A Book of Railway Journeys

by Ludovic Kennedy

  He could not do that. But the money was gone and Grandma would not get a penny of it. How could he go and stay there after that? But he couldn’t go home again either. And all because of a low, mean chap who offered you chocolate, and then pretended to be asleep so that he could steal your money. It really was a terrible thing to have happened.

  But Emil soon sniffed back the tears and looked about him. He might pull the communication cord, and the train would stop and the guard come along to find out what was wrong.

  “What’s the matter?” he’d ask, and Emil would tell him:

  “My money’s been stolen.”

  But as like as not, the guard would only say, “Well, better take care of it next time!” Then he’d be sure to ask for Emil’s name and address.

  “We shall have to write to your mother,” he’d say. “Penalty for improper use of the communication cord—five pounds. She’ll have to pay up, you know. Now get back into the train—quick.”

  Express trains have corridors so that passengers can walk from one end to the other. If Emil had been on one of those, he could have gone along to the guard’s van straight away and reported the theft. But his was a slow train. It had no corridor, and there was nothing he could do until it stopped at the next station. By that time the man in the bowler hat might be miles away. Emil had no idea when he had left the train. He began to wonder what the time was, and how soon they would reach Berlin.

  Out of the window he could see blocks of flats and houses with flower gardens, and then a lot of dirty red chimney stacks. Perhaps it was Berlin. He would go and find the guard at the next station, and tell him what had happened—oh, but then of course they would report it to the police.

  Oh dear! The police! If he got mixed up with the police now, Sergeant Jeschke would be bound to hear about it and bring up that matter of the statue. “Ah,” he’d say, “I have my suspicions about that boy, Emil Tischbein. First he defaces a fine statue here in Neustadt with chalks, then he says he’s been robbed of seven pounds on the way to Berlin. How are we to know that he ever had seven pounds? In my experience anyone capable of defacing a monument is quite equal to making up a story like that. He has probably buried the money somewhere, or even swallowed it. Don’t waste your time looking for a thief. If there ever was one, it was probably Emil Tischbein himself. I advise you to arrest him at once, Inspector!”

  It was horrible. He could not even go to the police for help.

  Emil dragged his suitcase down from the rack, and put on his cap. He stuck the pin carefully back in the lapel of his coat, and was ready to get out. He had no idea what to do next, but he could not bear to stay in that compartment any longer. The train slowed down, and through the window he saw rows and rows of shining rails. There were a lot of platforms, too, and he saw porters running along beside the carriages, ready to help people with their luggage. Then the train stopped.

  Out on the platform the name of the station was written up in large letters, zoological gardens. Carriage doors flew open and a lot of people got out. Some had friends waiting for them, and they waved and called to one another.

  Emil leaned out of the window of his carriage to look for the guard. Then suddenly, a little distance away in the stream of departing passengers, he saw a bowler hat. At once he thought—“Ah! Mr Grundeis!” Had he not left the train after all, but only skipped out of one compartment and into another while the train stopped and Emil was asleep? Without another thought, Emil was out on the platform. He forgot the flowers on the luggage rack, but just had time to scramble back after them, dashing in and out of the train as quickly as he could. Then, flowers in one hand and suitcase in the other, he scurried off towards the exit. People leaving the train were packed tight near the barrier, and could hardly move. In the crush, Emil found he had lost sight of the bowler hat, but he blundered on, stumbling round people’s legs and bumping into them with his suitcase; but he kept doggedly on till he saw it again. But then, all at once there were two bowler hats.

  The suitcase was so heavy it slowed Emil down terribly, but it might get stolen if he put it down somewhere so that he could run after his man. He just had to plunge on, and at last came nearly level with the bowler hats. But which was the right one? One man seemed too short. Emil twisted in and out of the crowd after the other, like a Red Indian on the trail, and was just in time to see his man push through the barrier, evidently in a great hurry.

  “Just you wait, you dirty rotten thief,” he thought to himself, “I’ll catch you yet.”

