“Why did the English travel in closed boxes? Why were the locomotives so small, and why did they burn soft coal? Why were there so many overhead bridges when a grade-crossing would suffice? What would be the wages of that old man working in that field? What was that bright yellow crop growing in that section? Why did vehicles in a street keep to the left? Was there any organized system of irrigation, that the country was all so green? Was there game in those woods, and who had the right to hunt it?”
Norton, a professional soldier from his school days, knew nothing of many of these things. He was also a typical Englishman, and had been brought up to accept matters as he found them. But he was the son of an English country squire, and he was able to name the various crops—meadow-grass, hay-grass, wheat, oats, barley, potatoes, beans—whose variegated colours impart to an English landscape its curious crazy-quilt effect. He was well-versed, too, in agricultural economics and the hoary traditions of the feudal system, and discussed voluminously, as an Englishman will when started upon his own subject, upon farm-labourers’ wages, the rotation of crops, and the Ground Game Act.
Floyd, who agreed with Dr. Samuel Johnson in regarding one green field as very like another green field, recked nothing of these things. But he was a mine of information on railroad management. To a deeply interested audience he traced the origin of the standard railway gauge of the world back to an obscure English colliery road of George Stephenson’s days: he ascribed the multitude of overhead bridges and tightly locked level crossings to the benevolent fussiness of the Board of Trade. He even knew—to the frank amazement of Captain Norton—the maximum height from rail-level to which a British locomotive, by reason of the aforesaid bridges, can aspire—thus accounting for the stunted appearance of the same by comparison with its American brother, which in an atmosphere of greater freedom is permitted to soar some nine feet higher. Greatly daring, he even justified the British custom of keeping to the left, on the ground that it dated back to the days when men rode on horseback, and riders and postilions, to mount or dismount, must perforce draw in to the near side of the road.
An American is forever battling between two instincts—native appreciation of what is modern and efficient, and inherited veneration for what is ancient and inconvenient. Common sense usually compels him to favour the former; but he is never so happy as when he can conserve or justify the latter.
Major Floyd gratified this instinct. He carried his hearers back to the days of stage-coaches. He told of the opening of the Stockton and Darlington Railway; of Brunel and the Broad Gauge; of the railway races in the nineties, when the Scottish Express ran four hundred miles in seven hours. Altogether, in his able hands, “Romance brought up the Nine Fifteen.”
The locomotive gave a shriek, and the train began to slow down. Major Powers turned from the contemplation of a tiny English town nestling in a shallow valley a mile away. With its red roofs and square church tower set against a background of living green, it looked the embodiment of uneventful drowsiness. Certainly a little imagination was required to realize that under nearly every one of these same roofs there stood at least one empty chair—a chair that might or might not be occupied again—and that beneath that ancient tower for four long years, week by week, in good times and in bad, women, children, and old men had congregated to pray that those whose names were inscribed upon the illuminated scroll in the church porch—squire’s son, parson’s son, farmer’s son, poacher’s son—might in God’s good time come home again, having achieved the purpose for which they had set out.
Powers possessed the requisite imagination. He had been reared in Kentucky—that land of fair women and noble horses. This toy town, which could have been transported bodily into his native State without materially affecting either the landscape or the census, appealed to him, as small children appeal to large people.
He turned to Norton, and said simply: