Mugby Junction and Other Stories Read online

  Mugby Junction and Other Stories

  Charles Dickens

  This etext was prepared from the 1894 Chapman and Hall “Christmas Stories” edition by David Price, email [email protected]

  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-at- home 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 si
din’. 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 oil-cans, and also a fragrant collection of what looked like the pocket-handkerchiefs of the whole lamp family.

  As Barbox Brothers (so to call the traveller on the warranty of his luggage) took his seat upon the form, and warmed his now ungloved hands at the fire, he glanced aside at a little deal desk, much blotched with ink, which his elbow touched. Upon it were some scraps of coarse paper, and a superannuated steel pen in very reduced and gritty circumstances.

  From glancing at the scraps of paper, he turned involuntarily to his host, and said, with some roughness:

  “Why, you are never a poet, man?”

  Lamps had certainly not the conventional appearance of one, as he stood modestly rubbing his squab nose with a handkerchief so exceedingly oily, that he might have been in the act of mistaking himself for one of his charges. He was a spare man of about the Barbox Brothers time of life, with his features whimsically drawn upward as if they were attracted by the roots of his hair. He had a peculiarly shining transparent complexion, probably occasioned by constant oleaginous application; and his attractive hair, being cut short, and being grizzled, and standing straight up on end as if it in its turn were attracted by some invisible magnet above it, the top of his head was not very unlike a lamp-wick.

  “But, to be sure, it’s no business of mine,” said Barbox Brothers. “That was an impertinent observation on my part. Be what you like.”

  “Some people, sir,” remarked Lamps in a tone of apology, “are sometimes what they don’t like.”

  “Nobody knows that better than I do,” sighed the other. “I have been what I don’t like, all my life.”

  “When I first took, sir,” resumed Lamps, “to composing little Comic-Songs—like—”

  Barbox Brothers eyed him with great disfavour.

  “—To composing little Comic-Songs-like—and what was more hard—to singing ‘em afterwards,” said Lamps, “it went against the grain at that time, it did indeed.”

  Something that was not all oil here shining in Lamps’s eye, Barbox Brothers withdrew his own a little disconcerted, looked at the fire, and put a foot on the top bar. “Why did you do it, then?” he asked after a short pause; abruptly enough, but in a softer tone. “If you didn’t want to do it, why did you do it? Where did you sing them? Public-house?”

  To which Mr. Lamps returned the curious reply: “Bedside.”

  At this moment, while the traveller looked at him for elucidation, Mugby Junction started suddenly, trembled violently, and opened its gas eyes. “She’s got up!” Lamps announced, excited. “What lays in her power is sometimes more, and sometimes less; but it’s laid in her power to get up to-night, by George!”

  The legend “Barbox Brothers,” in large white letters on two black surfaces, was very soon afterwards trundling on a truck through a silent street, and, when the owner of the legend had shivered on the pavement half an hour, what time the porter’s knocks at the Inn Door knocked up the whole town first, and the Inn last, he groped his way into the close air of a shut-up house, and so groped between the sheets of a shut-up bed that seemed to have been expressly refrigerated for him when last made.

  II

  “You remember me, Young Jackson?”

  “What do I remember if not you? You are my first remembrance. It was you who told me that was my name. It was you who told me that on every twentieth of December my life had a penitential anniversary in it called a birthday. I suppose the last communication was truer than the first!”

  “What am I like, Young Jackson?”

  “You are like a blight all through the year to me. You hard-lined, thin-lipped, repressive, changeless woman with a wax mask on. You are like the Devil to me; most of all when you teach me religious things, for you make me abhor them.”

  “You remember me, Mr. Young Jackson?” In another voice from another quarter.

  “Most gratefully, sir. You were the ray of hope and prospering ambition in my life. When I attended your course, I believed that I should come to be a great healer, and I felt almost happy—even though I was still the one boarder in the house with that horrible mask, and ate and drank in silence and constraint with the mask before me, every day. As I had done every, every, every day, through my school-time and from my earliest recollection.”

  “What am I like, Mr. Young Jackson?”

  “You are like a Superior Being to me. You are like Nature beginning to reveal herself to me. I hear you again, as one of the hushed crowd of young men kindling under the power of your presence and knowledge, and you bring into my eyes the only exultant tears that ever stood in them.”

  “You remember Me, Mr. Young Jackson?” In a grating voice from quite another quarter.