  He gave up his ticket, changed the suitcase to his other hand, wedged the flowers firmly under his right arm, and ran down the stairs.

  “Now for it!” he thought.

  ERICH KASTNER,

  Emil and the Detectives

  (trans. Eileen Hall)

  Mr. Boot and Mr. Salter

  After an early luncheon, William went to say goodbye to his grandmother. She looked at him with doleful, mad eyes. “Going to London, eh? Well I hardly suppose I shall be alive when you return. Wrap up warm, dear.” It was eternal winter in Mrs. Boot’s sunny bedroom.

  All the family who had the use of their legs attended on the steps to see William off; Priscilla bathed in tears of penitence. Nannie Bloggs sent him down three golden sovereigns. Aunt Anne’s motor car was there to take him away. At the last moment Uncle Theodore attempted to get in at the off side, but was detected and deterred. “Just wanted to see a chap in Jermyn Street about some business,” he said wistfully.

  It was always a solemn thing for a Boot to go to London; solemn as a funeral for William on this afternoon. Once or twice on the way to the station, once or twice as the train stopped on the route to Paddington, William was tempted to give up the expedition in despair. Why should he commit himself to this abominable city merely to be railed at and, for all he knew of Lord Copper’s temperament, physically assaulted? But sterner counsels prevailed. He might bluff it out. Lord Copper was a townsman, a provincial townsman at that, and certainly did not know the difference between a badger and a great crested grebe. It was William’s word against a few cantankerous correspondents and people who wrote to the newspapers were proverbially unbalanced. By the time he reached Westbury he had sketched out a little scene for himself, in which he stood resolutely in the board room defying the doctrinaire zoology of Fleet Street; every inch a Boot, thrice descended from Ethelred the Unready, rightful 15th Baron de Butte, haughty as a chieftain, honest as a peasant. “Lord Copper,” he was saying. “No man shall call me a liar unchastised. The great crested grebe does hibernate.”

  He went to the dining-car and ordered some whiskey. The steward said “We’re serving teas. Whiskey after Reading.” After Reading he tried again. “We’re serving dinners. I’ll bring you one to your carriage.” When it came, William spilled it down his tie. He gave the steward one of Nannie Blogg’s sovereigns in mistake for a shilling. It was contemptuously refused and everyone in the carriage stared at him. A man in a howler hat said, “May I look? Don’t often see one of them nowadays. Tell you what I’ll do, I’ll toss you for it. Call.”

  William said “Heads.”

  “Tails it is,” said the man in the bowler hat, putting it in his waistcoat pocket. He then went on reading his paper and everyone stared harder at William. His spirits began to sink; the mood of defiance passed. It was always the way; the moment he left the confines of Boot Magna he found himself in a foreign and hostile world. There was a train back at ten o’clock that night. Wild horses would not keep him from it. He would see Lord Copper, explain the situation fully and frankly, throw himself upon his mercy and, successful or defeated, catch the train at ten. By Reading he had worked out this new and humble policy. He would tell Lord Copper about Priscilla’s tears; great men were proverbially vulnerable in appeals of that kind. The man opposite him looked over the top of his paper. “Got any more quids?”

  “No,” said William.

  “Pity.”

  At seven he reached Paddington and the atro
cious city was all around him.

  That evening, some time after the advertised hour, Mr. Salter alighted at Boot Magna Halt. An hour earlier, at Taunton, he had left the express, and changed into a train such as he did not know existed outside the imagination of his Balkan correspondents; a single tram-like, one-class coach, which had pottered in a desultory fashion through a system of narrow, underpopulated valleys. It had stopped eight times, and at every station there had been a bustle of passengers succeeded by a long, silent pause, before it started again; men had entered who, instead of slinking and shuffling and wriggling themselves into corners and decently screening themselves behind newspapers, as civilized people should when they travelled by train, had sat down squarely quite close to Mr. Salter, rested their hands on their knees, stared at him fixedly and uncritically and suddenly addressed him on the subject of the weather in barely intelligible accents; there had been very old, unhygienic men and women, such as you never saw in the Underground, who ought long ago to have been put away in some public institution; there had been women carrying a multitude of atrocious little baskets and parcels which they piled on the seats; one of them had put a hamper containing a live turkey under Mr. Salter’s feet. It had been a horrible journey.

