I have never been in the habit of reading signs. I don't like to read
signs. I have never met a man that liked to read signs. I once invented
a creature who could play the piano with a hammer, and I mentioned him
to a professor in Harvard University whose peculiarity was Sanscrit. He
had the same interest in my invention that I have in a certain kind of
mustard. And yet this mustard has become a part of me. Or, I have
become a part of this mustard. Further, I know more of an ink, a brand
of hams, a kind of cigarette, and a novelist than any man living. I
went by train to see a friend in the country, and after passing through
a patent mucilage, some more hams, a South African Investment Company,
a Parisian millinery firm, and a comic journal, I alighted at a new and
original kind of corset. On my return journey the road almost
continuously ran through soap.
I have accumulated superior information concerning these things,
because I am at their mercy. If I want to know where I am I must find
the definitive sign. This accounts for my glib use of the word
mucilage, as well as the titles of other staples.
I suppose even the Briton in mixing his life must sometimes consult the
labels on 'buses and streets and stations, even as the chemist consults
the labels on his bottles and boxes. A brave man would possibly affirm
that this was suggested by the existence of the labels.
The reason that I did not learn more about hams and mucilage in New
York seems to me to be partly due to the fact that the British
advertiser is allowed to exercise an unbridled strategy in his attack
with his new corset or whatever upon the defensive public. He knows
that the vulnerable point is the informatory sign which the citizen
must, of course, use for his guidance, and then, with horse, foot,
guns, corsets, hams, mucilage, investment companies, and all, he hurls
himself at the point.
Meanwhile I have discovered a way to make the Sanscrit scholar heed my
creature who plays the piano with a hammer.
THE SCOTCH EXPRESS
The entrance to Euston Station is of itself sufficiently imposing. It
is a high portico of brown stone, old and grim, in form a casual
imitation, no doubt, of the front of the temple of Nike Apteros, with a
recollection of the Egyptians proclaimed at the flanks. The frieze,
where of old would prance an exuberant processional of gods, is, in
this case, bare of decoration, but upon the epistyle is written in
simple, stern letters the word "EUSTON." The legend reared high by the
gloomy Pelagic columns stares down a wide avenue, In short, this
entrance to a railway station does not in any way resemble the entrance
to a railway station. It is more the front of some venerable bank. But
it has another dignity, which is not born of form. To a great degree,
it is to the English and to those who are in England the gate to
Scotland.
The little hansoms are continually speeding through the gate, dashing
between the legs of the solemn temple; the four-wheelers, their tops
crowded with luggage, roll in and out constantly, and the footways beat
under the trampling of the people. Of course, there are the suburbs and
a hundred towns along the line, and Liverpool, the beginning of an
important sea-path to America, and the great manufacturing cities of
the North; but if one stands at this gate in August particularly, one
must note the number of men with gun-cases, the number of women who
surely have Tam-o'-Shanters and plaids concealed within their luggage,
ready for the moors. There is, during the latter part of that month, a
wholesale flight from London to Scotland which recalls the July throngs
leaving New York for the shore or the mountains.
The hansoms, after passing through this impressive portal of the
station, bowl smoothly across a courtyard which is in the center of the
terminal hotel, an institution dear to most railways in Europe. The
traveler lands amid a swarm of porters, and then proceeds cheerfully to
take the customary trouble for his luggage. America provides a
contrivance in a thousand situations where Europe provides a man or
perhaps a number of men, and the work of our brass check is here done
by porters, directed by the traveler himself. The men lack the memory
of the check; the check never forgets its identity. Moreover, the
European railways generously furnish the porters at the expense of the
traveler. Nevertheless, if these men have not the invincible business
precision of the check, and if they have to be tipped, it can be
asserted for those who care that in Europe one-half of the populace
waits on the other half most diligently and well.
Against the masonry of a platform, under the vaulted arch of the
train-house, lay a long string of coaches. They were painted white on
the bulging part, which led halfway down from the top, and the bodies
were a deep bottle-green. There was a group of porters placing luggage
in the van, and a great many others were busy with the affairs of
passengers, tossing smaller bits of luggage into the racks over the
seats, and bustling here and there on short quests. The guard of the
train, a tall man who resembled one of the first Napoleon's veterans,
was caring for the distribution of passengers into the various bins.