  “Too well. You made your ghostly appearance in my life one day, and announced that its course was to be suddenly and wholly changed. You showed me which was my wearisome seat in the Galley of Barbox Brothers. (When THEY were, if they ever were, is unknown to me; there was nothing of them but the name when I bent to the oar.) You told me what I was to do, and what to be paid; you told me afterwards, at intervals of years, when I was to sign for the Firm, when I became a partner, when I became the Firm. I know no more of it, or of myself.”

  “What am I like, Mr. Young Jackson?”

  “You are like my father, I sometimes think. You are hard enough and cold enough so to have brought up an acknowledged son. I see your scanty figure, your close brown suit, and your tight brown wig; but you, too, wear a wax mask to your death. You never by a chance remove it—it never by a chance falls off—and I know no more of you.”

  Throughout this dialogue, the traveller spoke to himself at his window in the morning, as he had spoken to himself at the Junction overnight. And as he had then looked in the darkness, a man who had turned grey too soon, like a neglected fire: so he now looked in the sun-light, an ashier grey, like a fire which the brightness of the sun put out.

  The firm of Barbox Brothers had been some offshoot or irregular branch of the Public Notary and bill-broking tree. It had gained for itself a griping reputation before the days of Young Jackson, and the reputation had stuck to it and to him. As he had imperceptibly come into possession of the dim den up in the corner of a court off Lombard Street, on whose grimy windows the inscription Barbox Brothers had for many long years daily interposed itself between him and the sky, so he had insensibly found himself a personage held in chronic distrust, whom it was essential to screw tight to every transaction in which he engaged, whose word was never to be taken without his attested bond, whom all dealers with openly set up guards and wards against. This character had come upon him through no act of his own. It was as if the original Barbox had stretched himself down upon the office floor, and had thither caused to be conveyed Young Jackson in his sleep, and had there effected a metempsychosis and exchange of persons with him. The discovery— aided in its turn by the deceit of the only woman he had ever loved, and the deceit
of the only friend he had ever made: who eloped from him to be married together—the discovery, so followed up, completed what his earliest rearing had begun. He shrank, abashed, within the form of Barbox, and lifted up his head and heart no more.

  But he did at last effect one great release in his condition. He broke the oar he had plied so long, and he scuttled and sank the galley. He prevented the gradual retirement of an old conventional business from him, by taking the initiative and retiring from it. With enough to live on (though, after all, with not too much), he obliterated the firm of Barbox Brothers from the pages of the Post-Office Directory and the face of the earth, leaving nothing of it but its name on two portmanteaus.

  “For one must have some name in going about, for people to pick up,” he explained to Mugby High Street, through the Inn window, “and that name at least was real once. Whereas, Young Jackson!—Not to mention its being a sadly satirical misnomer for Old Jackson.”

  He took up his hat and walked out, just in time to see, passing along on the opposite side of the way, a velveteen man, carrying his day’s dinner in a small bundle that might have been larger without suspicion of gluttony, and pelting away towards the Junction at a great pace.

  “There’s Lamps!” said Barbox Brothers. “And by the bye—”

  Ridiculous, surely, that a man so serious, so self-contained, and not yet three days emancipated from a routine of drudgery, should stand rubbing his chin in the street, in a brown study about Comic Songs.

  “Bedside?” said Barbox Brothers testily. “Sings them at the bedside? Why at the bedside, unless he goes to bed drunk? Does, I shouldn’t wonder. But it’s no business of mine. Let me see. Mugby Junction, Mugby Junction. Where shall I go next? As it came into my head last night when I woke from an uneasy sleep in the carriage and found myself here, I can go anywhere from here. Where shall I go? I’ll go and look at the Junction by daylight. There’s no hurry, and I may like the look of one Line better than another.”

  But there were so many Lines. Gazing down upon them from a bridge at the Junction, it was as if the concentrating Companies formed a great Industrial Exhibition of the works of extraordinary ground spiders that spun iron. And then so many of the Lines went such wonderful ways, so crossing and curving among one another, that the eye lost them. And then some of them appeared to start with the fixed intention of going five hundred miles, and all of a sudden gave it up at an insignificant barrier, or turned off into a workshop. And then others, like intoxicated men, went a little way very straight, and surprisingly slued round and came back again. And then others were so chock-full of trucks of coal, others were so blocked with trucks of casks, others were so gorged with trucks of ballast, others were so set apart for wheeled objects like immense iron cotton-reels: while others were so bright and clear, and others were so delivered over to rust and ashes and idle wheelbarrows out of work, with their legs in the air (looking much like their masters on strike), that there was no beginning, middle, or end to the bewilderment.