MUGBY JUNCTION
CHAPTER I--BARBOX BROTHERS
"Guard! What place is this?"
"Mugby Junction, sir."
"A windy place!"
"Yes, it mostly is, sir."
"And looks comfortless indeed!"
"Yes, it generally does, sir."
"Is it a rainy night still?"
"Pours, sir."
"Open the door. I''ll get out."
"You''ll have, sir," said the guard, glistening with drops of wet,
and looking at the tearful face of his watch by the light of his
lantern as the traveller descended, "three minutes here."
"More, I think.--For I am not going on."
"Thought you had a through ticket, sir?"
"So I have, but I shall sacrifice the rest of it. I want my
luggage."
"Please to come to the van and point it out, sir. Be good enough to
look very sharp, sir. Not a moment to spare."
The guard hurried to the luggage van, and the traveller hurried
after him. The guard got into it, and the traveller looked into it.
"Those two large black portmanteaus in the corner where your light
shines. Those are mine."
"Name upon ''em, sir?"
"Barbox Brothers."
"Stand clear, sir, if you please. One. Two. Right!"
Lamp waved. Signal lights ahead already changing. Shriek from
engine. Train gone.
"Mugby Junction!" said the traveller, pulling up the woollen muffler
round his throat with both hands. "At past three o''clock of a
tempestuous morning! So!"
He spoke to himself. There was no one else to speak to. Perhaps,
though there had been any one else to speak to, he would have
preferred to speak to himself. Speaking to himself he spoke to a
man within five years of fifty either way, who had turned grey too
soon, like a neglected fire; a man of pondering habit, brooding
carriage of the head, and suppressed internal voice; a man with many
indications on him of having been much alone.
He stood unnoticed on the dreary platform, except by the rain and by
the wind. Those two vigilant assailants made a rush at him. "Very
well," said he, yielding. "It signifies nothing to me to what
quarter I turn my face."
Thus, at Mugby Junction, at past three o''clock of a tempestuous
morning, the traveller went where the weather drove him.
Not but what he could make a stand when he was so minded, for,
coming to the end of the roofed shelter (it is of considerable
extent at Mugby Junction), and looking out upon the dark night, with
a yet darker spirit-wing of storm beating its wild way through it,
he faced about, and held his own as ruggedly in the difficult
direction as he had held it in the easier one. Thus, with a steady
step, the traveller went up and down, up and down, up and down,
seeking nothing and finding it.
A place replete with shadowy shapes, this Mugby Junction in the
black hours of the four-and-twenty. Mysterious goods trains,
covered with palls and gliding on like vast weird funerals,
conveying themselves guiltily away from the presence of the few
lighted lamps, as if their freight had come to a secret and unlawful
end. Half-miles of coal pursuing in a Detective manner, following
when they lead, stopping when they stop, backing when they back.
Red-hot embers showering out upon the ground, down this dark avenue,
and down the other, as if torturing fires were being raked clear;
concurrently, shrieks and groans and grinds invading the ear, as if
the tortured were at the height of their suffering. Iron-barred
cages full of cattle jangling by midway, the drooping beasts with
horns entangled, eyes frozen with terror, and mouths too: at least
they have long icicles (or what seem so) hanging from their lips.
Unknown languages in the air, conspiring in red, green, and white
characters. An earthquake, accompanied with thunder and lightning,
going up express to London. Now, all quiet, all rusty, wind and
rain in possession, lamps extinguished, Mugby Junction dead and
indistinct, with its robe drawn over its head, like Caesar.
Now, too, as the belated traveller plodded up and down, a shadowy
train went by him in the gloom which was no other than the train of
a life. From whatsoever intangible deep cutting or dark tunnel it
emerged, here it came, unsummoned and unannounced, stealing upon
him, and passing away into obscurity. Here mournfully went by a
child who had never had a childhood or known a parent, inseparable
from a youth with a bitter sense of his namelessness, coupled to a
man the enforced business of whose best years had been distasteful
and oppressive, linked to an ungrateful friend, dragging after him a
woman once beloved. Attendant, with many a clank and wrench, were
lumbering cares, dark meditations, huge dim disappointments,
monotonous years, a long jarring line of the discords of a solitary
and unhappy existence.
