The Day's Work Part 40

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-cla.s.s 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 a.s.sist 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 pa.s.sed 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--h.e.l.lo 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 b.u.mblebees 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--pa.s.sed 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 br.i.m.m.i.n.g gla.s.s 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 const.i.tution, 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."

"We've missed it," I said.

He looked at me curiously.

"We'll get another before sundown, if that's your only trouble. Say, porter, when's the next train down?"

"Seven forty-five," said the one porter, and pa.s.sed out through the wicket-gate into the landscape. It was then three-twenty of a hot and sleepy afternoon. The station was absolutely deserted. The navvy had closed his eyes, and now nodded.

"That's bad," said the doctor. "The man, I mean, not the train. We must make him walk somehow--walk up and down."

Swiftly as might be, I explained the delicacy of the situation, and the doctor from New York turned a full bronze-green. Then he swore comprehensively at the entire fabric of our glorious Const.i.tution, cursing the English language, root, branch, and paradigm, through its most obscure derivatives. His coat and bag lay on the bench next to the sleeper. Thither he edged cautiously, and I saw treachery in his eye.

What devil of delay possessed him to slip on his spring overcoat, I cannot tell. They say a slight noise rouses a sleeper more surely than a heavy one, and scarcely had the doctor settled himself in his sleeves than the giant waked and seized that silk-faced collar in a hot right hand. There was rage in his face-rage and the realisation of new emotions.

"I'm--I'm not so comfortable as I were," he said from the deeps of his interior. "You'll wait along o' me, you will." He breathed heavily through shut lips.

Now, if there was one thing more than another upon which the doctor had dwelt in his conversation with me, it was upon the essential law-abidingness, not to say gentleness, of his much-misrepresented country. And yet (truly, it may have been no more than a b.u.t.ton that irked him) I saw his hand travel backwards to his right hip, clutch at something, and come away empty.

"He won't kill you," I said. "He'll probably sue you in court, if I know my own people. Better give him some money from time to time."

"If he keeps quiet till the stuff gets in its work," the doctor answered, "I'm all right. If he doesn't... my name is Emory--Julian B.

Emory--193 'Steenth Street, corner of Madison and--"

"I feel worse than I've ever felt," said the navvy, with suddenness.

"What-did-you-give-me-the-drink-for?"

The matter seemed to be so purely personal that I withdrew to a strategic position on the overhead bridge, and, abiding in the exact centre, looked on from afar.

I could see the white road that ran across the shoulder of Salisbury Plain, unshaded for mile after mile, and a dot in the middle distance, the back of the one porter returning to Framlynghame Admiral, if such a place existed, till seven forty-five. The bell of a church invisible clanked softly. There was a rustle in the horse-chestnuts to the left of the line, and the sound of sheep cropping close.

The peace of Nirvana lay upon the land, and, brooding in it, my elbow on the warm iron girder of the footbridge (it is a forty-shilling fine to cross by any other means), I perceived, as never before, how the consequences of our acts run eternal through time and through s.p.a.ce. If we impinge never so slightly upon the life of a fellow-mortal, the touch of our personality, like the ripple of a stone cast into a pond, widens and widens in unending circles across the aeons, till the far-off G.o.ds themselves cannot say where action ceases. Also, it was I who had silently set before the doctor the tumbler of the first-cla.s.s lavatory compartment now speeding Plymouthward. Yet I was, in spirit at least, a million leagues removed from that unhappy man of another nationality, who had chosen to thrust an inexpert finger into the workings of an alien life. The machinery was dragging him up and down the sunlit platform. The two men seemed to be learning polka-mazurkas together, and the burden of their song, borne by one deep voice, was: "What did you give me the drink for?"

I saw the flash of silver in the doctor's hand. The navvy took it and pocketed it with his left; but never for an instant did his strong right leave the doctor's coat-collar, and as the crisis approached, louder and louder rose his bull-like roar: "What did you give me the drink for?"

They drifted under the great twelve-inch pinned timbers of the foot-bridge towards the bench, and, I gathered, the time was very near at hand. The stuff was getting in its work. Blue, white, and blue again, rolled over the navvy's face in waves, till all settled to one rich clay-bank yellow and--that fell which fell.

I thought of the blowing up of h.e.l.l Gate; of the geysers in the Yellowstone Park; of Jonah and his whale: but the lively original, as I watched it foreshortened from above, exceeded all these things. He staggered to the bench, the heavy wooden seat cramped with iron cramps into the enduring stone, and clung there with his left hand. It quivered and shook, as a breakwater-pile quivers to the rush of landward-racing seas; nor was there lacking when he caught his breath, the "scream of a maddened beach dragged down by the tide." His right hand was upon the doctor's collar, so that the two shook to one paroxysm, pendulums vibrating together, while I, apart, shook with them.

It was colossal-immense; but of certain manifestations the English language stops short. French only, the caryatid French of Victor Hugo, would have described it; so I mourned while I laughed, hastily shuffling and discarding inadequate adjectives. The vehemence of the shock spent itself, and the sufferer half fell, half knelt, across the bench. He was calling now upon G.o.d and his wife, huskily, as the wounded bull calls upon the unscathed herd to stay. Curiously enough, he used no bad language: that had gone from him with the rest. The doctor exhibited gold. It was taken and retained. So, too, was the grip on the coat-collar.

"If I could stand," boomed the giant, despairingly, "I'd smash you--you an' your drinks. I'm dyin'--dyin'--dyin'!"

"That's what you think," said the doctor. "You'll find it will do you a lot of good"; and, making a virtue of a somewhat imperative necessity, he added: "I'll stay by you. If you'd let go of me a minute I'd give you something that would settle you."

"You've settled me now, you d.a.m.ned anarchist. Takin' the bread out of the mouth of an English workin'man! But I'll keep 'old of you till I'm well or dead. I never did you no 'arm. S'pose I were a little full. They pumped me out once at Guy's with a stummick-pump. I could see that, but I can't see this 'ere, an' it's killin' of me by slow degrees."