There were no second-class compartments; they were all third and
first-class.
The train was at this time engineless, but presently a railway "flier,"
painted a glowing vermilion, slid modestly down and took its place at
the head. The guard walked along the platform, and decisively closed
each door. He wore a dark blue uniform thoroughly decorated with silver
braid in the guise of leaves. The way of him gave to this business the
importance of a ceremony. Meanwhile the fireman had climbed down from
the cab and raised his hand, ready to transfer a signal to the driver,
who stood looking at his watch. In the interval there had something
progressed in the large signal box that stands guard at Euston. This
high house contains many levers, standing in thick, shining ranks. It
perfectly resembles an organ in some great church, if it were not that
these rows of numbered and indexed handles typify something more
acutely human than does a keyboard. It requires four men to play this
organ-like thing, and the strains never cease. Night and day, day and
night, these four men are walking to and fro, from this lever to that
lever, and under their hands the great machine raises its endless hymn
of a world at work, the fall and rise of signals and the clicking swing
of switches.
And so as the vermilion engine stood waiting and looking from the
shadow of the curve-roofed station, a man in the signal house had
played the notes that informed the engine of its freedom. The driver
saw the fall of those proper semaphores which gave him liberty to speak
to his steel friend. A certain combination in the economy of the London
and Northwestern Railway, a combination which had spread from the men
who sweep out the carriages through innumerable minds to the general
manager himself, had resulted in the law that the vermilion engine,
with its long string of white and bottle-green coaches, was to start
forthwith toward Scotland.
Presently the fireman, standing with his face toward the rear, let fall
his hand. "All right," he said. The driver turned a wheel, and as the
fireman slipped back, the train moved along the platform at the pace of
a mouse. To those in the tranquil carriages this starting was probably
as easy as the sliding of one's hand over a greased surface, but in the
engine there was more to it. The monster roared suddenly and loudly,
and sprang forward impetuously. A wrong-headed or maddened draft-horse
will plunge in its collar sometimes when going up a hill. But this load
of burdened carriages followed imperturbably at the gait of turtles.
They were not to be stirred from their way of dignified exit by the
impatient engine. The crowd of porters and transient people stood
respectful. They looked with the indefinite wonder of the
railway-station sight-seer upon the faces at the windows of the passing
coaches. This train was off for Scotland. It had started from the home
of one accent to the home of another accent. It was going from manner
to manner, from habit to habit, and in the minds of these London
spectators there surely floated dim images of the traditional kilts,
the burring speech, the grouse, the canniness, the oat-meal, all the
elements of a romantic Scotland.
The train swung impressively around the signal-house, and headed up a
brick-walled cut. In starting this heavy string of coaches, the engine
breathed explosively. It gasped, and heaved, and bellowed; once, for a
moment, the wheels spun on the rails, and a convulsive tremor shook the
great steel frame.
The train itself, however, moved through this deep cut in the body of
London with coolness and precision, and the employees of the railway,
knowing the train's mission, tacitly presented arms at its passing. To
the travelers in the carriages, the suburbs of London must have been
one long monotony of carefully made walls of stone or brick. But after
the hill was climbed, the train fled through pictures of red
habitations of men on a green earth.
But the noise in the cab did not greatly change its measure. Even
though the speed was now high, the tremendous thumping to be heard in
the cab was as alive with strained effort and as slow in beat as the
breathing of a half-drowned man. At the side of the track, for
instance, the sound doubtless would strike the ear in the familiar
succession of incredibly rapid puffs; but in the cab itself, this
land-racer breathes very like its friend, the marine engine. Everybody
who has spent time on shipboard has forever in his head a reminiscence
of the steady and methodical pounding of the engines, and perhaps it is
curious that this relative which can whirl over the land at such a
pace, breathes in the leisurely tones that a man heeds when he lies
awake at night in his berth.