  EVELYN WAUGH,

  Scoop

  Train without driver

  A few days passed. Jacques had returned to his engine, avoiding his comrades, sunk back into his former savage gloom. War had just been declared, following stormy sessions in the Chamber. There had already been an advance-guard skirmish, which had turned out well, they said. For a week the transportation of troops wore down the railroad personnel with fatigue. A continual flow of unscheduled trains made the regular ones fearfully late, not to mention that the best engineers had been called to assist in the mobilization and concentration of the armies. And so, one night, instead of his usual express, Jacques took out of Le Havre a long train of eighteen cars, packed with soldiers.

  That night, Pecqueux arrived at the engine-house very drunk. The day after he had surprised Philomene and Jacques, he had resumed his work as fireman on Engine 608 with the latter again. And he made no allusion to the incident, but remained dark and somber, as though he dared not look at the engineer. But the latter felt that he was more and more in revolt; he refused to obey orders, answered them with a low growl. At last they stopped talking altogether. The platform that had carried them together, so friendly and united, was now no more than a dangerous and narrow plank on which their rivalry met. Their hatred increased, and, flying at top speed, they were ready to murder each other on these few square feet, from which the least shock might have precipitated them. That night, seeing Pecqueux drunk, Jacques was alarmed; for he knew he was too sly to quarrel sober, and that only wine unleashed the beast in him.

  The train, which was to have left at six o’clock, was delayed. It was already night when the soldiers were loaded like sheep into the cattle-cars. Planks had been nailed across for benches, and the soldiers were piled in until it seemed impossible the cars would hold them. They sat on each other, some stood up, so tightly squeezed they could not move their arms. At Paris, another train waited for them, to take them to the Rhine. They were already crushed with fatigue, in the excitement of their departure. But they had been given brandy, and many of them had spent the time before they embarked in the taverns, so that they had a sort of heated, brutal gaiety, their faces were red, their eyes started from their heads. And as the train started out of the station, they began to sing.

  Jacques looked at the sky, hidden by stormy clouds. It would be a black night. Not a breath of breeze stirred the burning-hot air. The wind made by their speed, usually fresh, was warm tonight. No light showed on the black horizon but the signals, like live coals. He increased the pressure to make the heavy grade from Harfleur to Saint-Romain. In spite of his several weeks of experimenting with Engine 608, he was not yet its master. It was too new, and its whims and childish pranks constantly surprised him. That night it seemed especially unmanageable, whimsical, ready to overturn on account of a few pieces of coal too many. His hand on the throttle, he kept an eye on the fires, as he grew more and more anxious over his fireman’s appearance. The little light that illumined the water-gauge left the platform in a penumbra of darkness, purple from the red-hot fire-box door. He could hardly make out Pecqueux; he had twice felt something brush his legs, as though fingers were practicing to take hold of them. But he decided that must have been drunken clumsiness, for he could hear him, over the engine’s roar, chuckling aloud, breaking coal with unnecessarily heavy blows. Every minute, he opened the door, and threw coal on the grate, in unreasonable amounts.

  “That’s enough!” cried Jacques.

  The other pretended not to hear or understand, but continued to throw in shovelful after shovelful. The engineer took him by the arm, and he turned threateningly, in drunken, increasing fury, with the quarrel he sought, at last at hand.

  “Let me go, or I’ll batter you! I like to go fast.”

  The train now ran at full speed over the plateau between Bolbec and Motteville. It was to proceed direct to Paris, without a stop except to take water. The huge mass of eighteen cars loaded, crammed, with human cattle, pounded and roared over the black countryside. And the men who were being carried to the slaughter were singing, so clamorously that the sound of it was louder than that of the rumbling wheels.

  Jacques kicked the door closed. Then, moving the injector, still controlling himself:

  “There’s too much fire. Go to sleep, if you’re drunk.”

