An Error In The Fourth Dimension
Before he was thirty, he discovered that there was no one to play
with him. Though the wealth of three toilsome generations stood to
his account, though his tastes in the matter of books, bindings,
rugs, swords, bronzes, lacquer, pictures, plate, statuary, horses,
conservatories, and agriculture were educated and catholic, the
public opinion of his country wanted to know why he did not go to
office daily, as his father had before him.
So he fled, and they howled behind him that he was an unpatriotic
Anglomaniac, born to consume fruits, one totally lacking in public
spirit. He wore an eyeglass; he had built a wall round his country
house, with a high gate that shut, instead of inviting America to
sit on his flower-beds; he ordered his clothes from England; and
the press of his abiding city cursed him, from his eye-glass to his
trousers, for two consecutive days.
When he rose to light again, it was where nothing less than the
tents of an invading army in Piccadilly would make any difference
to anybody. If he had money and leisure, England stood ready to
give him all that money and leisure could buy. That price paid,
she would ask no questions. He took his cheque-book and accumulated
things - warily at first, for he remembered that in America things
own the man. To his delight, he discovered that in England he
could put his belongings under his feet; for classes, ranks, and
denominations of people rose, as it were, from the earth, and
silently and discreetly took charge of his possessions. They had
been born and bred for that sole purpose - servants of the
cheque-book. When that was at an end they would depart as
mysteriously as they had come.
The impenetrability of this regulated life irritated him, and he
strove to learn something of the human side of these people. He
retired baffled, to be trained by his menials. In America, the
native demoralises the English servant. In England, the servant
educates the master. Wilton Sargent strove to learn all they taught
as ardently as his father had striven to wreck, before capture, the
railways of his native land; and it must have been some touch of
the old bandit railway blood that bade him buy, for a song, Holt
Hangars, whose forty-acre lawn, as every one knows, sweeps down in
velvet to the quadruple tracks of the Great Buchonian Railway. Their
trains flew by almost continuously, with a bee-like drone in the day
and a flutter of strong wings at night. The son of Merton Sargent
had good right to be interested in them. He owned controlling
interests in several thousand miles of track, - not permanent way,
- built on altogether different plans, where locomotives eternally
whistled for grade-crossings, and parlor-cars of fabulous expense
and unrestful design skated round curves that the Great Buchonian
would have condemned as unsafe in a construction-line. From the
edge of his lawn he could trace the chaired metals falling away,
rigid as a bowstring, into the valley of the Prest, studded with the
long perspective of the block signals, buttressed with stone, and
carried, high above all possible risk, on a forty-foot embankment.
Left to himself, he would have builded a private car, and kept it
at the nearest railway-station, Amberley Royal, five miles away.
But those into whose hands he had committed himself for his English
training had little knowledge of railways and less of private cars.
The one they knew was something that existed in the scheme of things
for their convenience. The other they held to be "distinctly
American"; and, with the versatility of his race, Wilton Sargent had
set out to be just a little more English than the English.
He succeeded to admiration. He learned not to redecorate Holt
Hangars, though he warmed it; to leave his guests alone; to refrain
from superfluous introductions; to abandon manners of which he had
great store, and to hold fast by manner which can after labour be
acquired. He learned to let other people, hired for the purpose,
attend to the duties for which they were paid. He learned - this
he got from a ditcher on the estate - that every man with whom he
came in contact had his decreed position in the fabric of the realm,
which position he would do well to consult. Last mystery of all,
he learned to golf - well: and when an American knows the innermost
meaning of "Don't press, slow back, and keep your eye on the ball,"
he is, for practical purposes, denationalised.
His other education proceeded on the pleasantest lines. Was he
interested in any conceivable thing in heaven above, or the earth
beneath, or the waters under the earth? Forthwith appeared at his
table, guided by those safe hands into which he had fallen, the
very men who had best said, done, written, explored, excavated,
built, launched, created, or studied that one thing - herders of
books and prints in the British Museum; specialists in scarabs,
cartouches, and dynasties Egyptian; rovers and raiders from the
heart of unknown lands; toxicologists; orchid-hunters; monographers
on flint implements, carpets, prehistoric man, or early Renaissance
music. They came, and they played with him. They asked no
questions; they cared not so much as a pin who or what he was. They
demanded only that he should be able to talk and listen courteously.
