by Ruskin Bond
‘What was you pleased to say?’ whined Carnehan. ‘They took them without any sound. Not a little whisper all along the snow, not though the King knocked down the first man that set hand on him—not though old Peachey fired his last cartridge into the brown of ‘em. Not a single solitary sound did those swines make. They just closed up tight, and I tell you their furs stunk. There was a man called Billy Fish, a good friend of us all, and they cut his throat, Sir, then and there, like a pig; and the King kicks up the bloody snow and says:—“We’ve had a dashed fine run for our money. What’s coming next?” But Peachey, Peachey Taliaferro, I tell you, Sir, in confidence as betwixt two friends, he lost his head, Sir. No, he didn’t neither. The King lost his head, so he did, all along o’ one of those cunning rope-bridges. Kindly let me have the paper-cutter, Sir. It tilted this way. They marched him a mile across that snow to a rope-bridge over a ravine with a river at the bottom. You may have seen such. They prodded him behind like an ox. “Damn your eyes!” says thy King. “D’you suppose I can’t die like a gentleman?” He turns to Peachey—Peachey that was crying like a child. “I’ve brought you to this, Peachey,” says he. “Brought you out of your happy life to be killed in Kafiristan, where you was late Commander-in-Chief of the Emperor’s forces. Say you forgive me, Peachey.” “I do,” says Peachey. “Fully and freely do I forgive you, Dan.” “Shake hands, Peachey,” says he. “I’m going now.” Out he goes, looking neither right nor left, and when he was plumb in the middle of those dizzy dancing ropes. “Cut, you beggars,” he shouts; and they cut, and old Dan fell, turning round and round and round twenty thousand miles, for he took half an hour to fall till he struck the water, and I could see his body caught on a rock with the gold crown close beside.
‘But do you know what they did to Peachey between two pine trees? They crucified him, Sir, as Peachey’s hand will show. They used wooden pegs for his hands and his feet; and he didn’t die. He hung there and screamed, and they took him down next day, and said it was a miracle that he wasn’t dead. They took him down—poor old Peachey that hadn’t done them any harm—that hadn’t done them any . . . .’
He rocked to and fro and wept bitterly, wiping his eyes with the back of his scarred hands and moaning like a child for some ten minutes.
‘They was cruel enough to feed him up in the temple, because they said he was more of a God than old Daniel that was a man. Then they turned him out on the snow, and told him to go home, and Peachey came home in about a year, begging along the roads quite safe; for Daniel Dravot he walked before and said:—“Come along, Peachey. It’s a big thing we’re doing.” The mountains they danced at night, and the mountains they tried to fall on Peachey’s head, but Dan he held up his hand, and Peachey came along bent double. He never let go of Dan’s hand, and he never let go of Dan’s head. They gave it to him as a present in the temple to remind him not to come again, and though the crown was pure gold and Peachey was starving, never would Peachey sell the same. You knew Dravot, Sir! You knew Right Worshipful Brother Dravot! Look at him now!’
He fumbled in the mass of rags round his bent waist; brought out a black horsehair bag embroidered with silver thread; and shook therefrom on to my table—the dried, withered head of Daniel Dravot! The morning sun that had long been paling the lamps struck the red beard and blind sunken eyes; struck, too, a heavy circlet of gold studded with raw turquoises, that Carnehan placed tenderly on the battered temples.
‘You behold now,’ said Carnehan, ‘the Emperor in his habit as he lived—the King of Kafiristan with his crown upon his head. Poor old Daniel that was a monarch once!’
I shuddered, for in spite of defacements manifold, I recognized the head of the man of Marwar Junction. Carnehan rose to go. I attempted to stop him. He was not fit to walk abroad. ‘Let me take away the whisky and give me a little money,’ he gasped. ‘I was a King once. I’ll go to the Deputy Commissioner and ask to set in the Poorhouse till I get my health. No, thank you, I can’t wait till you get a carriage for me. I’ve urgent private affairs—in the south—at Marwar’
He shambled out of the office and departed in the direction of the Deputy Commissioner’s house. That day at noon I had occasion to go down the blinding hot Mall, and I saw a crooked man crawling along the white dust of the roadside, his hat in his hand, quavering dolorously after the fashion of street-singers at Home. There was not a soul in sight and he was out of all possible earshot of the houses. And he sang through his nose, turning his head from right to left:
The Son of Man goes forth to war,
A golden crown to gain;
His blood-red banner streams afar—
Who follows in his train?
