_This story is very much of the same sort as “An Unqualified Pilot,” and
shows that, when any one is really keen on his job, he will generally
find some older man who is even keener than he, who will give him help
and instruction that could not be found in a whole library of books.
Olaf Swanson’s book of “Road-Locos Repair or the Young Driver’s
Vademecome,” was well known in the Railway sheds in its day, and was
written in the queerest English ever printed. But it told useful facts
and, as you will see, saved a train at a pinch. It may be worth noticing
that young Ottley’s chance did not come to him till he had worked on and
among engine-repairs for some five or six years and was well-grounded in
practical knowledge of his subject._
Young Ottley’s father came to Calcutta in 1857 as fireman on the first
locomotive ever run by the D. I. R., which was then the largest Indian
railway. All his life he spoke broad Yorkshire, but young Ottley, being
born in India, naturally talked the clipped sing-song that is used by
the half-castes and English-speaking natives. When he was fifteen years
old the D. I. R. took him into their service as an apprentice in the
Locomotive Repair Department of the Ajaibpore workshops, and he became
one of a gang of three or four white men and nine or ten natives.
There were scores of such gangs, each with its hoisting and overhead
cranes, jack-screws, vises and lathes, as separate as separate shops,
and their work was to mend locomotives and make the apprentices behave.
But the apprentices threw nuts at one another, chalked caricatures of
unpopular foremen on buffer-bars and discarded boilers, and did as
little work as they possibly could.
They were nearly all sons of old employés, living with their parents in
the white bungalows of Steam Road or Church Road or Albert Road—on the
broad avenues of pounded brick bordered by palms and crotons and
bougainvilleas and bamboos which made up the railway town of Ajaibpore.
They had never seen the sea or a steamer; half their speech was helped
out with native slang; they were all volunteers in the D. I. R.’s
Railway Corps—grey with red facings—and their talk was exclusively about
the Company and its affairs.
They all hoped to become engine-drivers earning six or eight hundred a
year, and therefore they despised all mere sit-down clerks in the Store,
Audit and Traffic departments, and ducked them when they met at the
Company’s swimming baths.
There were no strikes or tie-ups on the D. I. R. in those days, for the
reason that the ten or twelve thousand natives and two or three thousand
whites were doing their best to turn the Company’s employment into a
caste in which their sons and relatives would be sure of positions and
pensions. Everything in India crystallizes into a caste sooner or
later—the big jute and cotton mills, the leather harness and opium
factories, the coal-mines and the dockyards, and, in years to come, when
India begins to be heard from as one of the manufacturing countries of
the world, the labour Unions of other lands will learn something about
the beauty of caste which will greatly interest them.
Those were the days when the D. I. R. decided that it would be cheaper
to employ native drivers as much as possible, and the “Sheds,” as they
called the Repair Department, felt the change acutely; for a native
driver could misuse his engine, they said, more curiously than any six
monkeys. The Company had not then standardized its rolling-stock, and
this was very good for apprentices anxious to learn about machines,
because there were, perhaps, twenty types of locomotives in use on the
road. They were Hawthornes; E. types; O types; outside cylinders;
Spaulding and Cushman double-enders and short-run Continental-built tank
engines, and many others. But the native drivers burned them all out
impartially, and the apprentices took to writing remarks in Bengali on
the cabs of the repaired ones where the next driver would be sure to see
them.
Young Ottley worked at first as little as the other apprentices, but his
father, who was then a pensioned driver, taught him a great deal about
the insides of locomotives; and Olaf Swanson, the red-headed Swede who
ran the Government Mail, the big Thursday express, from Serai Rajgara to
Guldee Haut, was a great friend of The Ottley family, and dined with
them every Friday night.
Olaf was an important person, for besides being the best of the
mail-drivers, he was Past Master of the big railway Masonic Lodge, “St.
Duncan’s in the East,” Secretary of the Drivers’ Provident Association,
a Captain in the D. I. R. Volunteer Corps, and, which he thought much
more of, an Author; for he had written a book in a language of his own
which he insisted upon calling English, and had printed it at his own
expense at the ticket-printing works.
Some of the copies were buff and green, and some were pinkish and blue,
and some were yellow and brown; for Olaf did not believe in wasting
money on high-class white paper. Wrapping-paper was good enough for him,
and besides, he said the colours rested the eyes of the reader. It was
called “The Art of Road-Locos Repair or The Young Driver’s Vademecome,”
and was dedicated in verse to a man of the name of Swedenborg.