Their work was done elsewhere and out of his sight.
There were also women.
"Never," said Wilton Sargent to himself, "has an American seen
England as I'm seeing it"; and he thought, blushing beneath the
bedclothes, of the unregenerate and blatant days when he would steam
to office, down the Hudson, in his twelve-hundred-ton ocean-going
steam-yacht, and arrive, by gradations, at Bleecker Street, hanging
on to a leather strap between an Irish washerwoman and a German
anarchist. If any of his guests had seen him then they would have
said: "How distinctly American!" and - Wilton did not care for that
tone. He had schooled himself to an English walk, and, so long as
he did not raise it, an English voice. He did not gesticulate with
his hands; he sat down on most of his enthusiasms, but he could not
rid himself of The Shibboleth. He would ask for the Worcestershire
sauce: even Howard, his immaculate butler, could not break him of
this.
It was decreed that he should complete his education in a wild and
wonderful manner, and, further, that I should be in at that death.
Wilton had more than once asked me to Holt Hangars, for the purpose
of showing how well the new life fitted him, and each time I had
declared it creaseless. His third invitation was more informal
than the others, and he hinted of some matter in which he was
anxious for my sympathy or counsel, or both. There is room for an
infinity of mistakes when a man begins to take liberties with his
nationality; and I went down expecting things. A seven-foot
dog-cart and a groom in the black Holt Hangars livery met me at
Amberley Royal. At Holt Hangars I was received by a person of
elegance and true reserve, and piloted to my luxurious chamber.
There were no other guests in the house, and this set me thinking.
Wilton came into my room about half an hour before dinner, and though
his face was masked with a drop-curtain of highly embroidered
indifference, I could see that he was not at ease. In time, for he
was then almost as difficult to move as one of my own countrymen, I
extracted the tale - simple in its extravagance, extravagant in its
simplicity. It seemed that Hackman of the British Museum had been
staying with him about ten days before, boasting of scarabs. Hackman
has a way of carrying really priceless antiquities on his tie-ring
and in his trouser pockets. Apparently, he had intercepted something
on its way to the Boulak Museum which, he said, was "a genuine
Amen-Hotepa queen's scarab of the Fourth Dynasty." Now Wilton had
bought from Cassavetti, whose reputation is not above suspicion, a
scarab of much the same scarabeousness, and had left it in his London
chambers. Hackman at a venture, but knowing Cassavetti, pronounced
it an imposition. There was long discussion - savant versus
millionaire, one saying: " ut I know it cannot be"; and the other:
"But I can and will prove it." Wilton found it necessary for his
soul's satisfaction to go up to town, then and there, - a forty-mile
run, - and bring back the scarab before dinner. It was at this point
that he began to cut corners with disastrous results. Amberley Royal
station being five miles away, and putting in of horses a matter of
time, Wilton had told Howard, the immaculate butler, to signal the
next train to stop; and Howard, who was more of a man of resource
than his master gave him credit for, had, with the red flag of the
ninth hole of the links which crossed the bottom of the lawn,
signalled vehemently to the first down-train; and it had stopped.
Here Wilton's account became confused. He attempted, it seems, to
get into that highly indignant express, but a guard restrained him
with more or less force - hauled him, in fact, backyards from the
window of a locked carriage. Wilton must have struck the gravel
with some vehemence, for the consequences, he admitted, were a free
fight on the line in which he lost his hat, and was at last dragged
into the guard's van and set down breathless.
He had pressed money upon the man, and very foolishly had explained
everything but his name. This he clung to, for he had a vision of
tall head-lines in the New York papers, and well knew no son of
Merton Sargent could expect mercy that side the water. The guard,
to Wilton's amazement, refused the money on the grounds that this
was a matter for the Company to attend to. Wilton insisted on his
incognito, and, therefore, found two policemen waiting for him at
St. Botolph terminus. When he expressed a wish to buy a new hat
and telegraph to his friends, both policemen with one voice warned
him that whatever he said would be used as evidence against him;
and this had impressed Wilton tremendously.