I waited to hear no more, but put the poor wretch into my carriage and drove him off to the nearest missionary for eventual transfer to the Asylum. He repeated the hymn twice while he was with me whom he did not in the least recognize, and I left him singing it to the missionary.
Two days later I inquired after his welfare of the Superintendent of the Asylum.
‘He was admitted suffering from sun-stroke. He died early yesterday morning,’ said the Superintendent. ‘Is it true that he was half an hour bareheaded in the sun at midday?’
‘Yes,’ said I, ‘but do you happen to know if he had anything upon him by any chance when he died?’
‘Not to my knowledge,’ said the Superintendent.
And there the matter rests.
By Cow-Catcher and Trolley
Anonymous
THERE ARE MORE WAYS THAN ONE of travelling on a railway, but they do not come the way of all. It must have been a desire of every boy and indeed of many a man to ride in the cab of an engine not to speak of a journey upon the cow-catcher, while, for some, even the slow hand-pushed trolley has a certain fascination. And in this world, when anticipation is so often the better part of a thing, it is a consolation to find that these boyish ideals of the joyrides to be obtained on engines and trolleys are not entirely incapable of fulfilment.
When you clamber to the foot-plate and survey the world from a proud height not only physically but mentally—for you tell yourself that it is only privileged persons who can enjoy the experience you are about to undergo—the feeling is somewhat akin to that of mounting a seventeen-hands horse—at least that is what suggests itself. One is so high up in the world that things seem dwarfed, but the size of the locomotive itself—an elephantine monster from the ground—decreases perceptibly. The next impression is the change of the field of vision. One is used to a side view from a train; up here in the cab one gets a sight of the line from a new angle and along the great black shiny flank of the ‘iron horse.’ One is surprised somewhat at both the extent and smallness of the country taken in; the long stretch of open line with the converging rails waiting to be pinched off into nothingness where the perspective takes final effect and the extraordinary reduction round curves in cuttings or jungle. What with the smokestack and the shoulder of the engine the view from the outer side of the curve is as limited as that on the inner. And one no longer wonders why, at times, there is so much whistling from the engine. The driver is but giving a warning to trolleymen and permanent-way repairers of his presence, for it is astonishing how quietly a train may steal up when a cutting softens the sound of the reverberating snorts of the locomotive and deadens the roar of the wheels. On a downgrade, with steam shut off, a heavy train will slip along with comparatively no sound whatever to those on the line ahead. Hence the warning note when a sharp curve is at hand.
But perhaps the most startling revelation is the strenuous life of the stoker. He adds fuel to the roaring leaping yellow flames with their background of glowing red embers on the average once very two minutes. Open swings the door of the fire box and a great heat scorches the body and limbs of those on the foot-plate. A ruddy light gleams in the dark corners of the cab. The heat seems to glance and flicker about one as the flames dance within their bright prison. But the fireman, regardless of the tremendous heat, of the glare th
at seems to sear the eye-balls, of the scorching wind that dries up the throat, is flinging in shovelfuls of coal, sprinkling them to right and left, distributing them evenly over the surface of the fire. His last shovelful is bestowed with a neat turn of the wrist as the shovel rests on the edge of the furnace-opening that flings a last layer in all directions. Clang! The heat and the glare are cut off as if by a magic, and the fireman goes to the side of the cab for a breath of fresh air; but in sixty seconds he is back again. Clang! Again that spectacle of ravening flames awaiting food, that terrible scorching, that ghastly glare; again the speedy spadework; again the grateful relief. So the fireman gets through his spell, and if ever a man earned his pay it is surely he. Behind him a khalassi is shovelling coal down from the tender, breaking up the food for the giant’s searing maw; sweeping up and keeping everything ship-shape. The driver, his eyes on the line, his hand within easy reach of the whistle cord, is a busy man, but his business is more that of the brain and the eye than of the hand. The general impression of life on the foot-plate is that it is one of the most strenuous modern conditions have yet produced.
