He tore his eyes from the monotonous picture and directed them towards the corridor. His glance slid over the door leading to the compartments, went to the wall of windows opposite, and rested on the boring beaten pathway.

He finished his ‘supper’ and lit a pipe. He was, in truth, still on the job, but in this area, particularly before the final destination, he did not fear the supervisor.

The tobacco was good, smuggled at the border; it smoked in circular, fragrant coils. From the conductor’s lips spun out pliable ribbons and, twisting into balls of smoke, they rolled like billiard balls along the car corridor; in the next moment thick, dense spools unreeled from his lips to drift lazily upwards like blue stalks and crack like a petard at the ceiling. Boron was a master at smoking a pipe.

A wave of laughter flowed from the compartments: the guests were in a good mood.

The conductor tightened his teeth in anger; words of contempt fell from his lips.

‘Commercial travellers! Tradesmen!’

Fundamentally, Boron couldn’t stand passengers; their ‘practicality’ irritated him. For him the railway existed for the railway, not for travellers. The job of the railway was not to transport people from place to place with the object of communication, but motion in and of itself, the conquest of space. Of what concern to it were the trivial affairs of earthly pigmies, the endeavours of industrial swindlers, the obscene allocations of tradesmen? Stations were present not to get off at, but to measure the distance passed; the stops were the gauge of the ride, and their successive change, as in a kaleidoscope, evidence of progressive movement.

The conductor glanced with similar scorn at the throngs pressing through the car doors; he observed with a sardonic grimace the panting women and feverish-with-haste gentlemen pressing on heads, necks, amidst shouts, curses, sometimes jabs to get to the compartments to ‘occupy a place’ and beat out their companions in the sheep-like run.

‘A herd!’ he spit out between his teeth. ‘As if the world depends on some Mr B. or some Mrs W. arriving “in time” from F to Z.’

Meantime, reality stood in striking contrast with Boron’s views. People still got on and off at stations, still pushed with the same fierceness, and always for those same practical reasons. But the conductor also retaliated against this at every opportunity.

In his area, which took in three to four cars, it was never crowded, that horrible infliction of the mob that destroyed the will to live in his colleagues and was a dark stain on the horizon of a conductor’s grey fate. What measures he used, what paths he took to reach this ideal, unrealized by others in his profession, no one knew. The fact remained that even in times of the greatest attendance, during the holidays, the interior of Boron’s cars betrayed a normal look; the passageways were clear and in the lobbies one breathed in fairly good air. Supernumerary seating and ‘standing room only’ spots the conductor did not accept. Severe with himself, fastidious in his job, he knew also how to be unyielding to travellers. Regulations he observed to the letter, at times with Draconian excess. Quibbling didn’t help, ruses, swindles, or the deft slipping into the hand of a bribe—Boron could not be bought. He even took legal action against several people who tried this; one individual he slapped around for the insult, managing to get off lightly before the railway authorities when the matter was brought up before them. Sometimes it would happen that in the middle of the ride, somewhere on some squalid stop, on some miserable little station, in an open field, he politely but firmly showed the door to a hoodwinking ‘guest’.

Only twice in the course of his long career did he come upon ‘worthy’ passengers who fulfilled his ideal of travellers to some extent.