"They were so infernally polite," he said. "If they had clubbed me
I wouldn't have cared; but it was, 'Step this way, sir,' and, 'Up
those stairs, please, sir,' till they jailed me - jailed me like a
common drunk, and I had to stay in a filthy little cubby-hole of a
cell all night."
"That comes of not giving your name and not wiring your lawyer," I
replied. "What did you get?"
"Forty shillings, or a month," said Wilton, promptly, - "next morning
bright and early. They were working us off, three a minute. A girl
in a pink hat - she was brought in at three in the morning - got ten
days. I suppose I was lucky. I must have knocked his senses out of
the guard. He told the old duck on the bench that I had told him I
was a sergeant in the army, and that I was gathering beetles on the
track. That comes of trying to explain to an Englishman."
"And you?"
"Oh, I said nothing. I wanted to get out. I paid my fine, and
bought a new hat, and came up here before noon next morning. There
were a lot of people in the house, and I told ' em I'd been
unavoidably detained, and then they began to recollect engagements
elsewhere. Hackman must have seen the fight on the track and made
a story of it. I suppose they thought it was distinctly American
- confound 'em! It's the only time in my life that I've ever
flagged a train, and I wouldn't have done it but for that scarab.
'T wouldn't hurt their old trains to be held up once in a while."
"Well, it's all over now," I said, choking a little. "And your name
didn't get into the papers. It is rather transatlantic when you
come to think of it."
"Over!" Wilton grunted savagely. "It's only just begun. That
trouble with the guard was just common, ordinary assault - merely
a little criminal business. The flagging of the train is civil,
infernally civil, - and means something quite different. They're
after me for that now."
"Who?"
"The Great Buchonian. There was a man in court watching the case
on behalf of the Company. I gave him my name in a quiet corner
before I bought my hat, and - come to dinner now; I'll show you the
results afterwards." The telling of his wrongs had worked Wilton
Sargent into a very fine temper, and I do not think that my
conversation soothed him. In the course of the dinner, prompted
by a devil of pure mischief, I dwelt with loving insistence on
certain smells and sounds of New York which go straight to the heart
of the native in foreign parts; and Wilton began to ask many
questions about his associates aforetime - men of the New York Yacht
Club, Storm King, or the Restigouche, owners of rivers, ranches,
and shipping in their playtime, lords of railways, kerosene, wheat,
and cattle in their offices. When the green mint came, I gave him
a peculiarly oily and atrocious cigar, of the brand they sell in the
tessellated, electric-lighted, with expensive-pictures-of-the-nude
adorned bar of the Pandemonium, and Wilton chewed the end for
several minutes ere he lit it. The butler left us alone, and the
chimney of the oak-panelled diningroom began to smoke.
"That's another!" said he, poking the fire savagely, and I knew
what he meant. One cannot put steam-heat in houses where Queen
Elizabeth slept. The steady beat of a night-mail, whirling down
the valley, recalled me to business. "What about the Great
Buchonian?" I said.
"Come into my study. That's all - as yet."
It was a pile of Seidlitz-powders-coloured correspondence, perhaps
nine inches high, and it looked very businesslike.
"You can go through it," said Wilton. "Now I could take a chair
and a red flag and go into Hyde Park and say the most atrocious
things about your Queen, and preach anarchy and all that, y' know,
till I was hoarse, and no one would take any notice. The Police
damn 'em! - would protect me if I got into trouble. But for a
little thing like flagging a dirty little sawed-off train, -
running through my own grounds, too, - I get the whole British
Constitution down on me as if I sold bombs. I don't understand it."
"No more does the Great Buchonian - apparently." I was turning over
the letters. "Here's the traffic superintendent writing that it's
utterly incomprehensible that any man should ... Good heavens,
Wilton, you have done it!" I giggled, as I read on.
"What's funny now?" said my host.
"It seems that you, or Howard for you, stopped the three-forty
Northern down."
"I ought to know that! They all had their knife into me, from the
engine-driver up."
"But it's the three-forty - the Induna - surely you've heard of
the Great Buchonian's Induna!"
"How the deuce am I to know one train from another? They come along
about every two minutes."
"Quite so. But this happens to be the Induna - the one train of
the whole line. She's timed for fifty-seven miles an hour. She was
put on early in the Sixties, and she has never been stopped - "
"I know! Since William the Conqueror came over, or King Charles hid
in her smoke-stack. You're as bad as the rest of these Britishers.