It covered every conceivable accident that could happen to an engine on
the road; and gave a rough-and-ready remedy for each; but you had to
understand Olaf’s written English, as well as all the technical talk
about engines, to make head or tail of it, and you had also to know
personally every engine on the D. I. R., for the “Vademecome” was full
of what might be called “locomotive allusions,” which concerned the D.
I. R. only. Otherwise, it would, as some great locomotive designer once
said, have been a classic and a text-book.
Olaf was immensely proud of it, and would pin young Ottley in a corner
and make him learn whole pages—it was written all in questions and
answers—by heart.
“Never mind what she _means_,” Olaf would shout. “You learn her
word-perfect, and she will help you in the Sheds. I drive the
Mail,—_the_ mail of all India,—and what I write and say is true.”
“But I do _not_ wish to learn the book,” said young Ottley, who thought
he saw quite enough of locomotives in business hours.
“You _shall_ learn! I haf great friendship for your father, and so I
shall teach you whether you like it or not.”
Young Ottley submitted, for he was really fond of old Olaf, and at the
end of six months’ teaching in Olaf’s peculiar way began to see that the
“Vademecome” was a very valuable help in the repair sheds, when
broken-down engines of a new type came in. Olaf gave him a copy bound in
cartridge paper and hedged round the margins with square-headed
manuscript notes, each line the result of years of experience and
accidents.
“There is nothing in this book,” said Olaf, “that I have not tried in my
time, and I say that the engine is like the body of a man. So long as
there is steam—the life, you see,—so long, if you know how, you can make
her move a little,—so!” He waggled his hand slowly. “Till a man is dead,
or the engine she is at the bottom of a river, you can do something with
her. Remember that! _I_ say it and I know.”
He repaid young Ottley’s time and attention by using his influence to
get him made a Sergeant in his Company, and young Ottley, being a keen
Volunteer and a good shot, stood well with the D. I. R. in the matter of
casual leave. When repairs were light in the Sheds and the honour of the
D. I. R. was to be upheld at some far-away station against the men of
Agra or Bandikui, the narrow-gauge railway-towns of the west, young
Ottley would contrive to get away, and help to uphold it on the glaring
dusty rifle-ranges of those parts.
A ’prentice never dreamed of paying for his ticket on any line in India,
least of all when he was in uniform, and young Ottley was practically as
free of the Indian railway system as any member of the Supreme
Legislative Council who wore a golden General Pass on his watch-chain
and could ride where he chose.
Late in September of his nineteenth year he went north on one of his
cup-hunting excursions, elegantly and accurately dressed, with
one-eighth of one inch of white collar showing above his grey uniform
stock, and his Martini-Henry rifle polished to match his sergeant’s
sword in the rack above him.
The rains were out, and in Bengal that means a good deal to the
railways; for the rain falls for three months lavishly, till the whole
country is one sea, and the snakes take refuge on the embankment, and
the racing floods puff out the brick ballast from under the iron ties,
and leave the rails hanging in graceful loops. Then the trains run as
they can, and the permanent-way inspectors spend their nights
flourishing about in hand-carts pushed by coolies over the dislocated
metals, and everybody is covered with the fire-red rash of prickly heat,
and loses his temper.
Young Ottley was used to these things from birth. All he regretted was
that his friends along the line were so draggled and dripping and sulky
that they could not appreciate his gorgeousness; for he considered
himself very consoling to behold when he cocked his helmet over one eye
and puffed the rank smoke of native-made cigars through his nostrils.
Until night fell he lay out on his bunk, in his shirt-sleeves, reading
the works of G. W. R. Reynolds, which were sold on all the railway
bookstalls, and dozing at intervals.
Then he found they were changing engines at Guldee Haut, and old
Rustomjee, a Parsee, was the new driver, with Number Forty in hand.
Young Ottley took this opportunity to go forward and tell Rustomjee
exactly what they thought of him in the Sheds, where the ’prentices had
been repairing some of his carelessness in the way of a dropped
crown-sheet, the result of inattention and bad stoking.
Rustomjee said he had bad luck with engines, and young Ottley went back
to his carriage and slept. He was waked by a bang, a bump, and a jar,
and saw on the opposite bunk a subaltern who was travelling north with a
detachment of some twenty English soldiers.
“What’s that?” said the subaltern.
“Rustomjee has blown her up, perhaps,” said young Ottley, and dropped
out into the wet, the subaltern at his heels. They found Rustomjee
sitting by the side of the line, nursing a scalded foot and crying aloud
that he was a dead man, while the gunner-guard—who is a kind of
extra-hand—looked respectfully at the roaring, hissing machine.
