A Book of Railway Journeys

by Ludovic Kennedy

  The buildings get higher, the streets more uncountable. How does one find one’s way in such a confusion? It is dusk, and the lights are coming on in the streets.

  One of the men points for him.

  —Johannesburg, umfundisi.

  He sees great high buildings; there are red and green lights on them, almost as tall as the buildings. They go on and off. Water comes out of a bottle, till the glass is full. Then the lights go out. And when they come on again, lo the bottle is full and upright, and the glass empty. And there goes the bottle over again. Black and white, it says, black and white, though it is red and green. It is too much to understand.

  He is silent, his head aches, he is afraid. There is this railway station to come, this great place with all its tunnels under the ground. The train stops, under a great roof, and there are thousands of people. Steps go down into the earth, and here is the tunnel under the ground. Black people, white people, some going, some coming, so many that the tunnel is full. He goes carefully that he may not bump anybody, holding tightly on to his bag. He comes out into a great hall, and the stream goes up the steps, and here he is out in the street. The noise is immense. Cars and buses one behind the other, more than he has ever imagined. The stream goes over the street, but remembering Mpanza’s son, he is afraid to follow. Lights change from green to red, and back again to green. He has heard that. When it is green, you may go. But when he starts across, a great bus swings across the path. There is some law of it that he does not understand, and he retreats again. He finds himself a place against the wall, he will look as though he is waiting for some purpose. His heart beats like that of a child, there is nothing to do or think to stop it. Tixo, watch over me, he says to himself. Tixo, watch over me.

  ALAN PATON,

  Cry, the Beloved Country

  The great race east

  Harvey Cheyne, a multi-millionaire living in San Diego, California, believes that his only son Harvey has drowned in the North Atlantic after falling off an ocean liner. When, months later, he receives a telegram from his son that he has arrived safely in Gloucester, Massachusetts (having been picked up by a Grand Banks fishing boat), he hires a special train for himself and his wife to go to him.

  It was a busy week-end among the wires; for, now that their anxiety was removed, men and cities hastened to accommodate.

  Los Angeles called to San Diego and Barstow that the Southern California engineers might know and be ready in their lonely round-houses; Barstow passed the word to the Atlantic and Pacific; and Albuquerque flung it the whole length of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe management, even into Chicago. An engine, combination-car with crew, and the great and gilded “Constance” private car were to be “expedited” over those two thousand three hundred and fifty miles. The train would take precedence of one hundred and seventy-seven others meeting and passing; despatchers and crews of every one of those said trains must be notified. Sixteen locomotives, sixteen engineers, and sixteen firemen would be needed—each and every one the best available. Two and one-half minutes would be allowed for changing engines; three for watering and two for coaling. “Warn the men, and arrange tanks and chutes accordingly; for Harvey Cheyne is in a hurry, a hurry—a hurry,” sang the wires. “Forty miles an hour will be expected, and division superintendents will accompany this special over their respective divisions. From San Diego to Sixteenth Street, Chicago, let the magic carpet be laid down. Hurry! oh, hurry!”

  “It will be hot,” said Cheyne, as they rolled out of San Diego in the dawn of Sunday. “We’re going to hurry, mamma, just as fast as ever we can; but I really don’t think there’s any good of your putting on your bonnet and gloves yet. You’d much better lie down and take your medicine. I’d play you a game o’ dominoes, but it’s Sunday.”

  “I’ll be good. Oh, I will be good. Only—taking off my bonnet makes me feel as if we’d never get there.”

  “Try to sleep a little, mamma, and we’ll be in Chicago before you know.”

  “But it’s Boston, father. Tell them to hurry.”

