“I don’t know. You’ve done something that no one ever thought of doing before, and the Company don’t know what to make of it. I see they offer to send down their solicitor and another official of the Company to talk things over informally. Then here’s another letter suggesting that you put up a fourteen-foot wall, crowned with bottle-glass, at the bottom of the garden.”
“Talk of British insolence! The man who recommends that (he’s another bloated functionary) says that I shall ‘derive great pleasure from watching the wall going up day by day’! Did you ever dream of such gall? I’ve offered ‘em money enough to buy a new set of cars and pension the driver for three generations; but that doesn’t seem to be what they want. They expect me to go to the House of Lords and get a ruling, and build walls between times. Are they all stark, raving mad? One ‘ud think I made a profession of flagging trains. How in Tophet was I to know their old Induna from a waytrain? I took the first that came along, and I’ve been jailed and fined for that once already.”
“That was for slugging the guard.”
“He had no right to haul me out when I was half-way through a window.”
“What are you going to do about it?”
“Their lawyer and the other official (can’t they trust their men unless they send ‘em in pairs?) are coming hereto-night. I told ‘em I was busy, as a rule, till after dinner, but they might send along the entire directorate if it eased ‘em any.”
Now, after-dinner visiting, for business or pleasure, is the custom of the smaller American town, and not that of England, where the end of the day is sacred to the owner, not the public. Verily, Wilton Sargent had hoisted the striped flag of rebellion!
“Isn’t it time that the humour of the situation began to strike you, Wilton?” I asked.
“Where’s the humour of baiting an American citizen just because he happens to be a millionaire — poor devil.” He was silent for a little time, and then went on: “Of course. Now I see!” He spun round and faced me excitedly. “It’s as plain as mud. These ducks are laying their pipes to skin me.”
“They say explicitly they don’t want money!”
“That’s all a blind. So’s their addressing me as W. Sargent. They know well enough who I am. They know I’m the old man’s son. Why didn’t I think of that before?”
“One minute, Wilton. If you climbed to the top of the dome of St. Paul’s and offered a reward to any Englishman who could tell you who or what Merton Sargent had been, there wouldn’t be twenty men in all London to claim it.”
“That’s their insular provincialism, then. I don’t care a cent. The old man would have wrecked the Great Buchonian before breakfast for a pipe-opener. My God, I’ll do it in dead earnest! I’ll show ‘em that they can’t bulldoze a foreigner for flagging one of their little tinpot trains, and — I’ve spent fifty thousand a year here, at least, for the last four years.”
I was glad I was not his lawyer. I re-read the correspondence, notably the letter which recommended him — almost tenderly, I fancied — to build a fourteen-foot brick wall at the end of his garden, and half-way through it a thought struck me which filled me with pure joy.
The footman ushered in two men, frock-coated, grey-trousered, smooth-shaven, heavy of speech and gait. It was nearly nine o’clock, but they looked as newly come from a bath. I could not understand why the elder and taller of the pair glanced at me as though we had an understanding; nor why he shook hands with an unEnglish warmth.
“This simplifies the situation,” he said in an undertone, and, as I stared, he whispered to his companion: “I fear I shall be of very little service at present. Perhaps Mr. Folsom had better talk over the affair with Mr. Sargent.”
“That is what I am here for,” said Wilton.
The man of law smiled pleasantly, and said that he saw no reason why the difficulty should not be arranged in two minutes’ quiet talk. His air, as he sat down opposite Wilton, was soothing to the last degree, and his companion drew me up-stage. The mystery was deepening, but I followed meekly, and heard Wilton say, with an uneasy laugh:
“I’ve had insomnia over this affair, Mr. Folsom. Let’s settle it one way or the other, for heaven’s sake!”
“Ah! Has he suffered much from this lately?” said my man, with a preliminary cough.
“I really can’t say,” I replied.
“Then I suppose you have only lately taken charge here?”
“I came this evening. I am not exactly in charge of anything.”
“I see. Merely to observe the course of events in case — ” He nodded.
“Exactly.” Observation, after all, is my trade.
He coughed again slightly, and came to business.
