I
“Guard! What place is this?”
“Mugby Junction, sir.”
“A windy place!”
“Yes, it mostly is, sir.”
“And looks comfortless indeed!”
“Yes, it generally does, sir.”
“Is it a rainy night still?”
“Pours, sir.”
“Open the door. I’ll get out.”
“You’ll have, sir,” said the guard, glistening with drops of wet, and
looking at the tearful face of his watch by the light of his lantern as
the traveller descended, “three minutes here.”
“More, I think.—For I am not going on.”
“Thought you had a through ticket, sir?”
“So I have, but I shall sacrifice the rest of it. I want my luggage.”
“Please to come to the van and point it out, sir. Be good enough to look
very sharp, sir. Not a moment to spare.”
The guard hurried to the luggage van, and the traveller hurried after
him. The guard got into it, and the traveller looked into it.
“Those two large black portmanteaus in the corner where your light
shines. Those are mine.”
“Name upon ’em, sir?”
“Barbox Brothers.”
“Stand clear, sir, if you please. One. Two. Right!”
Lamp waved. Signal lights ahead already changing. Shriek from engine.
Train gone.
“Mugby Junction!” said the traveller, pulling up the woollen muffler
round his throat with both hands. “At past three o’clock of a
tempestuous morning! So!”
He spoke to himself. There was no one else to speak to. Perhaps, though
there had been any one else to speak to, he would have preferred to speak
to himself. Speaking to himself, he spoke to a man within five years of
fifty either way, who had turned grey too soon, like a neglected fire; a
man of pondering habit, brooding carriage of the head, and suppressed
internal voice; a man with many indications on him of having been much
alone.
He stood unnoticed on the dreary platform, except by the rain and by the
wind. Those two vigilant assailants made a rush at him. “Very well,”
said he, yielding. “It signifies nothing to me, to what quarter I turn
my face.”
Thus, at Mugby Junction, at past three o’clock of a tempestuous morning,
the traveller went where the weather drove him.
Not but what he could make a stand when he was so minded, for, coming to
the end of the roofed shelter (it is of considerable extent at Mugby
Junction) and looking out upon the dark night, with a yet darker
spirit-wing of storm beating its wild way through it, he faced about, and
held his own as ruggedly in the difficult direction, as he had held it in
the easier one. Thus, with a steady step, the traveller went up and
down, up and down, up and down, seeking nothing, and finding it.
A place replete with shadowy shapes, this Mugby Junction in the black
hours of the four-and-twenty. Mysterious goods trains, covered with
palls and gliding on like vast weird funerals, conveying themselves
guiltily away from the presence of the few lighted lamps, as if their
freight had come to a secret and unlawful end. Half miles of coal
pursuing in a Detective manner, following when they lead, stopping when
they stop, backing when they back. Red hot embers showering out upon the
ground, down this dark avenue, and down the other, as if torturing fires
were being raked clear; concurrently, shrieks and groans and grinds
invading the ear, as if the tortured were at the height of their
suffering. Iron-barred cages full of cattle jangling by midway, the
drooping beasts with horns entangled, eyes frozen with terror, and mouths
too: at least they have long icicles (or what seem so) hanging from their
lips. Unknown languages in the air, conspiring in red, green, and white
characters. An earthquake accompanied with thunder and lightning, going
up express to London.
Now, all quiet, all rusty, wind and rain in possession, lamps
extinguished, Mugby Junction dead and indistinct, with its robe drawn
over its head, like Cæsar. Now, too, as the belated traveller plodded up
and down, a shadowy train went by him in the gloom which was no other
than the train of a life. From whatsoever intangible deep cutting or
dark tunnel it emerged, here it came, unsummoned and unannounced,
stealing upon him and passing away into obscurity. Here, mournfully went
by, a child who had never had a childhood or known a parent, inseparable
from a youth with a bitter sense of his namelessness, coupled to a man
the enforced business of whose best years had been distasteful and
oppressive, linked to an ungrateful friend, dragging after him a woman
once beloved. Attendant, with many a clank and wrench, were lumbering
cares, dark meditations, huge dim disappointments, monotonous years, a
long jarring line of the discords of a solitary and unhappy existence.
“—Yours, sir?”
The traveller recalled his eyes from the waste into which they had been
staring, and fell back a step or so under the abruptness, and perhaps the
chance appropriateness, of the question.
“O! My thoughts were not here for the moment. Yes. Yes. Those two
portmanteaus are mine. Are you a Porter?”
“On Porter’s wages, sir. But I am Lamps.”
The traveller looked a little confused.
“Who did you say you are?”
“Lamps, sir,” showing an oily cloth in his hand, as further explanation.
“Surely, surely. Is there any hotel or tavern here?”
“Not exactly here, sir. There is a Refreshment Room here, but—” Lamps,
with a mighty serious look, gave his head a warning roll that plainly
added—“but it’s a blessed circumstance for you that it’s not open.”
“You couldn’t recommend it, I see, if it was available?”
“Ask your pardon, sir. If it was—?”
“Open?”
“It ain’t my place, as a paid servant of the company to give my opinion
on any of the company’s toepics,” he pronounced it more like toothpicks,
“beyond lamp-ile and cottons,” returned Lamps, in a confidential tone;
“but speaking as a man, I wouldn’t recommend my father (if he was to come
to life again) to go and try how he’d be treated at the Refreshment Room.
