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 burst 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."
"Better say it again, any'ow',' said the driver. "Orders is orders.
Say it again."
Once more the guard paced back, I, anxious to attract his attention,
trotting at his heels.
"In a minute - in a minute, sir," he said, waving an arm capable of
starting all the traffic on the London and Southwestern Railway at
a wave. "Has any gentleman here got a bottle of medicine? A
gentleman has taken a bottle of poison (laudanum) by mistake."
"Where's the man?" I gasped.
"Woking. 'Ere's my orders." He showed me the telegram, on which
were the words to be said. "'E must have left 'is bottle in the
train, an' took another by mistake. 'E's been wirin' from Woking
awful, an', now I come to think of, it, I'm nearly sure I put a
bottle of medicine off at Andover."
"Then the man that took the poison isn't in the train?"
"Lord, no, sir. No one didn't take poison that way. 'E took it
away with 'im, in 'is 'ands. 'E's wirin' from Wokin'. My orders
was to ask everybody in the train, and I 'ave, an' we're four minutes
late now. Are you comin' on, sir? No? Right be'ind!"
There is nothing, unless, perhaps, the English language, more
terrible than the workings of an English railway-line. An instant
before it seemed as though we were going to spend all eternity at
Framlynghame Admiral, and now I was watching the tail of the train
disappear round the curve of the cutting.
But I was not alone. On the one bench of the down platform sat the
largest navvy I have ever seen in my life, softened and made affable
(for he smiled generously) with liquor. In his huge hands he nursed
an empty tumbler marked "L.S.W.R." - marked also, internally, with
streaks of blue-grey sediment. Before him, a hand on his shoulder,
stood the doctor, and as I came within ear-shot, this is what I
heard him say: "Just you hold on to your patience for a minute or
two longer, and you'll be as right as ever you were in your life.
I'll stay with you till you're better."
"Lord! I'm comfortable enough," said the navvy. "Never felt better
in my life."
Turning to me, the doctor lowered his voice. "He might have died
while that fool conduct-guard was saying his piece. I've fixed him,
though. The stuff's due in about five minutes, but there's a heap
to him. I don't see how we can make him take exercise."
For the moment I felt as though seven pounds of crushed ice had been
neatly applied in the form of a compress to my lower stomach.
"How - how did you manage it?" I gasped.
"I asked him if he'd have a drink. He was knocking spots out of
the car - strength of his constitution, I suppose. He said he'd
go 'most anywhere for a drink, so I lured onto the platform, and
loaded him up. 'Cold-blooded people, you Britishers are. That
train's gone, and no one seemed to care a cent."
"We've missed it," I said.
He looked at me curiously.
We'll get another before sundown, if that's your only trouble. Say,
porter, when's the next train down?"
"Seven forty-five," said the one porter, and passed out through the
wicket-gate into the landscape. It was then three-twenty of a hot
and sleepy afternoon. The station was absolutely deserted. The
navvy had closed his eyes, and now nodded.
"That's bad," said the doctor. "The man, I mean, not the train.
We must make him walk somehowwalk up and down."
Swiftly as might be, I explained the delicacy of the situation, and
the doctor from New York turned a full bronze-green. Then he swore
comprehensively at the entire fabric of our glorious Constitution,
cursing the English language, root, branch, and paradigm, through
its most obscure derivatives. His coat and bag lay on the bench
next to the sleeper. Thither he edged cautiously, and I saw
treachery in his eye.
What devil of delay possessed him to slip on his spring overcoat, I
cannot tell. They say a slight noise rouses a sleeper more surely
than a heavy one, and scarcely had the doctor settled himself in his
sleeves than the giant waked and seized that silk-faced collar in a
hot right hand. There was rage in his face-rage and the realisation
of new emotions.
"I'm - I'm not so comfortable as I were," he said from the deeps of
his interior. "You'll wait along o' me, you will." He breathed
heavily through shut lips.
Now, if there was one thing more than another upon which the doctor
had dwelt in his conversation with me, it was upon the essential
law-abidingness, not to say gentleness, of his much-misrepresented
country. And yet (truly, it may have been no more than a button
that irked him) I saw his hand travel backwards to his right hip,
clutch at something, and come away empty.
