Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) (425 page)

“But why am I to disfigure my lawn with a new brick wall?”

“Grey flint is extremely picturesque.”

“Grey flint, then, if you put it that way. Why the dickens must I go building towers of Babylon just because I have held up one of your trains-once?”

“The expression he used in his third letter was that he wished to ‘board her,’” said my companion in my ear. “That was very curious — a marine delusion impinging, as it were, upon a land one. What a marvellous world he must move in — and will before the curtain falls. So young, too — so very young!”

“Well, if you want the plain English of it, I’m damned if I go wall-building to your orders. You can fight it all along the line, into the House of Lords and out again, and get your rulings by the running foot if you like,” said Wilton, hotly. “Great heavens, man, I only did it once!”

“We have at present no guarantee that you may not do it again; and, with our traffic, we must, in justice to our passengers, demand some form of guarantee. It must not serve as a precedent. All this might have been saved if you had only referred us to your legal representative.” The lawyer looked appealingly around the room. The dead-lock was complete.

“Wilton,” I asked, “may I try my hand now?”

“Anything you like,” said Wilton. “It seems I can’t talk English. I won’t build any wall, though.” He threw himself back in his chair.

“Gentlemen,” I said deliberately, for I perceived that the doctor’s mind would turn slowly, “Mr. Sargent has very large interests in the chief railway systems of his own country.”

“His own country?” said the lawyer.

“At that age?” said the doctor.

“Certainly. He inherited them from his father, Mr. Sargent, who was an American.”

“And proud of it,” said Wilton, as though he had been a Western Senator let loose on the Continent for the first time.

“My dear sir,” said the lawyer, half rising, “why did you not acquaint the Company with this fact — this vital fact — early in our correspondence? We should have understood. We should have made allowances.”

“Allowances be damned. Am I a Red Indian or a lunatic?”

The two men looked guilty.

“If Mr. Sargent’s friend had told us as much in the beginning,” said the doctor, very severely, “much might have been saved.” Alas! I had made a life’s enemy of that doctor.

“I hadn’t a chance,” I replied. “Now, of course, you can see that a man who owns several thousand miles of line, as Mr. Sargent does, would be apt to treat railways a shade more casually than other people.”

“Of course; of course. He is an American; that accounts. Still, it was the Induna; but I can quite understand that the customs of our cousins across the water differ in these particulars from ours. And do you always stop trains in this way in the States, Mr. Sargent?”

“I should if occasion ever arose; but I’ve never had to yet. Are you going to make an international complication of the business?”

“You need give yourself no further concern whatever in the matter. We see that there is no likelihood of this action of yours establishing a precedent, which was the only thing we were afraid of. Now that you understand that we cannot reconcile our system to any sudden stoppages, we feel quite sure that — ”

“I sha’n’t be staying long enough to flag another train,” Wilton said pensively.

“You are returning, then, to our fellow-kinsmen across the-ah-big pond, you call it?”

“No, sir. The ocean — the North Atlantic Ocean. It’s three thousand miles broad, and three miles deep in places. I wish it were ten thousand.”

“I am not so fond of sea-travel myself; but I think it is every Englishman’s duty once in his life to study the great branch of our Anglo-Saxon race across the ocean,” said the lawyer.

“If ever you come over, and care to flag any train on my system, I’ll — I’ll see you through,” said Wilton.

“Thank you — ah, thank you. You’re very kind. I’m sure I should enjoy myself immensely.”

“We have overlooked the fact,” the doctor whispered to me, “that your friend proposed to buy the Great Buchonian.”

“He is worth anything from twenty to thirty million dollars — four to five million pounds,” I answered, knowing that it would be hopeless to explain.

“Really! That is enormous wealth. But the Great Buchonian is not in the market.”

“Perhaps he does not want to buy it now.”

“It would be impossible under any circumstances,” said the doctor.

“How characteristic!” murmured the lawyer, reviewing matters in his mind. “I always understood from books that your countrymen were in a hurry. And so you would have gone forty miles to town and back — before dinner — to get a scarab? How intensely American! But you talk exactly like an Englishman, Mr. Sargent.”

“That is a fault that can be remedied. There’s only one question I’d like to ask you. You said it was inconceivable that any man should stop a train on your road?”

“And so it is-absolutely inconceivable.”

“Any sane man, that is?”

“That is what I meant, of course. I mean, with excep — ”

“Thank you.”

The two men departed. Wilton checked himself as he was about to fill a pipe, took one of my cigars instead, and was silent for fifteen minutes.

Then said he: “Have you got a list of the Southampton sailings on you?”

Far away from the greystone wings, the dark cedars, the faultless gravel drives, and the mint-sauce lawns of Holt Hangars runs a river called the Hudson, whose unkempt banks are covered with the palaces of those wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice. Here, where the hoot of the Haverstraw brick-barge-tug answers the howl of the locomotive on either shore, you shall find, with a complete installation of electric light, nickel-plated binnacles, and a calliope attachment to her steam-whistle, the twelve-hundred-ton ocean-going steam-yacht Columbia, lying at her private pier, to take to his office, at an average speed of seventeen knots an hour, — and the barges can look out for themselves, — Wilton Sargent, American.

MY SUNDAY AT HOME

   If the Red Slayer think he slays,

     Or if the slain think he is slain,

   They know not well the subtle ways

      I keep and pass and turn again.

                                   EMERSON.