  The six-foot drivers were hammering their way to San Bernardino and the Mohave wastes, but this was no grade for speed. That would come later. The heat of the desert followed the heat of the hills as they turned east to the Needles and the Colorado River. The car cracked in the utter drouth and glare, and they put crushed ice to Mrs. Cheyne’s neck, and toiled up the long, long grades, past Ash Fork, towards Flagstaff, where the forests and quarries are, under the dry, remote skies. The needle of the speed indicator flicked and wagged to and fro; the cinders rattled on the roof, and a whirl of dust sucked after the whirling wheels. The crew of the combination sat on their bunks, panting in their shirt-sleeves, and Cheyne found himself among them shouting old, old stories of the railroad that every trainman knows, above the roar of the car. He told them about his son, and how the sea had given up its dead, and they nodded and spat and rejoiced with him; asked after “her, back there,” and whether she could stand it if the engineer “let her out a piece,” and Cheyne thought she could. Accordingly, the great fire-horse was “let out” from Flagstaff to Winslow till a division superintendent protested.

  But Mrs. Cheyne, in the boudoir state-room, where the French maid, sallow-white with fear, clung to the silver door-handle, only moaned a little and begged her husband to bid them “hurry.” And so they dropped the dry sands and moonstruck rocks of Arizona behind them, and grilled on till the crash of the couplings and the wheeze of the brake-hose told them they were at Coolidge by the Continental Divide.

  Three bold and experienced men—cool, confident, and dry when they began; white, quivering, and wet when they finished their trick at those terrible wheels—swung her over the great lift from Albuquerque to Glorietta and beyond Springer, up and up to the Raton Tunnel on the State line, whence they dropped rocking into La Junta, had sight of the Arkansaw, and tore down the long slope to Dodge City, where Cheyne took comfort once again from setting his watch an hour ahead.

  There was very little talk in the car. The secretary and typewriter sat together on the stamped Spanish leather cushions by the plate-glass observation window at the rear end, watching the surge and ripple of the ties crowded back behind them, and, it is believed, making notes of the scenery. Cheyne moved nervously between his own extravagant gorgeousness and the naked necessity of the combination, an unlit cigar in his teeth, till the pitying crews forgot that he was their tribal enemy, and did their best to entertain him.

  At night the bunched electrics lit up that distressful palace of all the luxuries, and they fared sumptuously, swinging on through the emptiness of abject desolation. Now they heard the swish of a water-tank, and the guttural voice of a Chinaman, the clink-clink of hammers that tested the Krupp-steel wheels, and the oath of a tramp chased off the rear-platform; now the solid crash of coal shot into the tender; and now a beating back of noises as they flew past a waiting train. Now they looked out into great abysses, a trestle purring beneath their tread, or up to rocks that barred out half the stars. Now scaur and ravine changed and rolled back to jagged mountains on the horizon’s edge, and now broke into hills lower and lower, till at last came the true plains.

  At Dodge City an unknown hand threw in a copy of a Kansas paper containing some sort of an interview with Harvey, who had evidently fallen in with an enterprising reporter, telegraphed on from Boston. The joyful journalese revealed that it was beyond question their boy, and it soothed Mrs. Cheyne for a while. Her one word “hurry” was conveyed by the crews to the engineers at Nickerson, Topeka, and Marceline, where the grades are easy, and they brushed the continent behind them. Towns and villages were close together now, and a man could feel here that he moved among people.

  “I can’t see the dial, and my eyes ache so. What are we doing?”

  “The very best we can, mamma. There’s no sense in getting in before the Limited. We’d only have to wait.”

  “I don’t care. I want to feel we’re moving. Sit down and tell me the miles.”


  Cheyne sat down and read the dial for her (there were some miles which stand for records to this day), but the seventy-foot car never changed its long steamer-like roll, moving through the heat with the hum of a giant bee. Yet the speed was not enough for Mrs. Cheyne; and the heat, the remorseless August heat, was making her giddy; the clock hands would not move, and when, oh, when would they be in Chicago?

