The Motion Demon by Stefan Grabinski, Miroslaw Lipinski Page A

found himself unexpectedly beyond the tight crowds of the passengers, and, as if drunk, he staggered somewhere among the columns of the platform.
    ‘You deserved that,’ he murmured through tightened teeth. ‘Why did you have to push your way to the third-class compartment instead of the second? Inferior compartments, inferior service. I always told you that. One can tell a gentleman by his knee-boots.’
    Calmed a bit by this reasoning, he straightened his crumpled coat and went stealthily from the platform to the waiting room, from there to the entrance hall, and then to the street. He had had enough ‘travelling’ for today—the last occurrence had disheartened him from finishing his journey, cutting it short by one hour.
    It was already after midnight. The city slept. The lights of roadside inns had died out, beerhouses and restaurants had become silent. Here and there a consumptive street lamp at a corner in the far distance brightened the darkness of the street; here and there, the faint gleam from some underground den slid along the sidewalk. Now and then, the quick step of a late passer-by, or the distant baying of dogs let down from a chain, interrupted the quiet of sleep….
    With his suitcase in hand, the perpetual passenger dragged on slowly along a narrow winding street that crept somewhere among secluded lanes by the river. His head weighed like lead, his legs trod stiffly, wooden like crutch stilts. He was returning home for a few hours of sleep before daybreak, for tomorrow morning a desk was waiting for him, and after three o’clock, as today, as yesterday, as for many forgotten years, a symbolic journey.

 
     
    IN THE COMPARTMENT
     
     
     
    THE TRAIN SHOT THROUGH THE LANDSCAPE as quick as a flash. Fields plunged into the darkness of evening, fallows bare and stark moved submissively behind, appearing like so many segments of a continuously folding fan. Taut telegraph wires went up, then went down, and once again unreeled along with perfect level straightness—stubborn, absurd, stiff lines.
    Godziemba was looking through the coach window. His eyes, glued to the shiny rails, drank in their apparent movement; his hands, digging into the window sill, seemed to be helping the train push away the ground being passed. His heart rate was fast, as if wanting to increase the tempo of the ride, to double the momentum of the hollow-sounding wheels.
    Winged with the rush of the locomotive, a bird flew easily from the fetters of commonplace existence and flashed by the lengthy coaches, brushing their windows in its exhilarated flight, and overtook the engine to soar to the wide, vanishing horizon, to a faraway, mist-covered world!....
    Godziemba was a fanatic of motion. This usually quiet and timid dreamer became unrecognizable the moment he mounted the steps of a train. Gone was the unease, gone the timidity, and the formerly passive, musing eyes took on a sparkle of energy and strength.
    This notorious daydreamer and sluggard was suddenly transformed into a dynamic, strong-willed person with a feeling of self-worth. And when the lively bugle signal faded and the black coaches started towards their distant destinations, a boundless joy permeated his entire being, pouring warm and reviving currents into the farthest reaches of his soul, like the rays of the sun over the earth on summer days.
    Something resided in the essence of a speeding train, something that galvanized Godziemba’s weak nerves—stimulating strongly, though artificially, his faint life-force. A specific environment was created, a unique milieu of motion with its own laws and power, its own strange, at times dangerous, spirit. The motion of a locomotive was not just physically contagious; the momentum of an engine quickened his psychic pulse, it electrified his will—he became independent. ‘Train neurosis’ seemed to transform temporarily this overly refined and sensitive individual into someone who exhibited a beneficial, positive force.