"He won't kill you," I said. "He'll probably sue you in court, if
I know my own people. Better give him some money from time to time."
"If he keeps quiet till the stuff gets in its work," the doctor
answered, "I'm all right. If he doesn't ... my name is Emory -
Julian B. Emory - 193 'Steenth Street, corner of Madison and - "
"I feel worse than I've ever felt," said the navvy, with suddenness.
"What-did-you-give-me-the-drink-for?"
The matter seemed to be so purely personal that I withdrew to a
strategic position on the overhead bridge, and, abiding in the exact
centre, looked on from afar.
I could see the white road that ran across the shoulder of Salisbury
Plain, unshaded for mile after mile, and a dot in the middle
distance, the back of the one porter returning to Framlynghame
Admiral, if such a place existed, till seven forty-five. The bell
of a church invisible clanked softly. There was a rustle in the
horse-chestnuts to the left of the line, and the sound of sheep
cropping close.
The peace of Nirvana lay upon the land, and, brooding in it, my
elbow on the warm iron girder of the footbridge (it is a
forty-shilling fine to cross by any other means), I perceived, as
never before, how the consequences of our acts run eternal through
time and through space. If we impinge never so slightly upon the
life of a fellow-mortal, the touch of our personality, like the
ripple of a stone cast into a pond, widens and widens in unending
circles across the aeons, till the far-off Gods themselves cannot
say where action ceases. Also, it was I who had silently set
before the doctor the tumbler of the first-class lavatory compartment
now speeding Plymouthward. Yet I was, in spirit at least, a million
leagues removed from that unhappy man of another nationality, who
had chosen to thrust an inexpert finger into the workings of an
alien life. The machinery was dragging him up and down the sunlit
platform. The two men seemed to be learning polka-mazurkas together,
and the burden of their song, borne by one deep voice, was: "What
did you give me the drink for?"
I saw the flash of silver in the doctor's hand. The navvy took it
and pocketed it with his left; but never for an instant did his
strong right leave the doctor's coat-collar, and as the crisis
approached, louder and louder rose his bull-like roar: "What did you
give me the drink for?"
They drifted under the great twelve-inch pinned timbers of the
foot-bridge towards the bench, and, I gathered, the time was very
near at hand. The stuff was getting in its work. Blue, white, and
blue again, rolled over the navvy's face in waves, till all settled
to one rich clay-bank yellow and - that fell which fell.
I thought of the blowing up of Hell Gate; of the geysers in the
Yellowstone Park; of Jonah and his whale: but the lively original,
as I watched it foreshortened from above, exceeded all these things.
He staggered to the bench, the heavy wooden seat cramped with iron
cramps into the enduring stone, and clung there with his left hand.
It quivered and shook, as a breakwater-pile quivers to the rush of
landward-racing seas; nor was there lacking when he caught his
breath, the "scream of a maddened beach dragged down by the tide."
His right hand was upon the doctor's collar, so that the two shook
to one paroxysm, pendulums vibrating together, while I, apart, shook
with them.
It was colossal-immense; but of certain manifestations the English
language stops short. French only, the caryatid French of Victor
Hugo, would have described it; so I mourned while I laughed, hastily
shuffling and discarding inadequate adjectives. The vehemence of
the shock spent itself, and the sufferer half fell, half knelt,
across the bench. He was calling now upon God and his wife, huskily,
as the wounded bull calls upon the unscathed herd to stay. Curiously
enough, he used no bad language: that had gone from him with the
rest. The doctor exhibited gold. It was taken and retained. So,
too, was the grip on the coat-collar.
"If I could stand," boomed the giant, despairingly, "I'd smash you
- you an' your drinks. I'm dyin' - dyin' -dyin'!"
"That's what you think," said the doctor. "You'll find it will do
you a lot of good"; and, making a virtue of a somewhat imperative
necessity, he added: "I'll stay by you. If you'd let go of me a
minute I'd give you something that would settle you."
"You've settled me now, you damned anarchist. Takin' the bread out
of the mouth of an English workin'man! But I'll keep 'old of you
till I'm well or dead. I never did you no 'arm. S'pose I were a
little full. They pumped me out once at Guy's with a stummick-pump.
I could see that, but I can't see this 'ere, an' it's killin' of me
by slow degrees."