If she's been run all that while, it's time she was flagged once or
twice."
The American was beginning to ooze out all over Wilton, and his
small-boned hands were moving restlessly.
"Suppose you flagged the Empire State Express, or the Western Cyclone?"
"Suppose I did. I know Otis Harvey - or used to. I'd send him a wire,
and he'd understand it was a ground-hog case with me. That's exactly
what I told this British fossil company here."
"Have you been answering their letters without legal advice, then?"
"Of course I have."
"Oh, my Sainted Country! Go ahead, Wilton."
"I wrote 'em that I'd be very happy to see their president and
explain to him in three words all about it; but that wouldn't do.
'Seems their president must be a god. He was too busy, and - well,
you can read for yourself - they wanted explanations. The
stationmaster at Amberley Royal - and he grovels before me, as a
rule - wanted an explanation, and quick, too. The head sachem at
St. Botolph's wanted three or four, and the Lord High Mukkamuk that
oils the locomotives wanted one every fine day. I told 'em - I've
told hem about fifty times - I stopped their holy and sacred train
because I wanted to board her. Did they think I wanted to feel
her pulse?"
"You didn't say that?"
"Feel her pulse'? Of course not."
"No. 'Board her.'"
"What else could I say?"
"My dear Wilton, what is the use of Mrs. Sherborne, and the Clays,
and all that lot working over you for four years to make an
Englishman out of you, if the very first time you're rattled you go
back to the vernacular?"
"I'm through with Mrs. Sherborne and the rest of the crowd. America's
good enough for me. What ought I to have said? 'Please,' or 'thanks
awf'ly or how?"
There was no chance now of mistaking the man's nationality. Speech,
gesture, and step, so carefully drilled into him, had gone away with
the borrowed mask of indifference. It was a lawful son of the
Youngest People, whose predecessors were the Red Indian. His voice
had risen to the high, throaty crow of his breed when they labour
under excitement. His close-set eyes showed by turns unnecessary
fear, annoyance beyond reason, rapid and purposeless flights of
thought, the child's lust for immediate revenge, and the child's
pathetic bewilderment, who knocks his head against the bad, wicked
table. And on the other side, I knew, stood the Company, as unable
as Wilton to understand.
"And I could buy their old road three times over," he muttered,
playing with a paper-knife, and moving restlessly to and fro.
"You didn't tell 'em that, I hope!"
There was no answer; but as I went through the letters, I felt that
Wilton must have told them many surprising things. The Great
Buchonian had first asked for an explanation of the stoppage of
their Induna, and had found a certain levity in the explanation
tendered. It then advised " Mr. W. Sargent" to refer his
solicitor to their solicitor, or whatever the legal phrase is.
"And you didn't?" I said, looking up.
"No. They were treating me exactly as if I had been a kid playing
on the cable-tracks. There was not the least necessity for any
solicitor. Five minutes' quiet talk would have settled everything."
I returned to the correspondence. The Great Buchonian regretted
that, owing to pressure of business, none of their directors could
accept Mr. W. Sargent's invitation to run down and discuss the
difficulty. The Great Buchonian was careful to point out that no
animus underlay their action, nor was money their object. Their
duty was to protect the interests of their line, and these interests
could not be protected if a precedent were established whereby any
of the Queen's subjects could stop a train in mid-career. Again
(this was another branch of the correspondence, not more than five
heads of departments being concerned), the Company admitted that
there was some reasonable doubt as to the duties of express-trains
in all crises, and the matter was open to settlement by process of
law till an authoritative ruling was obtained - from the House of
Lords, if necessary.
"That broke me all up," said Wilton, who was reading over my
shoulder. "I knew I'd struck the British Constitution at last.
The House of Lords - my Lord! And, anyway, I'm not one of the
Queen's subjects."
"Why, I had a notion that you'd got yourself naturalised."
Wilton blushed hotly as he explained that very many things must
happen to the British Constitution ere he took out his papers.
"How does it all strike you?" he said. "Isn't the Great Buchonian
crazy?"
"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.
-THE END-
Rudyard Kipling's short story: An Error In The Fourth Dimension
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