  Pecqueux reopened the door and piled on more and more fuel, as though he were trying to burst the boilers. It was revolt, orders disregarded, frenzied passion that forgot completely all the human lives behind. Jacques leaned over to lower the bar of the grate, to diminish the draft at least. But the fireman took hold of him, tried to shove him suddenly off the engine.

  “You bastard! So that’s what you wanted! Then you could say I fell! You bastard!”

  He had caught hold of the edge of the tender. They were both slipping. The struggle continued on the little iron platform that danced and jumped. Teeth clenched, they no longer spoke, but concentrated each on throwing the other through the narrow opening which had only a single iron bar across it. But it wasn’t easy. The engine sped on and on. Barentin was passed, and the train plunged into Malaunay tunnel. They were still struggling, thrown down on the coal, their heads now and then striking against the water tanks. Both avoided the red-hot fire-box door, which burned their legs each time they came close to it.

  For a moment, Jacques thought that if he could get up, he would close the throttle, and be able to call for help, to rid himself of this drunken maniac, mad with wine and jealousy. He was weakening, and began to despair of having the strength to throw him off; he was already beaten, and felt the terror of the fall prickling his scalp. He made a supreme effort, feeling with his hand, and the other understood, stiffened himself, and picked him up like a child.

  “Oh, so you want to stop!... Oh, so you took my woman!... Come on, you’ve got to pay, now!”

  The engine sped on and on. The train had left the tunnel with a roar, and continued on its mad course across the dark, empty countryside. They passed through the station of Malaunay so fast that the assistant station-master, standing on the platform, did not even glimpse the two men murdering each other in the engine-cab.

  With a final effort, Pecqueux threw Jacques off, and Jacques feeling himself fall, terror-struck, clung to his neck so tight he dragged him with him. There were two terrible screams that seemed like one, then died away. The two men, falling together, dragged under the wheels by the action of the train’s speed, were cut and sliced, in their horrible embrace. They had lived for so long like brothers. They were found headless, without feet, two bloody trunks still holding each other in a murderous hug.

  And the engine, free of control, flew on and on. At last the irresponsible, rebellious engine could yield to the caprice of
its youth, like an unbroken colt, escaped from its master’s hands, and galloping over the fields. There was water in the boiler, the coal that had been piled on the grate was turning red. For half an hour, the pressure rose madly, as the speed madly increased. The conductor had no doubt fallen asleep. The soldiers, whose drunkenness was greater for the crowding, cheered the increasing speed, sang louder. The train went through Maromme with lightning speed. There was no whistling at signals or stations. It was a steady gallop, a beast with silent head low to the ground, brooking no obstacle. It sped and sped on endlessly, as though maddened and infuriated by the strident shrieking of its own breath.

  At Rouen, they were to take on water; and the station was chilled with terror when the train passed, a streak of smoke and flame, its engine without engineer or fireman, its cattle-cars filled with troops howling patriotic airs. They were going to war, speeding to the banks of the Rhine. The employees stared, waving their arms. Suddenly everyone cried out. That abandoned, masterless train could never get through the Sotteville station, where there was always a clutter of manoeuvering engines and coaches. The telegraph clicked. At Sotteville, a freight train which was on the line was side-tracked. The roar of the escaped monster came from the distance. It had plunged through the two tunnels close to Rouen, and was arriving at a mad gallop, like a prodigious, irresistible force which there was no hope of stopping. It burned through Sotteville station, sped between all obstacles, and plunged into the darkness again, where the roar of its passage slowly died away.

  Now every telegraph instrument along the line clicked, every heart beat, with the news of a phantom train that had just gone through Sotteville and Rouen. Everyone trembled. An express, ahead on the same line, would surely be caught up with. Like a boar through the woods, the train sped on without regard for red lights or cracker signals. At Oissel, it narrowly missed striking a shunting-engine. Pont-de-l’Arche was terror-struck, for its speed did not seem diminished. Disappearing again it sped, and roared into the black night, no one knew where, ahead.