There had been no fog in London, but here on the edge of the city a
heavy wind was blowing, and the driver leaned aside and yelled that it
was a very bad day for traveling on an engine. The engine-cabs of
England, as of all Europe, are seldom made for the comfort of the men.
One finds very often this apparent disregard for the man who does the
work--this indifference to the man who occupies a position which for
the exercise of temperance, of courage, of honesty, has no equal at the
altitude of prime ministers. The American engineer is the gilded
occupant of a salon in comparison with his brother in Europe. The man
who was guiding this five-hundred-ton bolt, aimed by the officials of
the railway at Scotland, could not have been as comfortable as a shrill
gibbering boatman of the Orient. The narrow and bare bench at his side
of the cab was not directly intended for his use, because it was so low
that he would be prevented by it from looking out of the ship's
port-hole which served him as a window. The fireman, on his side, had
other difficulties. His legs would have had to straggle over some pipes
at the only spot where there was a prospect, and the builders had also
strategically placed a large steel bolt. Of course it is plain that the
companies consistently believe that the men will do their work better
if they are kept standing. The roof of the cab was not altogether a
roof. It was merely a projection of two feet of metal from the bulkhead
which formed the front of the cab. There were practically no sides to
it, and the large cinders from the soft coal whirled around in sheets.
From time to time the driver took a handkerchief from his pocket and
wiped his blinking eyes.
London was now well to the rear. The vermilion engine had been for some
time flying like the wind. This train averages, between London and
Carlisle forty-nine and nine-tenth miles an hour. It is a distance of
299 miles. There is one stop. It occurs at Crewe, and endures five
minutes. In consequence, the block signals flashed by seemingly at the
end of the moment in which they were sighted.
There can be no question of the statement that the road-beds of English
railways are at present immeasurably superior to the American
road-beds. Of course there is a clear reason. It is known to every
traveler that peoples of the Continent of Europe have no right at all
to own railways. Those lines of travel are too childish and trivial for
expression. A correct fate would deprive the Continent of its railways,
and give them to somebody who knew about them.
The continental idea of a railway is to surround a mass of machinery
with forty rings of ultra-military law, and then they believe they have
one complete. The Americans and the English are the railway peoples.
That our road-beds are poorer than the English road-beds is because of
the fact that we were suddenly obliged to build thousands upon
thousands of miles of railway, and the English were obliged to build
slowly tens upon tens of miles. A road-bed from New York to San
Francisco, with stations, bridges, and crossings of the kind that the
London and Northwestern owns from London to Glasgow, would cost a sum
large enough to support the German army for a term of years. The whole
way is constructed with the care that inspired the creators of some of
our now obsolete forts along the Atlantic coast.
An American engineer, with his knowledge of the difficulties he had to
encounter--the wide rivers with variable banks, the mountain chains,
perhaps the long spaces of absolute desert; in fact, all the
perplexities of a vast and somewhat new country--would not dare spend a
respectable portion of his allowance on seventy feet of granite wall
over a gully, when he knew he could make an embankment with little cost
by heaving up the dirt and stones from here and there. But the English
road is all made in the pattern by which the Romans built their
highways. After England is dead, savants will find narrow streaks of
masonry leading from ruin to ruin. Of course this does not always seem
convincingly admirable. It sometimes resembles energy poured into a
rat-hole. There is a vale between expediency and the convenience of
posterity, a mid-ground which enables men surely to benefit the
hereafter people by valiantly advancing the present; and the point is
that, if some laborers live in unhealthy tenements in Cornwall, one is
likely to view with incomplete satisfaction the record of long and
patient labor and thought displayed by an eight-foot drain for a
nonexistent, impossible rivulet in the North. This sentence does not
sound strictly fair, but the meaning one wishes to convey is that if an
English company spies in its dream the ghost of an ancient valley that
later becomes a hill, it would construct for it a magnificent steel
trestle, and consider that a duty had been performed in proper
accordance with the company's conscience. But after all is said of it,
the accidents and the miles of railway operated in England are not in
proportion to the accidents and the miles of railway operated in the
United States. The reason can be divided into three parts--older
conditions, superior caution, the road-bed. And of these, the greatest
is older conditions.