Not speaking as a man, no, I would _not_.”
The traveller nodded conviction. “I suppose I can put up in the town?
There is a town here?” For the traveller (though a stay-at-home compared
with most travellers) had been, like many others, carried on the steam
winds and the iron tides through that Junction before, without having
ever, as one might say, gone ashore there.
“O yes, there’s a town, sir. Anyways there’s town enough to put up in.
But,” following the glance of the other at his luggage, “this is a very
dead time of the night with us, sir. The deadest time. I might a’most
call it our deadest and buriedest time.”
“No porters about?”
“Well, sir, you see,” returned Lamps, confidential again, “they in
general goes off with the gas. That’s how it is. And they seem to have
overlooked you, through your walking to the furder end of the platform.
But in about twelve minutes or so, she may be up.”
“Who may be up?”
“The three forty-two, sir. She goes off in a sidin’ till the Up X
passes, and then she,” here an air of hopeful vagueness pervaded Lamps,
“doos all as lays in her power.”
“I doubt if I comprehend the arrangement.”
“I doubt if anybody do, sir. She’s a Parliamentary, sir. And, you see,
a Parliamentary, or a Skirmishun—”
“Do you mean an Excursion?”
“That’s it, sir.—A Parliamentary, or a Skirmishun, she mostly _doos_ go
off into a sidin’. But when she _can_ get a chance, she’s whistled out
of it, and she’s whistled up into doin’ all as,” Lamps again wore the air
of a highly sanguine man who hoped for the best, “all as lays in her
power.”
He then explained that porters on duty being required to be in attendance
on the Parliamentary matron in question, would doubtless turn up with the
gas. In the meantime, if the gentleman would not very much object to the
smell of lamp-oil, and would accept the warmth of his little room.—The
gentleman being by this time very cold, instantly closed with the
proposal.
A greasy little cabin it was, suggestive to the sense of smell, of a
cabin in a Whaler. But there was a bright fire burning in its rusty
grate, and on the floor there stood a wooden stand of newly trimmed and
lighted lamps, ready for carriage service. They made a bright show, and
their light, and the warmth, accounted for the popularity of the room, as
borne witness to by many impressions of velveteen trousers on a form by
the fire, and many rounded smears and smudges of stooping velveteen
shoulders on the adjacent wall. Various untidy shelves accommodated a
quantity of lamps and oil-cans, and also a fragrant collection of what
looked like the pocket-handkerchiefs of the whole lamp family.
As Barbox Brothers (so to call the traveller on the warranty of his
luggage) took his seat upon the form, and warmed his now ungloved hands
at the fire, he glanced aside at a little deal desk, much blotched with
ink, which his elbow touched. Upon it, were some scraps of coarse paper,
and a superannuated steel pen in very reduced and gritty circumstances.
From glancing at the scraps of paper, he turned involuntarily to his
host, and said, with some roughness—
“Why, you are never a poet, man!”
Lamps had certainly not the conventional appearance of one, as he stood
modestly rubbing his squab nose with a handkerchief so exceedingly oily,
that he might have been in the act of mistaking himself for one of his
charges. He was a spare man of about the Barbox Brothers’ time of life,
with his features whimsically drawn upward as if they were attracted by
the roots of his hair. He had a peculiarly shining transparent
complexion, probably occasioned by constant oleaginous application; and
his attractive hair, being cut short, and being grizzled, and standing
straight up on end as if it in its turn were attracted by some invisible
magnet above it, the top of his head was not very unlike a lamp-wick.
“But to be sure it’s no business of mine,” said Barbox Brothers. “That
was an impertinent observation on my part. Be what you like.”
“Some people, sir,” remarked Lamps, in a tone of apology, “are sometimes
what they don’t like.”
“Nobody knows that better than I do,” sighed the other. “I have been
what I don’t like, all my life.”
“When I first took, sir,” resumed Lamps, “to composing little
Comic-Songs-like—”
Barbox Brothers eyed him with great disfavour.
“—To composing little Comic-Songs-like—and what was more hard—to singing
’em afterwards,” said Lamps, “it went against the grain at that time, it
did indeed.”
Something that was not all oil here shining in Lamps’s eye, Barbox
Brothers withdrew his own a little disconcerted, looked at the fire, and
put a foot on the top bar. “Why did you do it, then?” he asked, after a
short pause; abruptly enough but in a softer tone. “If you didn’t want
to do it, why did you do it? Where did you sing them? Public-house?”
To which Mr. Lamps returned the curious reply: “Bedside.”
At this moment, while the traveller looked at him for elucidation, Mugby
Junction started suddenly, trembled violently, and opened its gas eyes.
“She’s got up!” Lamps announced, excited. “What lays in her power is
sometimes more, and sometimes less; but it’s laid in her power to get up
to-night, by George!”
The legend “Barbox Brothers” in large white letters on two black
surfaces, was very soon afterwards trundling on a truck through a silent
street, and, when the owner of the legend had shivered on the pavement
half an hour, what time the porter’s knocks at the Inn Door knocked up
the whole town first, and the Inn last, he groped his way into the close
air of a shut-up house, and so groped between the sheets of a shut-up bed
that seemed to have been expressly refrigerated for him when last made.