"You'll be all right in half-an-hour. What do you suppose I'd want
to kill you for?" said the doctor, who came of a logical breed.
"'Ow do I know? Tell 'em in court. You'll get seven years for
this, you body-snatcher. That's what you are - a bloomin'
bodysnatcher. There's justice, I tell you, in England; and my
Union'll prosecute, too. We don't stand no tricks with people's
insides 'ere. They give a woman ten years for a sight less than
this. An' you'll 'ave to pay 'undreds an' 'undreds o' pounds,
besides a pension to the missus. You'll see, you physickin'
furriner. Where's your licence to do such? You'll catch it,
I tell you!"
Then I observed what I have frequently observed before, that a man
who is but reasonably afraid of an altercation with an alien has a
most poignant dread of the operations of foreign law. The doctor's
voice was flute-like in its exquisite politeness, as he answered:
"But I've given you a very great deal of money - fif-three pounds,
I think."
"An' what's three pound for poisonin' the likes o' me? They told
me at Guy's I'd fetch twenty-cold-on the slates. Ouh! It's comin'
again."
A second time he was cut down by the foot, as it were, and the
straining bench rocked to and fro as I averted my eyes.
It was the very point of perfection in the heart of an English
May-day. The unseen tides of the air had turned, and all nature
was setting its face with the shadows of the horse-chestnuts
towards the peace of the coming night. But there were hours yet,
I knew - long, long hours of the eternal English twilight - to
the ending of the day. I was well content to be alive - to
abandon myself to the drift of Time and Fate; to absorb great peace
through my skin, and to love my country with the devotion that three
thousand miles of intervening sea bring to fullest flower. And what
a garden of Eden it was, this fatted, clipped, and washen land! A
man could camp in any open field with more sense of home and security
than the stateliest buildings of foreign cities could afford. And
the joy was that it was all mine alienably - groomed hedgerow,
spotless road, decent greystone cottage, serried spinney, tasselled
copse, apple-bellied hawthorn, and well-grown tree. A light puff
of wind - it scattered flakes of may over the gleaming rails - gave
me a faint whiff as it might have been of fresh cocoanut, and I
knew that the golden gorse was in bloom somewhere out of sight.
Linneeus had thanked God on his bended knees when he first saw a
field of it; and, by the way, the navvy was on his knees, too. But
he was by no means praying. He was purely disgustful.
The doctor was compelled to bend over him, his face towards the
back of the seat, and from what I had seen I supposed the navvy
was now dead. If that were the case it would be time for me to go;
but I knew that so long as a man trusts himself to the current of
Circumstance, reaching out for and rejecting nothing that comes his
way, no harm can overtake him. It is the contriver, the schemer,
who is caught by the Law, and never the philosopher. I knew that
when the play was played, Destiny herself would move me on from the
corpse; and I felt very sorry for the doctor.
In the far distance, presumably upon the road that led to
Framlynghame Admiral, there appeared a vehicle and a horse - the
one ancient fly that almost every village can produce at need. This
thing was advancing, unpaid by me, towards the station; would have
to pass along the deep-cut lane, below the railway-bridge, and come
out on the doctor's side. I was in the centre of things, so all
sides were alike to me. Here, then, was my machine from the machine.
When it arrived; something would happen, or something else. For the
rest, I owned my deeply interested soul.
The doctor, by the seat, turned so far as his cramped position
allowed, his head over his left shoulder, and laid his right hand
upon his lips. I threw back my hat and elevated my eyebrows in the
form of a question. The doctor shut his eyes and nodded his head
slowly twice or thrice, beckoning me to come. I descended
cautiously, and it was as the signs had told. The navvy was asleep,
empty to the lowest notch; yet his hand clutched still the doctor's
collar, and at the lightest movement (the doctor was really very
cramped) tightened mechanically, as the hand of a sick woman tightens
on that of the watcher. He had dropped, squatting almost upon his
heels, and, falling lower, had dragged the doctor over to the left.