“What has happened?” said young Ottley, by the light of the
gunner-guard’s lantern.
“_Phut gya_ [she has gone smash],” said Rustomjee, still hopping.
“Without doubt; but where?”
“_Khuda jahnta!_ [God knows]. I am a poor man. Number Forty is broke.”
Young Ottley jumped into the cab and turned off all the steam he could
find, for there was a good deal escaping. Then he took the lantern and
dived under the drive-wheels, where he lay face up, investigating among
spurts of hot water.
“Doocid plucky,” said the subaltern. “_I_ shouldn’t like to do that
myself. What’s gone wrong?”
“Cylinder-head blown off, coupler-rod twisted, and several more things.
She is very badly wrecked. Oah, yes, she is a tottal wreck,” said young
Ottley between the spokes of the right-hand driver.
“Awkward,” said the subaltern, turning up his coat-collar in the wet.
“What’s to be done, then?”
Young Ottley came out, a rich black all over his grey uniform with the
red facings, and drummed on his teeth with his finger nails, while the
rain fell and the native passengers shouted questions and old Rustomjee
told the gunner-guard to walk back six or seven miles and wire to
someone for help.
“I cannot swim,” said the gunner-guard. “Go and lie down.” And that, as
you might say, settled that. Besides, as far as one could see by the
light of the gunner-guard’s lantern, all Bengal was flooded.
“Olaf Swanson will be at Serai Rajgara with the Mail. He will be
particularly angry,” said young Ottley. Then he ducked under the engine
again with a flare-lamp and sat cross-legged, considering things and
wishing he had brought his “Vademecome” in his valise.
Number Forty was an old reconstructed Mutiny engine, with Frenchified
cock-nosed cylinders and a profligate allowance of underpinning. She had
been through the Sheds several times, and young Ottley, though he had
never worked on her, had heard much about her, but nothing to her
credit.
“You can lend me some men?” he said at last to the subaltern. “Then I
think we shall disconnect her this side, and perhaps, notwithstanding,
she will move. We will try—eh?”
“Of course we will. Hi! Sergeant!” said the subaltern. “Turn out the men
here and do what this—this officer tells you.”
“Officer!” said one of the privates, under his breath. “’Didn’t think
I’d enlisted to serve under a Sergeant o’ Volunteers. ’Ere’s a ’orrible
street accident. ’Looks like mother’s tea-kettle broke. What d’yer
expect us to do, Mister Civilian Sergeant?”
Young Ottley explained his plan of campaign while he was ravaging
Rustomjee’s tool-chest, and then the men crawled and knelt and levered
and pushed and hauled and turned spanners under the engine, as young
Ottley told them. What he wanted was to disconnect the right cylinder
altogether, and get off a badly twisted coupler-rod. Practically Number
Forty’s right side was paralyzed, and they pulled away enough
ironmongery there to build a culvert with.
Young Ottley remembered that the instructions for a case like this were
all in the “Vademecome,” but even he began to feel a little alarmed as
he saw what came away from the engine and was stacked by the side of the
line. After forty minutes of the hardest kind of work it seemed to him
that everything movable was cleared out, and that he might venture to
give her steam. She leaked and sweated and shook, but she moved—in a
grinding sort of way—and the soldiers cheered.
Rustomjee flatly refused to help in anything so revolutionary as driving
an engine on one cylinder, because, he said, Heaven had decreed that he
should always be unlucky, even with sound machines. Moreover, as he
pointed out, the pressure-gauge was jumping up and down like a
bottle-imp. The stoker had long since gone away into the night; for he
was a prudent man.
“Doocid queer thing altogether,” said the subaltern, “but look here, if
you like, I’ll chuck on the coals and you can drive the old jigamaroo,
if she’ll go.”
“Perhaps she will blow up,” said the gunner-guard.
“’Shouldn’t at all wonder by the sound of her. Where’s the shovel?” said
the subaltern.
“Oah no. She’s all raight according to my book, I think,” said young
Ottley. “Now we will go to Serai Rajgara—if she moves.”
She moved with long _ssghee! ssghee’s!_ of exhaustion and lamentation.
She moved quite seven miles an hour, and—for the floods were all over
the line—the staggering voyage began.
The subaltern stoked four shovels to the minute, spreading them thin,
and Number Forty made noises like a dying cow, and young Ottley
discovered that it was one thing to run a healthy switching-locomotive
up and down the yards for fun when the head of the yard wasn’t looking,
and quite another to drive a very sick one over an unknown road in
absolute darkness and tropic rain. But they felt their way along with
their hearts in their mouths till they came to a distant signal, and
whistled frugally, having no steam to spare.