But travelling in the cab must give place so far as new sensations go to riding on the cow-catcher. Here you are as a pioneer; the first explorer in a new country; the advance guard of many things. Seated on the steel platform beside the couplings you have the warmth of the engine at your back, but the wind of your passage chills you through. The actual riding is comfortable enough barring a crampy feeling where your knees touch the edges of steel and a desire to stretch your legs and lean back that needs to be kept in hand. But you forget these little disabilities in the joy of a new movement; in the whistle of the air about your ears; in the thunder of the ordered power behind. Far ahead of you stretches the steel road, two shining bars that gleam and glitter. And as fast as your speed eats them up new distances are unrolling, just as a great carpet might be flung out by the skilful hand of a giant shopman. The scenery flits by like a cinematograph picture; new vistas open out in front; the sleepers rise up to strike you, but they are always too late. Here the train is clearing miles of ghats and the atmosphere is undergoing curious changes of temperature. Deep in the cuttings the air is damp and cool—almost shrewd; out in the open the normal heat returns, tempered by the flow of air. Round the curves the whistle shrieks in your ear; on the down grade you can enjoy the smooth travelling as the great load of steel and wood and human life slips along under its own momentum; climbing, the engine pulsates, throbs, bounds under the impulse of the drive and clatter of the piston rods. Darkness is drawing in and the signal lights begin to glimmer amid the gloom of the forest. The air grows colder and in the jungles it nips you through until you long for warmer clothing and warmer air. The night mists are creeping up; shadows are falling across the line; a cheeky jackal refuses to move, despite the deep-throated blast of the whistle, until the train is thirty yards from him and then he bounds up the cutting; the sky darkens and the glow of the sunset deepens. The rush of the air is driving tears from your eyes and demands the application of your handkerchief; the great locomotive is thrusting itself along with a thunderous roar and over the great black shoulder of the engine the evening star gleams in a dying field of saffron.
After a journey in a cow-catcher a trolley-ride would seem slow by comparison. But there are such things as motor-trollies and a motor-trolley is a distinct sensation. It is a motor chassis on four small railway wheels but with no steering gear. But what it lacks in appearance it makes up in speed, vibration, and clatter, and the man who said that when you had finished you would not be able to hear anyone speak was not exaggerating. The most curious thing about a motor-trolley is that your feet are nearly touching the track, and the result is that sleepers and ballast seem to be preparing for a combined attack upon your legs which they are always too late to deliver. Every sleeper, every stone, raises itself to strike, but slips away, indistinguishable in the mist of speed. Over bridges, the gaunt black sleepers jump up singly one after the other, only to be merged into a mass as they surge beneath you. Conversation is impossible. A shouted remark, directed by a curved hand to your ear, comes faintly as a lengthy hail; your own voice in replay sounds like a wheezy time-expired gramophone doing its utmost with a worn-out needle on a cracked, uneven record. And all the time the hot air is dashing by at thirty miles an hour, you are swaying from side to side as the trolley responds to her driving power and the rattle of the wheels on the rails and the rattle of the engine combine in one hoarse roar.
After this a push trolley is a simple affair. And yet it has its points. For one thing conversation is possible. One might debate the Baconian theory, or discourse on philosophy without distraction while the trolley slips along the line. And yet the trolley is wonderful—or at least its coolies are. To most of us walking on the metals would be a feat of balancing that would entitle us to appear as a turn on the ‘halls.’ We should achieve it only by much swaying and beating of the air with the hands. But the trolley-men in India not only progress along the lines, but they run; one foot over the other, and they never put a foot wrong. Moreover, they cut along at an amazing rate, running with the body well forward and the long stride that tells of the athlete. And when they have the trolley going well they swing up to the platform and sit on the handle-bar with which they have been pushing; only to drop unerringly back again, feet in the correct position on the line, when the speed shows signs of slackening.
The Bold ’Prentice
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 employees, 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 dock-yards, 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.