In this flight toward Scotland one seldom encountered a grade crossing.
In nine cases of ten there was either a bridge or a tunnel. The
platforms of even the remote country stations were all of ponderous
masonry in contrast to our constructions of planking. There was always
to be seen, as we thundered toward a station of this kind, a number of
porters in uniform, who requested the retreat of any one who had not
the wit to give us plenty of room. And then, as the shrill warning of
the whistle pierced even the uproar that was about us, came the wild
joy of the rush past a station. It was something in the nature of a
triumphal procession conducted at thrilling speed. Perhaps there was a
curve of infinite grace, a sudden hollow explosive effect made by the
passing of a signal-box that was close to the track, and then the
deadly lunge to shave the edge of a long platform. There were always a
number of people standing afar, with their eyes riveted upon this
projectile, and to be on the engine was to feel their interest and
admiration in the terror and grandeur of this sweep. A boy allowed to
ride with the driver of the band-wagon as a circus parade winds through
one of our village streets could not exceed for egotism the temper of a
new man in the cab of a train like this one. This valkyric journey on
the back of the vermilion engine, with the shouting of the wind, the
deep, mighty panting of the steed, the gray blur at the track-side, the
flowing quicksilver ribbon of the other rails, the sudden clash as a
switch intersects, all the din and fury of this ride, was of a splendor
that caused one to look abroad at the quiet, green landscape and
believe that it was of a phlegm quiet beyond patience. It should have
been dark, rain-shot, and windy; thunder should have rolled across its
sky.
It seemed, somehow, that if the driver should for a moment take his
hands from his engine, it might swerve from the track as a horse from
the road. Once, indeed, as he stood wiping his fingers on a bit of
waste, there must have been something ludicrous in the way the solitary
passenger regarded him. Without those finely firm hands on the bridle,
the engine might rear and bolt for the pleasant farms lying in the
sunshine at either side.
This driver was worth contemplation. He was simply a quiet, middle-aged
man, bearded, and with the little wrinkles of habitual geniality and
kindliness spreading from the eyes toward the temple, who stood at his
post always gazing out, through his round window, while, from time to
time, his hands went from here to there over his levers. He seldom
changed either attitude or expression. There surely is no engine-driver
who does not feel the beauty of the business, but the emotion lies
deep, and mainly inarticulate, as it does in the mind of a man who has
experienced a good and beautiful wife for many years. This driver's
face displayed nothing but the cool sanity of a man whose thought was
buried intelligently in his business. If there was any fierce drama in
it, there was no sign upon him. He was so lost in dreams of speed and
signals and steam, that one speculated if the wonder of his tempestuous
charge and its career over England touched him, this impassive rider of
a fiery thing.
It should be a well-known fact that, all over the world, the
engine-driver is the finest type of man that is grown. He is the pick
of the earth. He is altogether more worthy than the soldier, and better
than the men who move on the sea in ships. He is not paid too much; nor
do his glories weight his brow; but for outright performance, carried
on constantly, coolly, and without elation, by a temperate, honest,
clear-minded man, he is the further point. And so the lone human at his
station in a cab, guarding money, lives, and the honor of the road, is
a beautiful sight. The whole thing is aesthetic. The fireman presents
the same charm, but in a less degree, in that he is bound to appear as
an apprentice to the finished manhood of the driver. In his eyes,
turned always in question and confidence toward his superior, one finds
this quality; but his aspirations are so direct that one sees the same
type in evolution.
There may be a popular idea that the fireman's principal function is to
hang his head out of the cab and sight interesting objects in the
landscape. As a matter of fact, he is always at work. The dragon is
insatiate. The fireman is continually swinging open the furnace-door,
whereat a red shine flows out upon the floor of the cab, and shoveling
in immense mouthfuls of coal to a fire that is almost diabolic in its
madness. The feeding, feeding, feeding goes on until it appears as if
it is the muscles of the fireman's arms that are speeding the long
train. An engine running over sixty-five miles an hour, with 500 tons
to drag, has an appetite in proportion to this task.