“This _might_ be Serai Rajgara,” said young Ottley, hopefully.
“’Looks more like the Suez Canal,” said the subaltern. “I say, when an
engine kicks up that sort of a noise she’s a little impatient, isn’t
she?”
“That sort of noise” was a full-powered, furious yelling whistle half a
mile up the line.
“That is the Down Mail,” said young Ottley. “We have delayed Olaf two
hours and forty-five minutes. She must surely be in Serai Rajgara.”
“’Don’t wonder she wants to get out of it,” said the subaltern. “Golly,
what a country!”
The line here dipped bodily under water, and young Ottley sent the
gunner-guard on to find the switch to let Number Forty into the siding.
Then he followed and drew up with a doleful _wop! wop! wop!_ by the side
of the great forty-five-ton, six-wheel, coupled, eighteen-inch
inside-cylinder Number Twenty-five, all paint and lacquer, standing
roaring at the head of the Down Mail. The rest was all water—flat, level
and solid from one point of the horizon to the other.
Olaf’s red beard flared like a danger-signal, and as soon as they were
in range some knobby pieces of Giridih coal whizzed past young Ottley’s
head.
“’Your friend very mad?” said the subaltern, ducking.
“Aah!” roared Olaf. “This is the fifth time you make delay. Three hours’
delay you make _me_—Swanson—the Mail! Now I will lose more time to break
your head.” He swung on to the foot-board of Number Forty, with a shovel
in one hand.
“Olaf!” cried young Ottley, and Olaf nearly tumbled backward. “Rustomjee
is behind.”
“Of course. He always is. But you? How you come here?”
“Oah, we smashed up. I have disconnected her and arrived here on one
cylinder, by your book. We are only a—a diagram of an engine, I think.”
“My book! My very good book. My ‘Vademecome’! Ottley, you are a fine
driver. I forgive my delays. It was worth. Oh, my book, my book!” and
Olaf leapt back to Number Twenty-five, shouting things about Swedenborg
and steam.
“Thatt is all right,” said young Ottley, “but where is Serai Rajgara? We
want assistance.”
“There is no Serai Rajgara. The water is two feet on the embankment, and
the telegraph office is fell in. I will report at Purnool Road.
Good-night, good boy!”
The Mail train splashed out into the dark, and Ottley made great haste
to let off his steam and draw his fire. Number Forty had done enough for
that night.
“Odd chap, that friend of yours,” said the subaltern, when Number Forty
stood empty and disarmed in the gathering waters. “What do we do now?
Swim?”
“Oah, no! At ten-forty-five thiss morning that is coming, an engine will
perhaps arrive from Purnool Road and take us north. Now we will lie down
and go to sleep. You see there _is_ no Serai Rajgara. You could get a
cup of tea here once on a time.”
“Oh, my Aunt, what a country!” said the subaltern, as he followed Ottley
to the carriage and lay down on the leather bunk.
For the next three weeks Olaf Swanson talked to everybody of nothing but
his “Vademecome” and young Ottley. What he said about his book does not
matter, but the compliments of a mail-driver are things to be repeated,
as they were, to people in high authority, the masters of many engines.
So young Ottley was sent for, and he came from the Sheds buttoning his
jacket and wondering which of his sins had been found out this time.
It was a loop line near Ajaibpore, where he could by no possibility come
to harm. It was light but steady traffic, and a first-class
superintendent was in charge; but it was a driver’s billet, and
permanent after six months. As a new engine was on order for the loop,
the foreman of the Sheds told young Ottley he might look through the
stalls and suit himself.
He waited, boiling with impatience, till Olaf came in, and the two went
off together, old Olaf clucking, “Look! Look! Look!” like a hen, all
down the Sheds, and they chose a nearly new Hawthorne, No. 239, which
Olaf highly recommended. Then Olaf went away, to give young Ottley his
chance to order her to the cleaning-pit, and jerk his thumb at the
cleaner and say, as he turned magnificently on his heel, “Thursday,
eight o’clock. _Mallum?_ Understand?”
That was almost the proudest moment of his life. The very proudest was
when he pulled out of Atami Junction through the brick-field on the way
to his loop, and passed the Down Mail, with Olaf in the cab.
They say in the Sheds that you could have heard Number Two hundred and
Thirty-nine’s whistle from Raneegunge clear to Calcutta.