Cleg Kelly, Arab of the City 24

Cleg Kelly, Arab of the City 24

"But ye didna' speak aboot it ony mair than me, Auld Chairlie!"

retorted Poet Jock.

 

"An' what for should I do that? I thocht the laddie maybe prefer't to

'bide wat!" said Auld Chairlie, with emphasis.

 

"Ye are surely growin' doited, Chairles," said the poet; "ye took the

Netherby clearin' hoose clerk for the General Manager o' the line the

day afore yesterday!"

 

"An' so micht onybody," replied Auld Chairlie, "upsetting blastie that

he is! Sic a wame as the craitur cairries, wag-waggin' afore him. I

declare I thocht he wad be either General Manager o' the line or the

Provist o' Glescae!"

 

"Haud your tongue, man Chairlie, and see if ye can own up, for yince!

If we are to judge folk by their wames, gussy pig gruntin' in the

trough wad be king o' men. But stop your haverin' and see if ye hae ony

dry claes that ye can lend this boy. He'll get his death o' cauld if he

lets them dry on him."

 

But Auld Chairlie had nothing whatever in the way of change, except a

checked red-and-white Sunday handkerchief for the neck.

 

"And I hae nocht ava'!" exclaimed the poet. "Ye maun juist gang to your

bed, my man, and I'll feed ye over the edge wi' a fork!"

 

But Cleg saw in the corner the old flour sack in which the surfaceman

had imported his last winter's flour. The bag had long been empty.

 

"Is this ony use?" said Cleg. "I could put this on!"

 

"Use," cried the poet, "what use can an auld flour sack be when a man's

claes are wat?"

 

"Aweel," said Cleg, "ye'll see, gin ye wait. Railway folk dinna ken a'

thing, though they think they do!"

 

So with that he cut a couple of holes at the corners, and made a still

larger hole in the middle of the sack bottom. Then he disrobed himself

with the utmost gravity, drew the empty sack over his head, and put his

arms through the holes in the corners.

 

"It only needs a sma' alteration at the oxters to fit like your very

skin," he said. Then he took up Auld Chairlie's table-knife and made a

couple of slits beneath the arms, "and there ye hae a comfortable suit

o' claes."

 

The poet burst into a great laugh and smote his thigh. "I never saw the

match o' the loon!" he cried, joyously.

 

"They are nocht gaudy," Cleg went on, as he seated himself at the

corner of the table, having first spread his wet garments carefully

before the stove, "but it is a fine an' airy suit for summer wear. The

surtowt comes below the knee, so it's in the fashion. Lang-skirted

coats are a' the go on Princes Street the noo. A' the lawyers wear

them."

 

At this point Cleg rose and gave an imitation of the walk and

conversation of a gentleman of the long robe, as seen from the

standpoint of the Sooth Back.

 

Once he had looked into Parliament House itself, and managed to walk

twice round before "getting chucked," as he remarked. So he knew all

about it.

 

He took an oily piece of cotton waste with which Poet Jock cleaned his

lamps. He secured it about his head, so that it hung down his back

for a wig. He put a penny in his eye, instead of the orthodox legal

eyeglass. Then he set his hands in the small of his back, and began to

parade up and down the centre of the old railway carriage in a very

dignified manner, with the old sack waving behind him after the fashion

of a gown.

 

He pretended to look down with a lofty contempt upon Poet Jock and Auld

Chairlie, as they watched him open-mouthed.

 

"Who the devil are those fellows?" he said; "lot of asses about.

Everybody is an ass. Who's sitting to-day? Ha! old Bully-boy—bally ass

he is! Who's speaking? Young Covercase—another bleating ass! Say, old

chappie, come and let's have a drink, and get out of the way of the

asses."

 

It is to be feared that Cleg would next have gone on to imitate the

clergy of his native city. But he was hampered by the fact that his

opportunities for observation had been limited to the street. He had

never been within a church door in his life. And that not so much

because he would have stood a good chance of being turned out as a

mischief-maker, but from natural aversion to an hour's confinement.

 

Then Cleg wrapped his old sack about him very tightly, and assumed

a fixed smile of great suavity. He approached the poet, who was

stretching his long limbs in the upper bunk which occupied one side of

the hut.

 

"Ah," said Cleg, slowly wagging his head from side to side, "and how do

we find ourselves to-day? Better? Let me feel your pulse—Ah, just as

I expected. Tongue—furry? Have you taken the medicine? What you need

is strengthening food, and the treatment as before. See that you get

it—blue mange, grouse pie, and the best champagne! And continue the

treatment! _Good_-morning!"

 

Cleg wrapped his sack closer about him as he finished, to represent the

slim surtout of the healing faculty, and, setting an old tea "cannie"

of tin upon his head to represent a tall hat, he bowed himself out with

his best Canongate imitation of a suitable and effective bedside manner.

