The Train From Rhodesia

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1952

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Themes

Capitalism and Inequality

The train’s arrival at the station represents a collision of worlds: the impoverished and isolated world of the native villagers, and the sheltered, privileged world of the passengers on the train. The contrast is made especially stark by the fact that the passengers never leave the train as if they fear being abandoned in the village or being contaminated by the poverty of the residents. Their only contact with the native villagers is through the train’s windows, reinforcing the social gulf between them.

Yet, there is desperation on both sides of this gulf. The passengers reach out toward the native people and shout as much as the native people hold their wares up at the passengers. The passengers want to see and acquire these wares, but there is also a sense that they want to broaden their experience and make a human connection. They do not know how to do so other than through haggling. When the passengers who have reached their heads outside the windows look back at the passengers who have remained in their seats, the latter look sealed off and distant: “Those sitting inside looked up: suddenly different, caged faces, boxed in, cut off after the contact of outside” (44).

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While the passengers are physically sealed in the train, they are also metaphorically sealed off from the village by their capitalist attitudes. The newlywed woman on the train intuits this isolation. Thinking about the gifts that she and her new husband have bought on their honeymoon, she wonders what these gifts will look like in their home and has a disturbing sense of her husband as a transitory object, bought on impulse, to assuage her loneliness.

The Strangeness of Travel

The happiest characters in this story appear to be not the wealthy passengers on the train but the train conductor and the stationmaster. These minor characters have a friendly chat during the train’s stop in the station; they apparently know one another, and these workaday chats are a regular ritual in their lives. They are the only characters who can bridge the gulf between the train and the village, and their ease in the world seems to come from a sense of knowing both worlds.

The passengers are (we assume) on holiday and far away from their normal lives. While their situation is privileged, it is also full of anxiety and uncertainty. They are far from home and do not fully inhabit their new surroundings. They pass through them, and their compulsive buying springs from a desire to make the unreal seem real. As the newlywed wife thinks about the ornaments that she and her husband have acquired on their travels, she asks herself, “What will they mean away from the places you found them? Away from the unreality of the last few weeks?” (45) At the same time, the passengers feel pressure to enjoy themselves, leading to fussiness and callousness, as when a girl on the train finds fault with a box of chocolates and flings it out of the window to the stray dogs in the village.

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While travel can have an isolating effect, it can also reveal people in stark and unexpected ways as seen in the fight between the newlyweds at the story’s end. The fight reveals the divide within the couple, showing them to have different temperaments and worldviews. The wife, a more sensitive and perceptive character than her husband, experiences their rift as serious and permanent: “She was feeling like this again. She had thought it was something to do with singleness, with being alone and belonging too much to oneself” (47).

Miscommunication and Loneliness

A sense of miscommunication pervades the story, seen in everything from the bargaining between the train passengers and the villagers to the fight between the newlywed husband and wife. Even the train is described as being unheard: “It called out to the sky, I’m coming, I’m coming; and again, there was no answer” (47). The train is a noisy, powerful machine, and its relation to its surroundings—like the relation between the train passengers and the villagers—is lopsided and invasive. In such a relation, fair and honest communication is difficult if not impossible. Each side has its agenda and cannot quite acknowledge the claims of the other.

The train calling out to the sky hints at another kind of loneliness—spiritual loneliness. This loneliness is enhanced by the story’s desert setting. The desert is often invoked, in the Bible and elsewhere, as a place where people either find God or struggle with God’s absence. The wife in the story seems haunted by the desert landscape as well, and her sense of “a void” (47) cannot be entirely explained by the disagreement that she has with her husband. It seems rather to come from a profound feeling of smallness and alienation: a feeling that she is alone not only in her marriage but in the world.