He began now to take deliberate action to free himself from what he thought of as a deadly trap, plucking at the ferule of the parasol, drawing the malacca cane free and using the point to break out the jagged edges of the nearest window. The fragments fell with a succession of insignificant crashes and he had his head and shoulders through the aperture and was wrestling with the door handle when Deborah's voice reached him as a high, imploring wail, “Uncle Adam…help… help…Alexander…” so that he wrenched himself back, twisting a half-circle, seizing the screaming child by his shoulders, hoisting him over the still form of his daughter and somehow contriving to push him clear of the window where he at once disappeared into the outstretched arms of the ex-coachman Blubb, who was standing on the baulkhead immediately below.
It did not astonish him that Blubb, manager of the Kentish Txriangle, should be there to receive Alexander, only that the child should be removed so effortlessly from his grasp, but as he withdrew himself a second time he became more or less aware of what was happening outside, where the coach hung from a snarl-up of rails and brickwork like a sock from a tangled clothesline. With a sense of wonder and relief that was like the removal of a tremendous weight from his chest he saw too that no one inside the compartment was dead, or even bleeding as he was bleeding, and it seemed miraculous that this could be so, for the woodwork and stuffing of the interior bulged and sagged in all directions, like a sofa that had been ripped and slashed by a dozen drunken swordsmen. Henrietta's voice came to him faintly and he saw her struggle half-upright, her pale face framed in a tangle of bright, copper hair, her hat reversed but still firmly fixed on her head with its absurd ribbons spilling down the front of her corsage that had split across the middle, revealing the pink petticoat underneath. Then Deborah called to him again and he was struck by the steadiness of her voice as she said, “I’m not hurt, Uncle Adam…but Stella…Stella…there by your knees…” and he glanced down and saw his daughter propped like a folded bolster between the seats, with her little white boots braced against the horsehair of the section of the compartment where Deborah had been sitting. He writhed around, fending off a hamper that had contained their picnic and lifted her clear, moving towards the window backwards, turning and finding there another pair of hands, or perhaps several pairs, reaching out for her over his shoulders, so that she too passed from his grasp. A gravelly voice from outside was saying, “The child…the lady…pass ’em through, mister, for Christ's sake, before she slips…” and his body began to respond to orders dictated by instinct, for he was unable to think clearly and logically and all the time that infernal drip of blood pumped from his cheek, splashing everything about him.
His next impression was that of receiving the limp body of Deborah from the hands of his wife, who had somehow levered her from the far corner of the compartment, and it seemed to him quite astounding that she had the strength to perform such a feat in flat contradiction to the laws of gravity, for Deborah had been lying half under Henrietta when she had projected Alex upward into his grasp. He saw blood too, and realised that it was not his own, for it was running diagonally across the child's thigh, but before he could look more closely a bearded face peered down at them from the splintered window frame and he recognised it at once as the face of Dickens and realised that the man was actually addressing him, saying, jerkily, “Door's locked…they’re all locked…wait…!” and one of his hands disappeared, reappearing almost immediately holding a stone, and then more glass fell with a crash, some fragments inside the compartment, where Stella had been lying a moment ago, but more of it outside on the baulkhead.
He had some kind of grip on himself now and could begin to deliberate as regards actions that, until then, had been little more than reflexes. He could even count and addressed himself to a sum relating to the occupants of this shambles, remembering that he had passed three bodies down on to the baulkhead but the power of concentration came and went so that he could not be sure who they were, or in what order they had left the compartment. There had been five of them and three from five left two, himself and one other. He inched himself away from the window, beyond which all hell seemed to be breaking loose, and moved closer to the jumble at the far end and there was Henrietta, face downwards in a welter of split cushions and bloodied luggage, and he would have assumed her dead had he not remembered that it was she who had been lying across Deborah's legs a moment ago and had somehow changed places with her, pushing the child in his direction. He began to work his way down to her, moving very cautiously, for the gravelly voice was still warning him that the coach was finely balanced and that movement inside it might shake it loose and pitch it through the gap into the river with the others.
It seemed to him a long time elapsed before he could grasp her by the shoulders. Her fine clothes were in ribbons but she did not seem injured, although when he called her name she did not respond but stared at him with a curiously hostile expression. It was when he sat back on his hams, bracing himself to lever her between his legs that the carriage itself began to sway and the movement, no more than a gentle rocking motion, had the power to frighten him as nothing had ever frightened him in his life. In blind panic he exerted his full strength, rolling over on his back and dragging her with him, so that her full weight rested on him, her head level with the window. He could see nothing now but he could hear a confused mutter of voices immediately above and assumed hands must be reaching down through the aperture and plucking at her, for the pressure on him moderated and suddenly she was gone and he was sitting there alone holding one of her elastic-sided boots, half-blinded by blood, dazed, breathless, and utterly spent.