 

There was no end to Cleg's entertainment when he felt that he had an

appreciative audience. And as the comedy consisted not so much in what

he said as in the perfect solemnity of his countenance, the charm of

his bare arms meandering through the holes in the corners of the sack,

and the bare legs stalking compass-like through its open mouth, Poet

Jock laughed till he had to lie down on the floor in the corner. Even

Auld Chairlie was compelled perforce to smile, though he often declared

his belief that it was all vanity, and that Cleg was certainly a child

of the devil.

 

Chairlie was specially confirmed in this opinion by Cleg's next

characterisation.

 

"Did ye ever see the Track Woman?" said Cleg, dropping for a moment

into his own manner. "I canna' bide her ava. There's them that we like

to see comin' into our hooses—folk like Miss Celie, that is veesitor in

oor district, or Big Smith, the Pleasance Missionary, even though he

whiles gies us a lick wi' his knobby stick for cloddin' cats. But the

Track Woman I canna bide. This is her!"

 

And he gathered up his sack very high in front of him, to express the

damage which it would receive by contact with the dirt of Poet Jock's

abode. Then he threw back his head and stuck out his chin, to convey an

impression of extreme condescension.

 

"Good day, poor people," he said, "I have called to leave you a little

tract. I don't know how you can live in such a place. Why don't you

move away? And the stair is so dirty and sticky! It is really not fit

for a lady to come up. What's this? What's this"—(smelling)—"chops!

Chops are far too expensive and wasteful for people in your position. A

little liver, now, or beef-bone——. What did you say? 'Get out of this!'

Surely I did not hear you right! Do you know that I came here to do you

good, and to leave you a little tract? Now, I pray you, do not let your

angry passions rise. I will, however, do my duty, and leave a little

tract. Read it carefully; I hope it will do you good. It is fitted to

teach you how to be grateful for the interest that is taken in you by

your betters!"

 

As soon as Cleg had finished, he lifted the skirts of his old sack

still higher, tilted his nose yet more in the air, and sailed out,

sniffing meanwhile from right to left and back again with extreme

disfavour.

 

But as soon as he had reached the door his manner suffered a

sea-change. He bounded in with a somersault, leaped to his feet, and

pretended to look out of the door after the departing "Track Woman."

 

"O ye besom!" he cried, "comin' here nosing and advising—as stuffed wi'

stinkin' pride as a butcher's shop wi' bluebottles in the last week o'

July! Dook her in the dub! Fling dead cats at her, and clod her wi'

cabbages and glaur! Pour dish-washin's on her. Ah, the pridefu' besom!"

 

And with this dramatic conclusion Cleg sank apparently exhausted into a

chair with the skirts of the sack sticking out in an elegant frill in

front of him, and fanned himself gracefully with an iron shovel taken

from the stove top, exactly as he had seen the young lady performers at

the penny theatres do as they waited in the wings for their "turn."

 

Great was the applause from Poet Jock, who lay in a state of collapse

on the floor.

 

"Boys O!" he exclaimed feebly, "but ye are a lad!"

 

Auld Chairlie only shook his head, and repeated, "I misdoot that ye are

a verra child o' the deevil!"

 

 

 

 

ADVENTURE XLVII.

 

THE SLEEP OF JAMES CANNON, SIGNALMAN.

 

 

On the morrow Cleg was up betimes. But not so early as Poet Jock and

Auld Chairlie. His own clothes were pretty dry, but Cleg had been so

pleased with the freedom and airiness of his "sack suit," as he called

it, that, as it was a warm morning and a lonely place, he decided to

wear it all day.

 

Cleg went out, and, starting from the side of the line, he ran

light-foot to the top of a little hill, from whence he could look

over a vast moorish wilderness—league upon league of purple heather,

through which the railway had been cut and levelled with infinite but

unremunerative art.

 

From horizon to horizon not a living thing could Cleg see except the

moorbirds and the sheep. But over the woods to the east he could catch

one glimpse of Loch Spellanderie, basking blue in the sunlight. He

could not, however, see the farmhouse. But he rubbed his hands with

satisfaction as he thought of swimming away from them all into the

darkness the night before.

 

"I showed her wha was the man, I'm thinkin'!" he said. And there upon

the heather-blooms Cleg Kelly flapped his thin arms against his sack

and crowed like a chanticleer. Then in a few moments there came back

from over the moor and loch a phantom cock-crow reduced to the airiest

diminuendo. It was the tyrant of the Loch Spellanderie dung-hill which

spoke back to him.

 

"I'm richt glad I'm no there," said Cleg, heartily.

