, in the mouth opened in a roar too terrible to be heard, it had a black tongue.” 

The carved lion is described as both winsome and sinister. It has a sweet ruff of fur around its neck and is also beautifully carved. Yet details such as the “black tongue” and the soundless roar give the carved lion a disturbing force and make it seem closer to a work of art than to an ornament.

“All up and down the length of the train in the dust the artists sprang, walking bent, like performing animals, the better to exhibit the fantasy held towards the faces on the train.” 

The artists in this passage are compared to animals, while the carved animals that they are selling are referred to as a single “fantasy”—whose fantasy, theirs or the train passengers’, is unclear. The passengers are referred to only as inert “faces on the train,” as if they are carved animals themselves. This language, in which everything is compared to something else, evokes the swirling, disorienting atmosphere of the train station. It also shows the dehumanizing impact of a culture focused on buying and selling.

“A man passed beneath the arch of reaching arms meeting grey-black and white in the exchange of money for the staring wooden eyes, the stiff wooden legs sticking up in the air; went along under the voices and the bargaining, interrogating the wheels.”

The man in this passage is a minor character, never identified. His anonymity is just one disorienting aspect of the passage, which suggests a sort of wreckage. The “staring wooden eyes” and “stiff wooden legs,” although they refer to the carved animals that the vendors are selling, suggest bodies after an accident. The disembodied “voices” of the train passengers evoke the confusion of a crowd. The man seems to be “interrogating the wheels” of the train to keep his bearings in this confusion.

“Those sitting inside looked up: suddenly different, caged faces, boxed in, cut off after the contact of outside.”

This passage refers to the tourists who remain on the train and do not engage with the vendors. These tourists are viewed here by the train passengers who have had a glimpse—even if a partial and mediated one—of the outside world. This glimpse of the world gives them a glimmer of perception about their isolation as tourists, an isolation that is compared here to that of caged animals.

“A girl had collected a handful of the hard kind, that no one liked, out of the chocolate box, and was throwing them to the dogs, over at the dining car.” 

The girl on the train throwing chocolate at starving stray dogs is an image of privilege and carelessness. Chocolate is poisonous for dogs, and her throwing it to them is far from a beneficent gesture, although she seems to believe that it is. She and the other passengers on the train seem to want to extend charity to the villagers. Yet their very privilege seems to blind them to these villagers’ needs and humanity.

“But the wooden buck, the hippos, the elephants […]! How will they look at home? Where will you put them?”

The wife on the train suddenly sees her impulsive vacation purchases in the light of her normal life. Even though she and her husband have bought these carved animals as souvenirs, she perceives that the animals will look strange and out of place in her home. They are symbols of everything about this foreign culture that she can never know or assimilate.

“Odd…somewhere there was an idea that he, that living with him, was part of the holiday, the strange places.”

The wife on the train has a sudden, disturbing perception of her husband as part of her temporary vacation reality, rather than her real life. This perception shows the lack of connection that she feels to her husband and foreshadows the disagreement that the two will have later. It also shows the wife’s general bewilderment and loneliness in this alien environment.

“As one automatically opens a hand to catch a thrown ball, a man fumbled wildly down his pocket, brought up the shilling and sixpence and threw them out; the old native, gasping, his skinny toes splaying the sand, flung the lion.”

The husband’s impulsive purchase of the lion is described with a sports analogy and suggests a sort of passivity. It is as if his throwing coins at the vendor is a reflex, rather than a deliberate action, as if he is not thinking. His carelessness contrasts with the clear desperation of the vendor, as the throwing of coins contrasts with flinging a lion.

“The blind end of the train was being pulled helplessly out of the station.” 

This image of the train leaving the station has a sense of shame and ignominy about it as if the train has been somehow disgraced. The “blind end” of the train suggests both the selective blindness of its passengers and the blindness of the husband on the train to the needs of his wife. The train’s “helpless” departure contrasts sharply with its noisy, bustling arrival into the station.

“Very slowly, cautious, she lifted her finger and touched the mane, where it was joined to the wood.”

The wife has just received the carved lion from her husband, a surprise gift that she does not want to accept. Her tentative touching of the lion suggests that the lion is alive and might lash out at her.

. “Everything was turning around inside her. One-and-six. One-and-six.” 

One-and-six is the amount that the husband has paid for the carved lion—an amount that the wife finds to be appallingly insufficient. The repetition of “one-and-six” suggests the turning wheels of a train and a force that is beyond the wife’s control. At the same time, the “turning around” that she is experiencing suggests that she has internalized this force.

“The heat of shame mounted through her legs and body and sounded in her ears like the sound of sand pouring.” 

The wife’s sense of shame comes not only from the actions of her husband but from her awareness of being complicit in an unfair capitalist system. The “sand pouring” recalls the desert sand outside of her window, an image of loneliness and barrenness analogous to what she is feeling. It suggests that shame is a strangely soft and insidious emotion, one that sneaks up slowly.