View of the clear-shining English scenery is often interrupted between
London and Crew by long and short tunnels. The first one was
disconcerting. Suddenly one knew that the train was shooting toward a
black mouth in the hills. It swiftly yawned wider, and then in a moment
the engine dived into a place inhabitated by every demon of wind and
noise. The speed had not been checked, and the uproar was so great that
in effect one was simply standing at the center of a vast, black-walled
sphere. The tubular construction which one's reason proclaimed had no
meaning at all. It was a black sphere, alive with shrieks. But then on
the surface of it there was to be seen a little needle-point of light,
and this widened to a detail of unreal landscape. It was the world; the
train was going to escape from this cauldron, this abyss of howling
darkness. If a man looks through the brilliant water of a tropical
pool, he can sometimes see coloring the marvels at the bottom the blue
that was on the sky and the green that was on the foliage of this
detail. And the picture shimmered in the heat-rays of a new and
remarkable sun. It was when the train bolted out into the open air that
one knew that it was his own earth.
Once train met train in a tunnel. Upon the painting in the perfectly
circular frame formed by the mouth there appeared a black square with
sparks bursting from it. This square expanded until it hid everything,
and a moment later came the crash of the passing. It was enough to make
a man lose his sense of balance. It was a momentary inferno when the
fireman opened the furnace door and was bathed in blood-red light as he
fed the fires.
The effect of a tunnel varied when there was a curve in it. One was
merely whirling then heels over head, apparently in the dark, echoing
bowels of the earth. There was no needle-point of light to which one's
eyes clung as to a star.
From London to Crew, the stern arm of the semaphore never made the
train pause even for an instant. There was always a clear track. It was
great to see, far in the distance, a goods train whooping smokily for
the north of England on one of the four tracks. The overtaking of such
a train was a thing of magnificent nothing for the long-strided engine,
and as the flying express passed its weaker brother, one heard one or
two feeble and immature puffs from the other engine, saw the fireman
wave his hand to his luckier fellow, saw a string of foolish, clanking
flat-cars, their freights covered with tarpaulins, and then the train
was lost to the rear.
The driver twisted his wheel and worked some levers, and the rhythmical
chunking of the engine gradually ceased. Gliding at a speed that was
still high, the train curved to the left, and swung down a sharp
incline, to move with an imperial dignity through the railway yard at
Rugby. There was a maze of switches, innumerable engines noisily
pushing cars here and there, crowds of workmen who turned to look, a
sinuous curve around the long train-shed, whose high wall resounded
with the rumble of the passing express; and then, almost immediately,
it seemed, came the open country again. Rugby had been a dream which
one could properly doubt. At last the relaxed engine, with the same
majesty of ease, swung into the high-roofed station at Crewe, and
stopped on a platform lined with porters and citizens. There was
instant bustle, and in the interest of the moment no one seemed
particularly to notice the tired vermilion engine being led away.
There is a five-minute stop at Crewe. A tandem of engines slip up, and
buckled fast to the train for the journey to Carlisle. In the meantime,
all the regulation items of peace and comfort had happened on the train
itself. The dining-car was in the center of the train. It was divided
into two parts, the one being a dining-room for first-class passengers,
and the other a dining-room for the third-class passengers. They were
separated by the kitchens and the larder. The engine, with all its
rioting and roaring, had dragged to Crewe a car in which numbers of
passengers were lunching in a tranquility that was almost domestic, on
an average menu of a chop and potatoes, a salad, cheese, and a bottle
of beer. Betimes they watched through the windows the great
chimney-marked towns of northern England. They were waited upon by a
young man of London, who was supported by a lad who resembled an
American bell-boy. The rather elaborate menu and service of the Pullman
dining-car is not known in England or on the Continent. Warmed roast
beef is the exact symbol of a European dinner, when one is traveling on
a railway.
This express is named, both by the public and the company, the
"Corridor Train," because a coach with a corridor is an unusual thing
in England, and so the title has a distinctive meaning. Of course, in
America, where there is no car which has not what we call an aisle, it
would define nothing. The corridors are all at one side of the car.
