Penguin Book of Indian Railway Stories

by Ruskin Bond

  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 saw 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 total 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.

  ‘That 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 this 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 sit 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.

  Snow-Leopard

  Flora Annie Steel

  THE GUARD OF THE TRAIN STOOD at the doorway of our first-class compartment apologetically. ‘I am afraid gentlemen,’ he said, ‘that you will have to wait for your dinners. There has been a slight smash just up the line and it may be the matter of an hour and a half before we can get on.’

  ‘And there isn’t a restaurant car on the train,’ I grumbled, ‘just like England.’

  The guard touched his hat and went forward with his tale of woe. The only other occupant of the compartment, reached up for his bundle of rugs, undid it, and spread one over his knees; for dusk was on us, and it became cold in the high Cumberland passes.

  I literally gasped, for the rug in question was simply the most beautiful snow-leopard skin I have ever seen, and it was mounted á distraction on cream-coloured velvet embroidered in gold and silver. Having hunted for many years in the Himalayas I knew something about snow-leopards and I could not repress the instant remark.

  ‘What a splendid skin! May I ask if you shot it yourself?’

  The owner, a man with dreamy eyes, replied absently, ‘I did not.’ And I noticed that, as he spoke, he stroked the long silky hair, so unlike that of a beast of prey, with the caressing touch one would have given a favourite dog.

 
‘Then if you bought it you must have paid a very long price for it,’ I remarked again, for, as I have said, the skin was one in a thousand; possibly a million.

  My fellow traveller smiled; a most attractive smile.

  ‘I did not buy it either,’ he replied, ‘and it was not given to me—it came to me in a rather—I may say an extraordinary way. As we are here for—at any rate some little time—I will tell you the tale if you care to hear it.’

  I jumped at the offer, and, settling himself comfortably with the wonderful rug well tucked round him, my fellow traveller began. He had a musical voice full of inflected cadences to which it was extremely pleasant to listen.

  ‘It was a good many years ago when I was up in the wilds near Nepal. I was a bit of a climber and though I never attempted Everest—no one did in those days—I had managed a good many peaks. So, though it was a trifle late in the season, I determined on shortening my return to the plains by going over a col into the next valley. At the last moment, however, too much snow was reported for the baggage animals, so I started them early to do a roundabout by a forced march to my next camping ground, while I stopped behind to get a rare plant which I had located at the top of some rather inaccessible cliffs, and then, at my leisure, to go over the col by myself. The cliffs, however, proved more inaccessible than I had anticipated, and it was well afternoon before I started on my fifteen-mile trudge. As I have said, it was by no means difficult going, but the snow was very heavy quite obscuring tracks, and more than once I took a blind alley ending in hopeless glacier; for on both sides of the col there were peaks not over high but practically unclimbable at any rate without paraphernalia. The result being, that as the light began to fade, I began to wonder where I was exactly. If you are not a climber you will not understand what that means. It means that you start afresh. I was young and strong; so it was some time before any anxiety took hold of me, in fact I doubt if I ever was anxious. As I plodded on doggedly, the snow hardening as the cold increased, I admitted calmly that I had lost my way and that ere long I might have to dig myself in as a last chance. It was one of those moonless Indian nights when everyone of the millions and millions of stars shines a different colour. All round me, save at my feet where the snow lay like a winding sheet, that glorious jewelled canopy! Precipices on either side of me; it was as if I were climbing to the very stars themselves. I must have fallen down some declivity or other, I think, for as I stumbled on, determined to do my best to the last, I saw dimly that I was in a sort of amphitheatre of high cliffs. Somewhere in them there might be a rift, a cave, some shelter.