  It is not true that, as they changed engines at Fort Madison, Cheyne passed over to the Amalgamated Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers an endowment sufficient to enable them to fight him and his fellows on equal terms for evermore. He paid his obligations to engineers and firemen as he believed they deserved, and only his bank knows what he gave the crews who had sympathized with him. It is on record that the last crew took entire charge of switching operations at Sixteenth Street, because “she” was in a doze at last, and Heaven was to help anyone who bumped her.

  Now the highly-paid specialist who conveys the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Limited from Chicago to Elkhart is something of an autocrat, and he does not approve of being told how to back up to a car. None the less he handled the “Constance” as if she might have been a load of dynamite, and when the crew rebuked him, they did it in whispers and dumb show.

  “Pshaw!” said the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe men, discussing life, later; “we weren’t runnin’ for a record. Harvey Cheyne’s wife, she were sick back, an’ we didn’t want to jounce her. Come to think of it, our runnin’ time from San Diego to Chicago was 57.54. You can tell that to them Eastern way-trains. When we’re tryin’ for a record, we’ll let you know.”

  To the Western man (though this would not please either city), Chicago and Boston are cheek by jowl, and some railroads encourage the delusion. The Limited whirled the “Constance” into Buffalo, and the arms of the New York Central and Hudson River (illustrious magnates with white whiskers and gold charms on their watch-chains boarded her here to talk a little business to Cheyne), who slid her gracefully into Albany, where the Boston and Albany completed the run from tidewater to tide-water—total time, eighty-seven hours and thirty-five minutes, or three days, fifteen hours and one-half. Harvey was waiting for them.

  RUDYARD KIPLING,

  Captains Courageous (1897)

  The story-teller

  It was a hot afternoon, and the railway carriage was correspondingly sultry, and the next stop was at Templecombe, nearly an hour ahead. The occupants of the carriage were a small girl, and a smaller girl, and a small boy. An aunt belonging to the children occupied one corner seat, and the further corner seat on the opposite side was occupied by a bachelor who was a stranger to their party, but the small girls and the small boy emphatically occupied the compartment. Both the aunt and the children were conversational in a limited, persistent way, reminding one of the attentions of a housefly that refused to be discouraged. Most of the aunt’s remarks seemed to begin with “Don’t,” and nearly all of the children’s remarks began with “Why?” The bachelor said something out loud.

  “Don’t, Cyril, don’t,” exclaimed the aunt, as the small boy began smacking the cushions of the seat, producing a cloud of dust at each blow.

  “Come and look out of the window,” she added.

  The child moved reluctantly to the window. “Why are those sheep being driven out of that field?” he asked.

  “I expect they are being driven to another field where there is more grass,” said the aunt weakly.

  “But there is lots of grass in that field,” protested the boy; “there’s nothing else but grass there. Aunt, there’s lots of grass in that field.”

  “Perhaps the grass in the other field is better,” suggested the aunt fatuously.

  “Why is it better?” came the swift, inevitable question.

  “Oh, look at those cows!” exclaimed the aunt. Nearly every field along the line had contained cows or bullocks, but she spoke as though she were drawing attention to a rarity.

  “Why is the grass in the other field better?” persisted Cyril.

  The frown on the bachelor’s face was deepening to a scowl. He was a hard, unsympathetic man, the aunt decided in her mind. She was utterly unable to come to any satisfactory decision about the grass in the other field.

  The smaller girl created a diversion by beginning to recite “On the Road to Mandalay.” She only knew the first line, but she put her limited knowledge to the fullest possible use. She repeated the line over and over again in a dreamy but resolute and very audible voice; it seemed to the bachelor as though some one had had a bet with her that she could not repeat the line aloud two thousand times without stopping. Whoever it was who had made the wager was likely to lose his bet.

  “Come over here and listen to a story,” said the aunt, when the bachelor had looked twice at her and once at the communication cord.

  The children moved listlessly towards the aunt’s end of the carriage. Evidently her reputation as a story-teller did not rank high in their estimation.