It was the unreproducible slid r, as he said this was his “fy-ist” visit to England, that told me he was a New-Yorker from New York; and when, in the course of our long, lazy journey westward from Waterloo, he enlarged upon the beauties of his city, I, professing ignorance, said no word. He had, amazed and delighted at the man’s civility, given the London porter a shilling for carrying his bag nearly fifty yards; he had thoroughly investigated the first-class lavatory compartment, which the London and Southwestern sometimes supply without extra charge; and now, half-awed, half-contemptuous, but wholly interested, he looked out upon the ordered English landscape wrapped in its Sunday peace, while I watched the wonder grow upon his face. Why were the cars so short and stilted? Why had every other freight-car a tarpaulin drawn over it? What wages would an engineer get now? Where was the swarming population of England he had read so much about? What was the rank of all those men on tricycles along the roads? When were we due at Plymouth I told him all I knew, and very much that I did not. He was going to Plymouth to assist in a consultation upon a fellow-countryman who had retired to a place called The Hoe — was that up-town or down-town — to recover from nervous dyspepsia. Yes, he himself was a doctor by profession, and how any one in England could retain any nervous disorder passed his comprehension. Never had he dreamed of an atmosphere so soothing. Even the deep rumble of London traffic was monastical by comparison with some cities he could name; and the country — why, it was Paradise. A continuance of it, he confessed, would drive him mad; but for a few months it was the most sumptuous rest-cure in his knowledge.

“I’ll come over every year after this,” he said, in a burst of delight, as we ran between two ten-foot hedges of pink and white may. “It’s seeing all the things I’ve ever read about. Of course it doesn’t strike you that way. I presume you belong here? What a finished land it is! It’s arrived. ‘Must have been born this way. Now, where I used to live — Hello I what’s up?”

The train stopped in a blaze of sunshine at Framlynghame Admiral, which is made up entirely of the name-board, two platforms, and an overhead bridge, without even the usual siding. I had never known the slowest of locals stop here before; but on Sunday all things are possible to the London and Southwestern. One could hear the drone of conversation along the carriages, and, scarcely less loud, the drone of the bumblebees in the wallflowers up the bank. My companion thrust his head through the window and sniffed luxuriously.

“Where are we now?” said he.

“In Wiltshire,” said I.

“Ah! A man ought to be able to write novels with his left hand in a country like this. Well, well! And so this is about Tess’s country, ain’t it? I feel just as if I were in a book. Say, the conduc — the guard has something on his mind. What’s he getting at?”

The splendid badged and belted guard was striding up the platform at the regulation official pace, and in the regulation official voice was saying at each door:

“Has any gentleman here a bottle of medicine? A gentleman has taken a bottle of poison (laudanum) by mistake.”

Between each five paces he looked at an official telegram in his hand, refreshed his memory, and said his say. The dreamy look on my companion’s face — he had gone far away with Tess — passed with the speed of a snap-shutter. After the manner of his countrymen, he had risen to the situation, jerked his bag down from the overhead rail, opened it, and I heard the click of bottles. “Find out where the man is,” he said briefly. “I’ve got something here that will fix him — if he can swallow still.”

Swiftly I fled up the line of carriages in the wake of the guard. There was clamour in a rear compartment — the voice of one bellowing to be let out, and the feet of one who kicked. With the tail of my eye I saw the New York doctor hastening thither, bearing in his hand a blue and brimming glass from the lavatory compartment. The guard I found scratching his head unofficially, by the engine, and murmuring: “Well, I put a bottle of medicine off at Andover — I’m sure I did.”

“Better say it again, any’ow’,” said the driver. “Orders is orders. Say it again.”

Once more the guard paced back, I, anxious to attract his attention, trotting at his heels.

“In a minute — in a minute, sir,” he said, waving an arm capable of starting all the traffic on the London and Southwestern Railway at a wave. “Has any gentleman here got a bottle of medicine? A gentleman has taken a bottle of poison (laudanum) by mistake.”

“Where’s the man?” I gasped.

“Woking. ‘Ere’s my orders.” He showed me the telegram, on which were the words to be said. “‘E must have left ‘is bottle in the train, an’ took another by mistake. ‘E’s been wirin’ from Woking awful, an’, now I come to think of, it, I’m nearly sure I put a bottle of medicine off at Andover.”

“Then the man that took the poison isn’t in the train?”

“Lord, no, sir. No one didn’t take poison that way. ‘E took it away with ‘im, in ‘is ‘ands. ‘E’s wirin’ from Wokin’. My orders was to ask everybody in the train, and I ‘ave, an’ we’re four minutes late now. Are you comin’ on, sir? No? Right be’ind!”

There is nothing, unless, perhaps, the English language, more terrible than the workings of an English railway-line. An instant before it seemed as though we were going to spend all eternity at Framlynghame Admiral, and now I was watching the tail of the train disappear round the curve of the cutting.

But I was not alone. On the one bench of the down platform sat the largest navvy I have ever seen in my life, softened and made affable (for he smiled generously) with liquor. In his huge hands he nursed an empty tumbler marked “L.S.W.R.” — marked also, internally, with streaks of blue-grey sediment. Before him, a hand on his shoulder, stood the doctor, and as I came within ear-shot, this is what I heard him say: “Just you hold on to your patience for a minute or two longer, and you’ll be as right as ever you were in your life. I’ll stay with you till you’re better.”

“Lord! I’m comfortable enough,” said the navvy. “Never felt better in my life.”

Turning to me, the doctor lowered his voice. “He might have died while that fool conduct-guard was saying his piece. I’ve fixed him, though. The stuff’s due in about five minutes, but there’s a heap to him. I don’t see how we can make him take exercise.”

For the moment I felt as though seven pounds of crushed ice had been neatly applied in the form of a compress to my lower stomach.

“How — how did you manage it?” I gasped.

“I asked him if he’d have a drink. He was knocking spots out of the car — strength of his constitution, I suppose. He said he’d go ‘most anywhere for a drink, so I lured onto the platform, and loaded him up. ‘Cold-blooded people, you Britishers are. That train’s gone, and no one seemed to care a cent.”