The rocking motion he had noticed now became more pronounced and behind it, like the thump of a brass drum, he could detect a harsh, jarring sound, as if the free end of the coach was beating rhythmically on the ground. He understood then that he was lost for very slowly, or so it seemed, the carriage began to spin. He heard someone call out with terrible urgency and seemingly almost in his ear, but there was nothing more he could do to help himself beyond rolling on his side and crouching between the shattered seats. The sliding movement brought his eyes level with the window and suddenly he glimpsed the sky, blue, cloudless, and, like everything else in that bedlam, gyrating with a slow, ponderous swing. And after that nothing, only a wall of sound that fell on him like tons of masonry.
4
Blubb, clambering on to the step of the last coach and peering down through a window at his employer, was not much astonished by what he saw. The coincidence was swallowed up in the immensity of the occurrence, a small, insignificant piece of a horrific jigsaw in which Adam Swann, his wife, and his family were somehow trapped and almost certain to die. In a disaster of this magnitude identities went by the board. It would not have surprised him to have seen the Queen or the Shah of Persia and all his retinue stagger out of the debris that choked the valley. As it was he did what he could, and what he achieved stemmed not so much from the man he was, old, gross, and short of wind, as the man he had been before those meddlesome fools had laced all England with iron rails, boasting that they could now transport passengers from one point to another at twenty times the speed of the old “Tantivy” or ‘Shrewsbury Wonder.” At a price, of course. Sometimes this kind of price.
Blubb's reactions, notwithstanding his age, his bulk, and his mountainous prejudice, were as quick or quicker than those of anyone at work on that bridge at the time. He had read approaching disaster in the face of the foreman before the man had moved two strides down the line towards the distant figure of the man stationed there, waving his futile little flag at an onrushing boat-train, the smoke of which could already be seen in the cutting. He knew then that nothing could avert a tragedy of fantastic proportions, and that here, on this strip of line, many people would die, or be mutilated. There was no time to shift the pinnace out of the line of danger. What time there was he used to save himself, and used it to advantage, plunging down the embankment like a hippopotamus i
n flight from a dinosaur, then diving under the brick pier supporting his end of the bridge. He gained sanctuary with seconds to spare. A moment later the avalanche came thundering down on them, scattering men from the bridge like a shower of peas and filling the air with a diabolical symphony of screaming brakes, hissing steam, rending metal, and human outcry.
From where he crouched, in the limited security of the brick buttress, Blubb had a clear view of the plummeting train, watching, jaw agape, as engine and tender cleared the gap on their own momentum, dragging the first three coaches in their wake and somehow, freakishly it seemed to Blubb, remaining upright on the other side. He saw it all clearly for no more than a moment and then it was enveloped, together with half the valley, in a cloud of steam as the following carriages broke free and slipped away down into the stream like a string of barrels shooting a waterfall.
The spectacle was so awful and so final that it had majesty, rooting him there in a kind of trance and watching the wreckage thresh and flounder before resolving itself into a vast, untidy pyramid. It was not until little spurts of colour began to spill down the sides of the pyramid and roll or bounce across the marshy ground, that he could see the wreck in terms of human tragedy rather than a spectacle involving tons of wood, glass, and metal. Then, at last, he crept out, his old heart pounding against his ribs like a sledge hammer, and averting his eyes from the carnage he glanced upward, amazed to see the final coach balanced at a sharp angle, like a diver arrested in the first movement of a plunge. Immediately behind it, and comparatively intact, were two vans, presumably those of the guard and the mail and the phenomenon had the effect of steadying him a little, the sheer improbability of what he saw absorbing the recoil of the shock that was paralysing his brain, so that it struck him at once the final passenger coach had been caught in wreckage ploughed up by the engine and tender, and it was possible, and even likely, that it contained people able to help themselves, if they were encouraged and assisted from without.
He made his decision on the instant. Down on the river banks there was a score of men, and many more, alerted by the uproar were already streaming out of Staplehurst, so he reasoned that they would be likely, one and all, to concern themselves with the first luckless wretches they found, whereas he alone was within easy reach of a coach that might, at any moment, plunge into the chaos below. He clawed his way upward to find the horizontal baulkheads had withstood the shock and were still in position, although there was nothing at all between them and the field below and it was therefore necessary to move cautiously, as upon a catwalk. A middle-aged man with an imperial, whose distraught face seemed to Blubb vaguely familiar, was already half out of the shattered window of the second compartment, wrestling with the door-handle, and as Blubb shouted a warning he lunged himself forward and downward, so that Blubb was there to support his weight for a moment while the passenger's flailing feet found the steeply angled step. He seemed uninjured and in control of himself, for he said, breathlessly, but authoritatively, “Stay there…two ladies…pass them down!” and Blubb braced himself to receive the weight of two women, one young and pretty, the other elderly and hysterical. Neither, so far as he could see, was injured and the younger woman scrambled nimbly through the window without much help. The elder was halfway through when she collapsed, and hung there, wedged in the aperture like a rag doll plugging a small hole in a fence.