The doctor thrust his right hand, which was free, into his pocket,
drew forth some keys, and shook his head. The navvy gurgled in his
sleep. Silently I dived into my pocket, took out one sovereign,
and held it up between finger and thumb. Again the doctor shook
his head. Money was not what was lacking to his peace. His bag
had fallen from the seat to the ground. He looked towards it, and
opened his mouth-O-shape. The catch was not a difficult one, and
when I had mastered it, the doctor's right forefinger was sawing
the air. With an immense caution, I extracted from the bag such a
knife as they use for cutting collops off legs. The doctor frowned,
and with his first and second fingers imitated the action of
scissors. Again I searched, and found a most diabolical pair of
cock-nosed shears, capable of vandyking the interiors of elephants.
The doctor then slowly lowered his left shoulder till the navvy's
right wrist was supported by the bench, pausing a moment as the
spent volcano rumbled anew. Lower and lower the doctor sank,
kneeling now by the navvy's side, till his head was on a level
with, and just in front of, the great hairy fist, and - there was
no tension on the coat-collar. Then light dawned on me.
Beginning a little to the right of the spinal column, I cut a huge
demilune out of his new spring overcoat, bringing it round as far
under his left side (which was the right side of the navvy) as I
dared. Passing thence swiftly to the back of the seat, and reaching
between the splines, I sawed through the silk-faced front on the
left-hand side of the coat till the two cuts joined.
Cautiously as the box-turtle of his native heath, the doctor drew
away sideways and to the right, with the air of a frustrated burglar
coming out from under a bed, and stood up free, one black diagonal
shoulder projecting through the grey of his ruined overcoat. I
returned the scissors to the bag, snapped the catch, and held all
out to him as the wheels of the fly rang hollow under the railway
arch.
It came at a footpace past the wicket-gate of the station, and the
doctor stopped it with a whisper. It was going some five miles
across country to bring home from church some one, - I could not
catch the name, - because his own carriage-horses were lame. Its
destination happened to be the one place in all the world that the
doctor was most burningly anxious to visit, and he promised the
driver untold gold to drive to some ancient flame of his - Helen
Blazes, she was called.
"Aren't you coming, too?" he said, bundling his overcoat into his
bag.
Now the fly had been so obviously sent to the doctor, and to no
one else, that I had no concern with it. Our roads, I saw, divided,
and there was, further, a need upon me to laugh.
"I shall stay here," I said. "It's a very pretty country."
"My God!" he murmured, as softly as he shut the door, and I felt
that it was a prayer.
Then he went out of my life, and I shaped my course for the
railway-bridge. It was necessary to pass by the bench once more,
but the wicket was between us. The departure of the fly had waked
the navvy. He crawled on to the seat, and with malignant eyes
watched the driver flog down the road.
"The man inside o' that," he called, "'as poisoned me. 'E's a
body-snatcher. 'E's comin' back again when I'm cold. 'Ere's my
evidence!"
He waved his share of the overcoat, and I went my way, because I
was hungry. Framlynghame Admiral village is a good two miles from
the station, and I waked the holy calm of the evening every step
of that way with shouts and yells, casting myself down in the
flank of the good green hedge when I was too weak to stand. There
was an inn, - a blessed inn with a thatched roof, and peonies in
the garden,- and I ordered myself an upper chamber in which the
Foresters held their courts for the laughter was not all out of
me. A bewildered woman brought me ham and eggs, and I leaned out
of the mullioned window, and laughed between mouthfuls. I sat
long above the beer and the perfect smoke that followed, till the
lights changed in the quiet street, and I began to think of the
seven forty-five down, and all that world of the "Arabian Nights"
I had quitted.
Descending, I passed a giant in moleskins who filled the low-ceiled
tap-room. Many empty plates stood before him, and beyond them a
fringe of the Framlynghame Admiralty, to whom he was unfolding a
wondrous tale of anarchy, of body-snatching, of bribery, and the
Valley of the Shadow from the which he was but newly risen. And as
he talked he ate, and as he ate he drank, for there was much room
in him; and anon he paid royally, speaking of Justice and the Law,
before whom all Englishmen are equal, and all foreigners and
anarchists vermin and slime.
