They all hoped to become engine-drivers earning six or eight hundred a year, and therefore they despised all mere sit-down clerks in the Store, Audit and Traffic departments, and ducked them when they met at the Company’s swimming baths.
There were no strikes or tie-ups on the D. I. R. in those days, for the reason that the ten or twelve thousand natives and two or three thousand whites were doing their best to turn the Company’s employment into a caste in which their sons and relatives would be sure of positions and pensions. Everything in India crystallizes into a caste sooner or later—the big jute and cotton mills, the leather harness and opium factories, the coal-mines and the dockyards, and, in years to come, when India begins to be heard from as one of the manufacturing countries of the world, the labour Unions of other lands will learn something about the beauty of caste which will greatly interest them.
Those were the days when the D. I. R. decided that it would be cheaper to employ native drivers as much as possible, and the “Sheds,” as they called the Repair Department, felt the change acutely; for a native driver could misuse his engine, they said, more curiously than any six monkeys. The Company had not then standardized its rolling-stock, and this was very good for apprentices anxious to learn about machines, because there were, perhaps, twenty types of locomotives in use on the road. They were Hawthornes; E. types; O types; outside cylinders; Spaulding and Cushman double-enders and short-run Continental-built tank engines, and many others. But the native drivers burned them all out impartially, and the apprentices took to writing remarks in Bengali on the cabs of the repaired ones where the next driver would be sure to see them.
Young Ottley worked at first as little as the other apprentices, but his father, who was then a pensioned driver, taught him a great deal about the insides of locomotives; and Olaf Swanson, the red-headed Swede who ran the Government Mail, the big Thursday express, from Serai Rajgara to Guldee Haut, was a great friend of The Ottley family, and dined with them every Friday night.
Olaf was an important person, for besides being the best of the mail-drivers, he was Past Master of the big railway Masonic Lodge, “St. Duncan’s in the East,” Secretary of the Drivers’ Provident Association, a Captain in the D. I. R. Volunteer Corps, and, which he thought much more of, an Author; for he had written a book in a language of his own which he insisted upon calling English, and had printed it at his own expense at the ticket-printing works.
Some of the copies were buff and green, and some were pinkish and blue, and some were yellow and brown; for Olaf did not believe in wasting money on high-class white paper. Wrapping-paper was good enough for him, and besides, he said the colours rested the eyes of the reader. It was called “The Art of Road-Locos Repair or The Young Driver’s Vademecome,” and was dedicated in verse to a man of the name of Swedenborg.
It covered every conceivable accident that could happen to an engine on the road; and gave a rough-and-ready remedy for each; but you had to understand Olaf’s written English, as well as all the technical talk about engines, to make head or tail of it, and you had also to know personally every engine on the D. I. R., for the “Vademecome” was full of what might be called “locomotive allusions,” which concerned the D. I. R. only. Otherwise, it would, as some great locomotive designer once said, have been a classic and a text-book.
Olaf was immensely proud of it, and would pin young Ottley in a corner and make him learn whole pages—it was written all in questions and answers—by heart.
“Never mind what she means,” Olaf would shout. “You learn her word-perfect, and she will help you in the Sheds. I drive the Mail,—the mail of all India,—and what I write and say is true.”
“But I do not wish to learn the book,” said young Ottley, who thought he saw quite enough of locomotives in business hours.