Doors open thence to little compartments made to seat four, or perhaps
six, persons. The first-class carriages are very comfortable indeed,
being heavily upholstered in dark, hard-wearing stuffs, with a bulging
rest for the head. The third-class accommodations on this train are
almost as comfortable as the first-class, and attract a kind of people
that are not usually seen traveling third-class in Europe. Many people
sacrifice their habit, in the matter of this train, to the fine
conditions of the lower fare.
One of the feats of the train is an electric button in each
compartment. Commonly an electric button is placed high on the side of
the carriage as an alarm signal, and it is unlawful to push it unless
one is in serious need of assistance from the guard. But these bells
also rang in the dining-car, and were supposed to open negotiations for
tea or whatever. A new function has been projected on an ancient
custom. No genius has yet appeared to separate these two meanings. Each
bell rings an alarm and a bid for tea or whatever. It is perfect in
theory then that, if one rings for tea, the guard comes to interrupt
the murder, and that if one is being murdered, the attendant appears
with tea. At any rate, the guard was forever being called from his
reports and his comfortable seat in the forward end of the luggage-van
by thrilling alarms. He often prowled the length of the train with
hardihood and determination, merely to meet a request for a sandwich.
The train entered Carlisle at the beginning of twilight. This is the
border town, and an engine of the Caledonian Railway, manned by two men
of broad speech, came to take the place of the tandem. The engine of
these men of the North was much smaller than the others, but her cab
was much larger, and would be a fair shelter on a stormy night. They
had also built seats with hooks by which they hang them to the rail,
and thus are still enabled to see through the round windows without
dislocating their necks. All the human parts of the cab were covered
with oilcloth. The wind that swirled from the dim twilight horizon made
the warm glow from the furnace to be a grateful thing.
As the train shot out of Carlisle, a glance backward could learn of the
faint, yellow blocks of light from the carriages marked on the dimmed
ground. The signals were now lamps, and shone palely against the sky.
The express was entering night as if night were Scotland.
There was a long toil to the summit of the hills, and then began the
booming ride down the slope. There were many curves. Sometimes could be
seen two or three signal lights at one time, twisting off in some new
direction. Minus the lights and some yards of glistening rails,
Scotland was only a blend of black and weird shapes. Forests which one
could hardly imagine as weltering in the dewy placidity of evening sank
to the rear as if the gods had bade them. The dark loom of a house
quickly dissolved before the eyes. A station with its lamps became a
broad yellow band that, to a deficient sense, was only a few yards in
length. Below, in a deep valley, a silver glare on the waters of a
river made equal time with the train. Signals appeared, grew, and
vanished. In the wind and the mystery of the night, it was like sailing
in an enchanted gloom. The vague profiles of hills ran like snakes
across the somber sky. A strange shape boldly and formidably confronted
the train, and then melted to a long dash of track as clean as
sword-blades.
The vicinity of Glasgow is unmistakable. The flames of pauseless
industries are here and there marked on the distance. Vast factories
stand close to the track, and reaching chimneys emit roseate flames. At
last one may see upon a wall the strong reflection from furnaces, and
against it the impish and inky figures of workingmen. A long,
prison-like row of tenements, not at all resembling London, but in one
way resembling New York, appeared to the left, and then sank out of
sight like a phantom.
At last the driver stopped the brave effort of his engine The 400 miles
were come to the edge. The average speed of forty-nine and one-third
miles each hour had been made, and it remained only to glide with the
hauteur of a great express through the yard and into the station at
Glasgow.
A wide and splendid collection of signal lamps flowed toward the
engine. With delicacy and care the train clanked over some switches,
passes the signals, and then there shone a great blaze of arc-lamps,
defining the wide sweep of the station roof. Smoothly, proudly, with
all that vast dignity which had surrounded its exit from London, the
express moved along its platform. It was the entrance into a gorgeous
drawing-room of a man that was sure of everything.
The porters and the people crowded forward. In their minds there may
have floated dim images of the traditional music-halls, the bobbies,
the 'buses, the 'Arrys and 'Arriets, the swells of London.
THE END