"--Yours, sir?"
The traveller recalled his eyes from the waste into which they had
been staring, and fell back a step or so under the abruptness, and
perhaps the chance appropriateness, of the question.
"Oh! My thoughts were not here for the moment. Yes. Yes. Those
two portmanteaus are mine. Are you a Porter?"
"On Porter''s wages, sir. But I am Lamps."
The traveller looked a little confused.
"Who did you say you are?"
"Lamps, sir," showing an oily cloth in his hand, as farther
explanation.
"Surely, surely. Is there any hotel or tavern here?"
"Not exactly here, sir. There is a Refreshment Room here, but--"
Lamps, with a mighty serious look, gave his head a warning roll that
plainly added--"but it''s a blessed circumstance for you that it''s
not open."
"You couldn''t recommend it, I see, if it was available?"
"Ask your pardon, sir. If it was -?"
"Open?"
"It ain''t my place, as a paid servant of the company, to give my
opinion on any of the company''s toepics,"--he pronounced it more
like toothpicks,--"beyond lamp-ile and cottons," returned Lamps in a
confidential tone; "but, speaking as a man, I wouldn''t recommend my
father (if he was to come to life again) to go and try how he''d be
treated at the Refreshment Room. Not speaking as a man, no, I would
NOT."
The traveller nodded conviction. "I suppose I can put up in the
town? There is a town here?" For the traveller (though a stay-athome compared with most travellers) had been, like many others,
carried on the steam winds and the iron tides through that Junction
before, without having ever, as one might say, gone ashore there.
"Oh yes, there''s a town, sir! Anyways, there''s town enough to put
up in. But," following the glance of the other at his luggage,
"this is a very dead time of the night with us, sir. The deadest
time. I might a''most call it our deadest and buriedest time."
"No porters about?"
"Well, sir, you see," returned Lamps, confidential again, "they in
general goes off with the gas. That''s how it is. And they seem to
have overlooked you, through your walking to the furder end of the
platform. But, in about twelve minutes or so, she may be up."
"Who may be up?"
"The three forty-two, sir. She goes off in a sidin'' till the Up X
passes, and then she"--here an air of hopeful vagueness pervaded
Lamps--"does all as lays in her power."
"I doubt if I comprehend the arrangement."
"I doubt if anybody do, sir. She''s a Parliamentary, sir. And, you
see, a Parliamentary, or a Skirmishun--"
"Do you mean an Excursion?"
"That''s it, sir.--A Parliamentary or a Skirmishun, she mostly DOES
go off into a sidin''. But, when she CAN get a chance, she''s
whistled out of it, and she''s whistled up into doin'' all as,"--Lamps
again wore the air of a highly sanguine man who hoped for the best,-"all as lays in her power."
He then explained that the porters on duty, being required to be in
attendance on the Parliamentary matron in question, would doubtless
turn up with the gas. In the meantime, if the gentleman would not
very much object to the smell of lamp-oil, and would accept the
warmth of his little room - The gentleman, being by this time very
cold, instantly closed with the proposal.
A greasy little cabin it was, suggestive, to the sense of smell, of
a cabin in a Whaler. But there was a bright fire burning in its
rusty grate, and on the floor there stood a wooden stand of newly
trimmed and lighted lamps, ready for carriage service. They made a
bright show, and their light, and the warmth, accounted for the
popularity of the room, as borne witness to by many impressions of
velveteen trousers on a form by the fire, and many rounded smears
and smudges of stooping velveteen shoulders on the adjacent wall.
Various untidy shelves accommodated a quantity of lamps and oilcans, and also a fragrant collection of what looked like the pockethandkerchiefs of the ...
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