 

Nevertheless he went down the hill again a little sadly, as though he

were not quite sure, when he came to think about it, whether he was

glad or not.

 

But on the whole it was perhaps as well that he was where he was, at

least in his present costume.

 

When Cleg got back to the hut, he looked about for something to do

till his friends returned. His active frame did not stand idleness

well. He grew distracted with the silence and the wide spaces of air

and sunshine about him. He longed to hear the thunderous rattle of the

coal-carts coming out of the station of St. Leonards. He missed the

long wolf's howl of the seasoned South Side coalman. In the morning,

indeed, the whaups had done something to cheer him, wailing and crying

to the peewits. But as the forenoon advanced even they went off to the

shore-side pools, or dropped into the tufts of heather and were mute.

 

Cleg grew more and more tired of the silence. It deafened him, so that

several times he had to go outside and yell at the top of his voice

simply, as it were, to relieve nature.

 

It happened that on the second occasion, as soon as he had finished

yelling—that is, exhausted an entire vocabulary of hideous sounds—a

train to Port Andrew broke the monotony. It did not actually stop,

because it was a passenger train and had already "watered up" at

Netherby. But Cleg was as pleased as if it had brought him a box of

apples. He climbed up and sat cross-legged on the top of the hut in his

sack, for all the world like an Indian idol; and the engine-driver was

so astonished that he forgot to put the brake on till he was thundering

headlong half way down the incline on the western side of the Summit

cabin.

 

But the stoker, a young man incapable of astonishment (as many of the

very young are), picked up a lump of coal from the tender and threw

it at Cleg with excellent aim. However, as the train was going slowly

uphill at the time, Cleg caught it and set the piece of coal between

his teeth. His aspect on this occasion was such as would fully have

warranted Auld Chairlie in setting him down not as a child of the

devil, but as the father of all the children of the devil.

 

The train passed, and Cleg was again in want of something to do. He

could not sit there in the sun, and be slowly roasted with a piece of

coal between his teeth, all for the benefit of the whaups. He thought

with regret how he should like to sit, just as he was, on some towering

pinnacle of the Scott monument where the police could not get him, and

make faces at all the envious keelies in Edinburgh. To do this through

all eternity would have afforded him much more pleasure than any

realisation of more contentional presentations of the joys of heaven.

 

He descended and looked about him.

 

At the end of the little cabin he found a pitcher of tar, but no brush.

He searched further, however, till he found it thrown carelessly

away among the heather. Whereupon Cleg forthwith appointed himself

house-painter-in-ordinary to the Port Andrew Railway Company, and

attacked the Summit cabin. He laid the tar on thick and good, so that

when the sun beat upon his handiwork it had the effect of raising

a smell which made Cleg's heart beat with the joy of reminiscence.

It reminded him of a thousand things—of the brickyard on blistering

afternoons, and also (when the perfume came most undiluted to his

nose) of that district of Fountainbridge which has the privilege of

standing upon the banks of the Forth and Clyde canal, and of containing

several highly respectable and well-connected glue factories. Cleg had

once gone there to "lag for a boy" who had offended his dignity by

"trapping" him at school in the spelling of the word "coffin."

 

Cleg had spelled it, simply and severely, "kofn."

 

The boy from Fountainbridge, however, had spelled it correctly. Not

only so, but he had been elated about the matter—very foolishly and

rashly so, indeed.

 

"For," said Cleg, "it's easy for him. His faither is a joiner, and

makes coffins to his trade. Besides, he had a half-brither that died

last week. He micht easy be able to spell 'coffin'!"

 

To prevent the pride which so surely comes before a fall, Cleg waited

for the "coffin" boy and administered the fall in person—indeed,

several of them, and mostly in puddles.

 

He was therefore agreeably reminded of his visit to Fountainbridge

whenever he stirred up the pitch from the bottom and the smell rose

to his nostrils particularly solid and emulous. He shut his eyes and

coughed. He dreamed that he was back and happily employed in "downing"

the orthographist of Fountainbridge upon the flowery banks of the Union

Canal.

 

It was after ten o'clock in the evening before Poet Jock came in

sight. He had been on a heavy job with a break-down gang on the Muckle

Fleet incline. All day long he had been rhyming verses to the rasp of

pick and the scrape of shovel. Sometimes so busy was he that he had

barely time to take his mate's warning and leap to the side before

the engine came leaping round the curve scarcely thirty lengths of

rail away. But Poet Jock was entirely happy. Probably he might have

travelled far and never known greater exhilaration than now, when he

heard the engine surge along the irons, while he tingled with the

thought that it was his strong arms which kept the track by which man

was joined to man and city linked to city.