It was a terrible business easing her through, despite the absence of all but a splinter or two of glass. She was wearing one of those monstrous, box-pleated crinolines, flat at the front but very full at the back, together with armoured stays and innumerable petticoats, some of which caught on the jagged woodwork of the frame and ripped to tatters. The iron-nerved passenger with the imperial beard heaved and strained, and Blubb, his chest level with the step, stood like Atlas supporting her weight as she descended on him an inch at a time. By the time she was free two other men were there to help and the younger woman had disappeared, so that Blubb moved nearer the bridge with the bearded traveller at his elbow and heard him say, wheezing for breath, “Party in there…children…” but he was clearly incapable of hoisting himself up and seemed to Blubb near the point of collapse. He said, “Wait on, sir…I’ll go up. Could you handle the nippers if I winkled ’em out?” and the man nodded wordlessly, passing his hand across a brow coated with dust and sweat. Blubb grabbed the handle of the compartment and hauled himself up, not without a fearful glance over his right shoulder, for the coach rocked twice and then gave a lurch before settling again. Then, of all people, the Gaffer's face appeared in the window and Blubb, occupied with establishing a precarious balance, muttered, “Christ A’mighty, you!” as he hauled himself level with the window and saw what appeared to be a coachload of dead bodies, sprawled at all angles, and between him and the charnel house the face of his employer, Adam Swann, with a great jagged cut below the right eye pumping blood and spattering everything about him.
Blubb thought then that he would die himself, falling backwards over the balustrade of the bridge, and fear prompted him to make the effort of his life, gripping the doorhandle with his left hand and clawing the edge of the window frame with his right For perhaps twenty seconds he hung there like a fly on a wall, watching Swann grope his way down towards the bodies at the far end of the compartment and then claw himself back again, moving crabwise and dragging behind him a screaming boy, aged about three. The child's screams helped him, stirring in him a terrible compassion for everyone in there, but, rising level with his pity, a terrible hatred and contempt for railways rose in his throat like bile so that he saw himself, in that moment in time, as a man singled out by Providence to avenge all the other victims of the gridiron, living and dead, who had mouldered away in failed inns, in bankrupt livery stables, in tumbledown toll-houses and in want and destitution over the years. The mission acted on him like a cordial, injecting a new and furious energy into muscles that he did not know he possessed, or had ever possessed, giving him the strength and dexterity to improve his position in a manner that left one hand free to drag the child through the hole, to steady him for a few seconds while he levered himself round, and then, with infinite gentleness, to lower him into the upraised hands of the man he had helped rescue the two women further down the coach.
He was no longer aware of the uproar that surrounded him on all sides, or even of the presence of the other helpers scrambling up the embankment in ones and twos, or indeed of anything but the necessity to empty the compartment of survivors before the coach broke away and continued its arrested nosedive into the field. He accepted the fact that this would happen very soon, that every second he remained there, every movement he or Swann made, underlined this certainty, but it did not occur to him to release his hold on the doorhandle and jump clear while there was a chance of extricating the four other people trapped in that debris. The little girl who was passed on to him was much easier to handle for she was unconscious and as light as a feather, but when Swann dragged an older child level with his chest he was obliged to use his teeth as well as his free hand, biting into the collar of the summer dress she was wearing and shifting his left-handed grip on the handle so that he could roll her on his belly and let her fall between himself and the coachwork into the arms of men on the baulkhead. The movement, carefully judged as it was, came near to causing the ultimate disaster, for the coach began to rock violently, flailing its broken coupling against the baulk-head and prompting another chorus of warnings from below. He ignored them, readjusting his grip and finding a blessed purchase for his knee against what he imagined must be the hinge of the door, and it was this anchorage that enabled him to claw Mrs. Swann through the window, although he could never have managed it had she not stirred and opened her eyes as Swann levered her towards him and he got a grip on her bunched skirt. She seemed then to understand what was happening and co-operated to a degree, taking some of her weight on her elbows and getting a purchase with one foot on the split horsehair of the backrest, but she could nev
er have worked herself free without Blubb's leverage from outside and the effort used up the very last of his strength so that when she fell he could do no more than grab at the tatters of her dress that came away in his hand. Those below must have broken her fall for he saw her stand upright for a moment, her mouth open, her arms gesturing feebly towards the place where he stood and he read her message, despite the successive waves of giddiness that assailed him now, causing him to spare a final glance at the interior of the compartment and the mask of blood that had little in common with the man who, so improbably, had appeared from nowhere seven years before and had helped him rebuild his pride. Then, glancing over his shoulder, and perhaps assessing the wisdom of jumping down to make way for a younger, stronger man, he saw that the group under the step had scattered, and at first their abrupt disappearance did not connect with the slow, deliberate slide of the structure to which he seemed to have been clinging for an hour or more. When the connection was made, and he understood precisely what was happening, he gathered himself for a spring, aiming roughly at the baulkhead but knowing somehow that he would miss it and fall through the gap on to the debris below, and this was how it happened and there was no one to break his fall, only spears of splintered coachwork and one steel buffer that struck him above the heart. The buffer absorbed the impact to some extent but the collision was lethal none the less, for it catapulted him clear of the wreckage and he fell like a sack into a patch of spongy marsh, and lay there spreadeagled, half-buried in soggy, trampled grass.
God is an Englishman Page 74