On my way to the station, he passed me with great strides, his head
high among the low-flying bats, his feet firm on the packed
road-metal, his fists clinched, and his breath coming sharply. There
was a beautiful smell in the air - the smell of white dust, bruised
nettles, and smoke, that brings tears to the throat of a man who
sees his country but seldom - a smell like the echoes of the lost
talk of lovers; the infinitely suggestive odour of an immemorial
civilisation. It was a perfect walk; and, lingering on every step,
I came to the station just as the one porter lighted the last of
a truckload of lamps, and set them back in the lamp-room, while he
dealt tickets to four or five of the population who, not contented
with their own peace, thought fit to travel. It was no ticket that
the navvy seemed to need. He was sitting on a bench, wrathfully
grinding a tumbler into fragments with his heel. I abode in
obscurity at the end of the platform, interested as ever, thank
Heaven, in my surroundings. There was a jar of wheels on the road.
The navvy rose as they approached, strode through the wicket, and
laid a hand upon a horse's bridle that brought the beast up on his
hireling hind legs. It was the providential fly coming back, and
for a moment I wondered whether the doctor had been mad enough to
revisit his practice.
"Get away; you're drunk,"said the driver.
"I'm not," said the navvy. "I've been waitin' 'ere hours and hours.
Come out, you beggar inside there!"
"Go on, driver," said a voice I did not know - a crisp, clear,
English voice.
"All right," said the navvy. "You wouldn't 'ear me when I was
polite. Now will you come?"
There was a chasm in the side of the fly, for he had wrenched the
door bodily off its hinges, and was feeling within purposefully.
A well-booted leg rewarded him, and there came out, not with delight,
hopping on one foot, a round and grey-haired Englishman, from whose
armpits dropped hymn-books, but from his mouth an altogether
different service of song.
"Come on, you bloomin' body-snatcher! You thought I was dead, did
you?" roared the navvy. And the respectable gentleman came
accordingly, inarticulate with rage.
"Ere's a man murderin' the Squire," the driver shouted, and fell
from his box upon the navvy's neck.
To do them justice, the people of Framlynghame Admiral, so many as
were on the platform, rallied to the call in the best spirit of
feudalism. It was the one porter who beat the navvy on the nose
with a ticket-punch, but it was the three third-class tickets who
attached themselves to his legs and freed the captive.
"Send for a constable! lock him up! " said that man, adjusting his
collar; and unitedly they cast him into the lamp-room, and turned
the key, while the driver mourned over the wrecked fly.
Till then the navvy, whose only desire was justice, had kept his
temper nobly. Then he went Berserk before our amazed eyes. The
door of the lamp-room was generously constructed, and would not give
an inch, but the window he tore from its fastenings and hurled
outwards. The one porter counted the damage in a loud voice, and
the others, arming themselves with agricultural implements from the
station garden, kept up a ceaseless winnowing before the window,
themselves backed close to the wall, and bade the prisoner think of
the gaol. He answered little to the point, so far as they could
understand; but seeing that his exit was impeded, he took a lamp
and hurled it through the wrecked sash. It fell on the metals and
went out. With inconceivable velocity, the others, fifteen in all,
followed, looking like rockets in the gloom, and with the last (he
could have had no plan) the Berserk rage left him as the doctor's
deadly brewage waked up, under the stimulus of violent exercise and
a very full meal, to one last cataclysmal exhibition, and - we heard
the whistle of the seven forty-five down.
They were all acutely interested in as much of the wreck as they
could see, for the station smelt to Heaven of oil, and the engine
skittered over broken glass like a terrier in a cucumber-frame.
The guard had to hear of it, and the Squire had his version of the
brutal assault, and heads were out all along the carriages as I
found me a seat.
"What is the row?" said a young man, as I entered. "'Man drunk?"
"Well, the symptoms, so far as my observation has gone, more
resemble those of Asiatic cholera than anything else," I answered,
slowly and judicially, that every word might carry weight in the
appointed scheme of things. Up till then, you will observe, I had
taken no part in that war.
He was an Englishman, but he collected his belongings as swiftly
as had the American, ages before, and leaped upon the platform,
crying: "Can I be of any service? I'm a doctor."
>From the lamp-room I heard a wearied voice wailing "Another bloomin'
doctor! "
And the seven forty-five carried me on, a step nearer to Eternity,
by the road that is worn and seamed and channelled with the
passions, and weaknesses, and warring interests of man who is
immortal and master of his fate.
-THE END-
Rudyard Kipling's short story: My Sunday At Home
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