  In a low, confidential voice, interrupted at frequent intervals by loud, petulant questions from her listeners, she began an unenterprising and deplorably uninteresting story about a little girl who was good, and made friends with every one on account of her goodness, and was finally saved from a mad bull by a number of rescuers who admired her moral character.

  “Wouldn’t they have saved her if she hadn’t been good?” demanded the bigger of the small girls. It was exactly the question that the bachelor had wanted to ask.

  “Well, yes,” admitted the aunt lamely, “but I don’t think they would have run quite so fast to her help if they had not liked her so much.”

  “It’s the stupidest story I’ve ever heard,” said the bigger of the small girls, with immense conviction.

  “I didn’t listen after the first bit, it was so stupid,” said Cyril.

  The smaller girl made no actual comment on the story, but she had long ago recommenced a murmured repetition of her favourite line.

  “You don’t seem to be a success as a story-teller,” said the bachelor suddenly from his corner.

  The aunt bristled in instant defence at this unexpected attack.

  “It’s a very difficult thing to tell stories that children can both understand and appreciate,” she said stiffly.

  “I don’t agree with you,” said the bachelor.

  “Perhaps you would like to tell them a story,” was the aunt’s retort.

  “Tell us a story,” demanded the bigger of the small girls.

  “Once upon a time,” began the bachelor, “there was a little girl called Bertha, who was extraordinarily good.”

  The children’s momentarily-aroused interest began at once to flicker; all stories seemed dreadfully alike, no matter who told them.

  “She did all that she was told, she was always truthful, she kept her clothes clean, ate milk puddings as though they were jam tarts, learned her lessons perfectly, and was polite in her manners.”

  “Was she pretty?” asked the bigger of the small girls.

  “Not as pretty as any of you,” said the bachelor, “but she was horribly good.”

  There was a wave of reaction in favour of the story; the word horrible in connection with goodness was a novelty that commended itself. It seemed to introduce a ring of truth that was absent from the aunt’s tales of infant life.

  “She was so good,” continued the bachelor, “that she won several medals for goodness, which she always wore, pinned on to her dress. There was a medal for obedience, another medal for punctuality, and a third for good behaviour. They were large metal medals and they clicked against one another as she walked. No other child in the town where she lived had as many as three medals, so everybody knew that she must be an extra good child.”

  “Horribly good,” quoted Cyril.

  “Everybody talked about her goodness, and the Prince of the country got to hear about it, and he said that as she was so very good she might be allowed once a week to walk in his park, which was just
outside the town. It was a beautiful park, and no children were ever allowed in it, so it was a great honour for Bertha to be allowed to go there.”

  “Were there any sheep in the park?” demanded Cyril.

  “No,” said the bachelor, “there were no sheep.”

  “Why weren’t there any sheep?” came the inevitable question arising out of that answer.

  The aunt permitted herself a smile, which might almost have been described as a grin.

  “There were no sheep in the park,” said the bachelor, “because the Prince’s mother had once had a dream that her son would either be killed by a sheep or else by a clock falling on him. For that reason the Prince never kept a sheep in his park or a clock in his palace.”

  The aunt suppressed a gasp of admiration.

  “Was the Prince killed by a sheep or by a clock?” asked Cyril.

  “He is still alive, so we can’t tell whether the dream will come true,” said the bachelor unconcernedly; “anyway, there were no sheep in the park, but there were lots of little pigs running all over the place.”

  “What colour were they?”

  “Black with white faces, white with black spots, black all over, grey with white patches, and some were white all over.”

  The story-teller paused to let a full idea of the park’s treasures sink into the children’s imaginations; then he resumed:

  “Bertha was rather sorry to find that there were no flowers in the park. She had promised her aunts, with tears in her eyes, that she would not pick any of the kind Prince’s flowers, and she had meant to keep her promise, so of course it made her feel silly to find that there were no flowers to pick.”

  “Why weren’t there any flowers?”