 

A fine, free, broad-browed, open-eyed man was Poet Jock. And his hand

was as heavy as his heart was tender. As, indeed, many a rascal had

found to his cost. Those who know railwaymen best, are surest that

there does not exist in the world so fine a set of workers as the men

whose care is the rails and the road, the engines and the guard vans,

the platforms, goods sheds, and offices of our common railways.

 

A railway never sleeps. A thousand watchful eyes are at this moment

glancing through the bull's-eyes of the driver's cab. A thousand strong

hands are on the driving lever. Aloft, in wind-beaten, rain-battered

signal boxes, stand the solitary men who, with every faculty on the

alert, keep ten thousand from instant destruction. How tense their

muscles, how clear their brains must be as they pull the signal and

open the points! That brown hand gripping lever number seventeen,

instead of number eighteen within six inches of it, is all that

preserves three hundred people from instant and terrible death. That

pound or two of pressure on the signal chain which sent abroad the

red flash of danger, stopped the express in which sat our wives and

children, and kept it from dashing at full speed into that over-shunted

truck which a minute ago toppled over and lay squarely across the

racer's path.

 

And the surfacemen, of whom are Auld Chairlie and Poet Jock? Have you

thought of how, night and day, they patrol every rod of iron path—how

with clink of hammer and swing of arm they test every length of

rail—how they dash the rain out of their eyes that they may discern

whether the sidelong pressure of the swift express, or the lumbering

thunder of the overladen goods, have not bent outwards the steel rail,

forced it from its "chair," or caused the end of the length to spring

upward like a fixed bayonet after the weight has passed over it?

 

A few men standing by the line side as the train speeds by. What of

them? Heroes? They look by no means like it. Lazy fellows, rather,

leaning on their picks and shovels when they should be working. Or a

solitary man far up among the hills, idly clinking the metals with his

hammer as he saunters along through the stillness.

 

These are the surfacemen—and that is all most know of them. But wait.

When the night is blackest, the storm grimmest, there is a bridge out

yonder which has been weakened—a culvert strained where a stream from

the hillside has undermined the track. The trains are passing every

quarter of an hour in each direction. Nevertheless, a length of rail

must be lifted and laid during that time. A watch must be kept. The

destructiveness of nature must be fought in the face of wetness and

weariness. And, in spite of all, the train may come too quick round

the curve. Then there follows the usual paragraph in the corner of

the local paper if the accident has happened in the country, a bare

announcement of the coroner's inquest if it be in the town.

 

A porter is crushed between the platform and the moving carriages; a

goods guard killed at the night shunt in the yard. Careless fellow!

Serves him right for his recklessness. Did he not know the risk when

he engaged? Of course he did—none better. But then he got twenty-two

shillings a week to feed wife and bairns with for taking that risk. And

if he did not take it, are there not plenty who would be glad of the

chance of his empty berth?

 

And what then? Why, just this: there is one added to the thousands

killed upon the railways of our lands—one stroke, a little figure 1

made at the foot of the unfinished column, a grave, a family in black,

a widow with six children moved out of the company's house on which

grow the roses which he planted about the door that first year, when

all the world was young and a pound a week spelled Paradise. The six

children have gone into a single room and she takes in washing, and is

hoping by and by to get the cleaning of a board school, if she be very

fortunate.

 

To blame? Who said that any one was to blame? Of course not. Are we not

all shareholders in the railways, and do we not grumble vastly when our

half-yearly dividend is low? So lengthen the hours of these over-paid,

lazy fellows in corduroys—lengthen that column over which the Board of

Trade's clerk lingers a moment ere he adds a unit. O well, what matter?

'Tis only statistics filed for reference in a Government office.

 

But while Cleg waited for Poet Jock something else was happening at

Netherby.

 

It was a bitter night there, with a westerly wind sweeping up torrents

of slanting rain through the pitchy dark. Netherby Junction was

asleep, but it was the sleep which draws near the resurrection. The

station-master was enjoying his short after-supper nap in the armchair

by the fire. For the down boat-train from Port Andrew and the Duncan

Urquhart's goods train would pass each other at Netherby Junction at

10.5 P. M.

 

The signal box up yonder in the breast of the storm was almost carried

away. So tall it rose that the whole fabric bent and shivered in each

fierce gust which came hurtling in from the Atlantic. James Cannon,

the signalman of Netherby West, was not asleep. His mate was ill, but

not ill enough to be quite off duty. James Cannon had applied for a

substitute, but headquarters were overtaxed for spare men and had not

responded. Netherby was considered a light station to work, and the

duty would no doubt be done somehow.

 

James Cannon had been on duty since six in the morning—sixteen hours

already at the levers. Then he had also been up nearly all the night

before with a weakly and fretful child. But the company's regulations could not be expected to provide for that.