“Now, — I am asking solely for information’s sake, — do you find the delusions persistent?”
“Which delusions?”
“They are variable, then? That is distinctly curious, because — but do I understand that the type of the delusion varies? For example, Mr. Sargent believes that he can buy the Great Buchonian.”
“Did he write you that?”
“He made the offer to the Company — on a half-sheet of note-paper. Now, has he by chance gone to the other extreme, and believed that he is in danger of becoming a pauper? The curious economy in the use of a half-sheet of paper shows that some idea of that kind might have flashed through his mind, and the two delusions can coexist, but it is not common. As you must know, the delusion of vast wealth — the folly of grandeurs, I believe our friends the French call it — is, as a rule, persistent, to the exclusion of all others.”
Then I heard Wilton’s best English voice at the end of the study:
“My dear sir, I have explained twenty times already, I wanted to get that scarab in time for dinner. Suppose you had left an important legal document in the same way?”
“That touch of cunning is very significant,” my fellow-practitioner — since he insisted on it — muttered.
“I am very happy, of course, to meet you; but if you had only sent your president down to dinner here, I could have settled the thing in half a minute. Why, I could have bought the Buchonian from him while your clerks were sending me this.” Wilton dropped his hand heavily on the blue-and-white correspondence, and the lawyer started.
“But, speaking frankly,” the lawyer replied, “it is, if I may say so, perfectly inconceivable, even in the case of the most important legal documents, that any one should stop the three-forty express — the Induna — Our Induna, my dear sir.”
“Absolutely!” my companion echoed; then to me in a lower tone: “You notice, again, the persistent delusion of wealth. I was called in when he wrote us that. You can see it is utterly impossible for the Company to continue to run their trains through the property of a man who may at any moment fancy himself divinely commissioned to stop all traffic. If he had only referred us to his lawyer — but, naturally, that he would not do, under the circumstances. A pity — a great pity. He is so young. By the way, it is curious, is it not, to note the absolute conviction in the voice of those who are similarly afflicted, — heart-rending, I might say, and the inability to follow a chain of connected thought.”
“I can’t see what you want,” Wilton was saying to the lawyer.
“It need not be more than fourteen feet high — a really desirable structure, and it would be possible to grow pear trees on the sunny side.” The lawyer was speaking in an unprofessional voice. “There are few things pleasanter than to watch, so to say, one’s own vine and fig tree in full bearing. Consider the profit and amusement you would derive from it. If you could see your way to doing this, we could arrange all the details with your lawyer, and it is possible that the Company might bear some of the cost. I have put the matter, I trust, in a nutshell. If you, my dear sir, will interest yourself in building that wall, and will kindly give us the name of your lawyers, I dare assure you that you will hear no more from the Great Buchonian.”
“But why am I to disfigure my lawn with a new brick
wall?”
“Grey flint is extremely picturesque.”
“Grey flint, then, if you put it that way. Why the dickens must I go building towers of Babylon just because I have held up one of your trains-once?”
“The expression he used in his third letter was that he wished to ‘board her,’” said my companion in my ear. “That was very curious — a marine delusion impinging, as it were, upon a land one. What a marvellous world he must move in — and will before the curtain falls. So young, too — so very young!”
“Well, if you want the plain English of it, I’m damned if I go wall-building to your orders. You can fight it all along the line, into the House of Lords and out again, and get your rulings by the running foot if you like,” said Wilton, hotly. “Great heavens, man, I only did it once!”
“We have at present no guarantee that you may not do it again; and, with our traffic, we must, in justice to our passengers, demand some form of guarantee. It must not serve as a precedent. All this might have been saved if you had only referred us to your legal representative.” The lawyer looked appealingly around the room. The dead-lock was complete.
“Wilton,” I asked, “may I try my hand now?”
“Anything you like,” said Wilton. “It seems I can’t talk English. I won’t build any wall, though.” He threw himself back in his chair.
“Gentlemen,” I said deliberately, for I perceived that the doctor’s mind would turn slowly, “Mr. Sargent has very large interests in the chief railway systems of his own country.”
“His own country?” said the lawyer.
“At that age?” said the doctor.
“Certainly. He inherited them from his father, Mr. Sargent, who was an American.”
“And proud of it,” said Wilton, as though he had been a Western Senator let loose on the Continent for the first time.
“My dear sir,” said the lawyer, half rising, “why did you not acquaint the Company with this fact — this vital fact — early in our correspondence? We should have understood. We should have made allowances.”
“Allowances be damned. Am I a Red Indian or a lunatic?”
The two men looked guilty.
“If Mr. Sargent’s friend had told us as much in the beginning,” said the doctor, very severely, “much might have been saved.” Alas! I had made a life’s enemy of that doctor.
“I hadn’t a chance,” I replied. “Now, of course, you can see that a man who owns several thousand miles of line, as Mr. Sargent does, would be apt to treat railways a shade more casually than other people.”
“Of course; of course. He is an American; that accounts. Still, it was the Induna; but I can quite understand that the customs of our cousins across the water differ in these particulars from ours. And do you always stop trains in this way in the States, Mr. Sargent?”
“I should if occasion ever arose; but I’ve never had to yet. Are you going to make an international complication of the business?”
“You need give yourself no further concern whatever in the matter. We see that there is no likelihood of this action of yours establishing a precedent, which was the only thing we were afraid of. Now that you understand that we cannot reconcile our system to any sudden stoppages, we feel quite sure that — ”
“I sha’n’t be staying long enough to flag another train,” Wilton said pensively.
“You are returning, then, to our fellow-kinsmen across the-ah-big pond, you call it?”
“No, sir. The ocean — the North Atlantic Ocean. It’s three thousand miles broad, and three miles deep in places. I wish it were ten thousand.”
“I am not so fond of sea-travel myself; but I think it is every Englishman’s duty once in his life to study the great branch of our Anglo-Saxon race across the ocean,” said the lawyer.
“If ever you come over, and care to flag any train on my system, I’ll — I’ll see you through,” said Wilton.
“Thank you — ah, thank you. You’re very kind. I’m sure I should enjoy myself immensely.”
“We have overlooked the fact,” the doctor whispered to me, “that your friend proposed to buy the Great Buchonian.”
“He is worth anything from twenty to thirty million dollars — four to five million pounds,” I answered, knowing that it would be hopeless to explain.
“Really! That is enormous wealth. But the Great Buchonian is not in the market.”
“Perhaps he does not want to buy it now.”
“It would be impossible under any circumstances,” said the doctor.
“How characteristic!” murmured the lawyer, reviewing matters in his mind. “I always understood from books that your countrymen were in a hurry. And so you would have gone forty miles to town and back — before dinner — to get a scarab? How intensely American! But you talk exactly like an Englishman, Mr. Sargent.”
“That is a fault that can be remedied. There’s only one question I’d like to ask you. You said it was inconceivable that any man should stop a train on your road?”
“And so it is-absolutely inconceivable.”
“Any sane man, that is?”
“That is what I meant, of course. I mean, with excep — ”
“Thank you.”
The two men departed. Wilton checked himself as he was about to fill a pipe, took one of my cigars instead, and was silent for fifteen minutes.
Then said he: “Have you got a list of the Southampton sailings on you?”
Far away from the greystone wings, the dark cedars, the faultless gravel drives, and the mint-sauce lawns of Holt Hangars runs a river called the Hudson, whose unkempt banks are covered with the palaces of those wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice. Here, where the hoot of the Haverstraw brick-barge-tug answers the howl of the locomotive on either shore, you shall find, with a complete installation of electric light, nickel-plated binnacles, and a calliope attachment to her steam-whistle, the twelve-hundred-ton ocean-going steam-yacht Columbia, lying at her private pier, to take to his office, at an average speed of seventeen knots an hour, — and the barges can look out for themselves, — Wilton Sargent, American.
MY SUNDAY AT HOME
If the Red Slayer think he slays,
Or if the slain think he is slain,
They know not well the subtle ways
I keep and pass and turn again.
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-class 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 assist 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 passed 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 bur
st 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 — Hello 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 bumblebees 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 — passed 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 brimming glass 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.”
Complete Works of Rudyard Kipling (Illustrated) Page 328