Prelude to Eternity. Brian Stableford
dutiful sort of way—but his gratitude was tempered by the essential Romanticism of his temperament, which was inflamed at present by virtue of the fact that he was in love.
He sighed automatically as he remembered yet again—although it was impossible for him actually to forget it—that he was in love.
Sir Richard Trevithick sighed too, emitting a long hiss of steam through one of the more discreet of its many orifices.
“There she goes!” said the engineer, in a tone of smug satisfaction, pretending to address the stoker, although he was really playing to the packed grandstand. “Ain’t she a beauty?”
Michael knew that engineers always called their beloved machines “she”, even when the Academy had decided, in its wisdom to name them after males. Dick Trevithick might have been the proud father of the new wave of industrial revolution precipitated by the Cornish Engine, but the finest of his children would always be reckoned daughters, or mistresses, by the men who nurtured and guided them: the supposed masters who were, in reality, their faithful and adoring servants.
Michael knew that only a tiny minority of the excited people gathered on the platform to ogle the Sir Richard Trevithick actually had tickets to travel on the train. The others were ostensibly there to “see off” the lucky ones, although they had actually turned out to gawk at the locomotive, much as they turned up at Ascot or Henley to gawk at the season’s fresh crop of debutantes, squired by the sons of the Admiralty and the Academy. Locomotives were, however, a trifle more democratic than the daughters of the aristocracy. Anyone could ride in the carriages they pulled—although some, admittedly, had to travel second class while others traveled first.
In spite of that democracy, and the unmagicality of which Michael might have been the only person present to be perversely aware, the members of the crowd were enraptured by the prideful Behemoth. Although nine days had passed since the engine had made its first timetabled journey from York to London and back again, without once breaking down—let alone blowing up, as several pessimists had loudly forecast—it was still seen as something fabulous, and as a glorious presentiment of the Age of Achievement to come.
Michael had taken off his hat in order to mop his brow with his handkerchief, so his hands and mind were fully occupied when a flabby hand suddenly slapped him on the back and the cheerful voice of Quentin Hope boomed in his ear. “Glorious sight, eh, Laurel! Makes one proud to be British, doesn’t it?”
Michael could only stare forlornly at the hand that Hope extended to him in the wake of this enthusiastic greeting, although it occurred to him a few seconds later that it would have been simple enough to pop the handkerchief into the hat and extend his own to meet it. For a man with the skilled and steady hand of a painter, Michael thought, as he blushed in embarrassment, simultaneously trying to replace the hat on his head and the handkerchief in his pocket, I really can be a remarkably clumsy oaf at times.
Hope—a plump, pink-complexioned and ostentatiously jovial man who could easily have sat for a portrait of John Bull—merely laughed at his victim’s confusion. He raised the unshaken hand to pat the artist on the shoulder, almost as if that were what he had intended all along. “Have you seen Jim Escott?” he asked, referring to his invariable traveling-companion, with whom he had been conducting a fervent running argument that was said to have extended over thirty years, every since the fateful day when the two of them had met in the junior common room on their first day at Eton.
Michael shook his head.
“No?” said Hope. “Can’t say I’m surprised. How could the fellow stand here, confronted with this magnificent machine, and continue to contend that progress is an illusion? He’ll be cowering in the carriage, I dare say, terrified of getting flecks of soot on his Savile Row suit. Your paints, canvases and easel safely stashed in the luggage van, are they, Laurel?”
Michael contrived a nod of the head. He had to admit, as he continued to stare at the steam locomotive, that Hope had a point. The Trevithick might not be magical, but it really did seem to be a perfect embodiment of the idea of progress, and a clear demonstration of its reality. However appropriate to its description borrowed terms like monster, Leviathan and Behemoth might be, the simple truth was that its mundane solidity, power and precision put every magical dragon of myth and legend to shame, demonstrating beyond the shadow of a doubt that the sure hand of the mechanic was nowadays mightier by far than the frothy mind of the fabulist.
Michael also had to admit, though, that the thought of entrusting his personal safety to the brutality of the locomotive terrified him. Had he had a choice, he would never have agreed to take his life in his hands by traveling in such a fashion—but he had not had a choice, because Cecilia had written to him to say that he “simply must” take the train. Even if, as seemed probable, she had intended the words simply must merely as an expression of enthusiasm, he was obliged to construe it as a command, because he was in love with her, and this was the first time that he had been invited to Langstrade Hall, her father’s country residence, in order to meet her parents.
Michael had first been introduced to the Langstrades six months before, and had now seen Cecilia on seven precious occasions, but it had required patient planning on her part to persuade her father to issue such an invitation to him—not, alas, as a formally-recognized and officially-sanctioned suitor, but merely as a hopefully-soon-to-be-fashionable painter. He had not even been commissioned to paint a portrait of Cecilia, although he dearly hoped that his remit might be broadened out once he actually reached Langstrade; thus far, his mission was simply to paint the recently-completed edifice in the extensively-remodeled grounds that everyone in London Society liked to call “the Langstrade Folly”.
“What wouldn’t I have given to be on the engine’s first scheduled journey last week, with the First Sea Lord and half the Admiralty, and the entire Privy Council of the Academy in tow?” Quentin Hope said, with an ostentatious sigh matched by a further hiss of steam. “The tenth round trip has a certain cachet of its own, though. It’ll be something to tell our grandchildren, eh, Laurel? There’ll be railways all over England by that time—probably all over the world—and you and I will be able to say that we were present at the beginning, if not on the Glorious Tuesday itself. We’re still pioneers, aren’t we?”
Hope sighed again, more profoundly this time. Yet again, Sir Richard Trevithick hissed fervently in excessive sympathy—reminding Michael, just for a moment, of his mother. The artist had to shake his head to clear it of that perverse thought, and Hope mistook the gesture.
“You don’t agree?” he said. “Come on, Lad! I know you’re an artist, and supposed to believe in all that Romantic fiddle-faddle about the loveliness of Mother Nature, but you’re young, damn it! What are you, twenty-three, twenty-four? I suppose that makes you a child of the eighteenth century, but only just! You’re a son of the Age of Steam, the Era of Progress! You must look to the future, my boy, as a wonderland of opportunity—and I shall make it my business this weekend to see that you do! Escott will fight me all the way, of course, and so will that old fool Carp, but Langstrade’s in my camp, and so is Marlstone. They’re both lunatics, admittedly, but they’re lunatics on the side of the angels. Stick with me, young Laurel, and I’ll show you the way the world’s going, or my name’s not Hope!”
The last remark was a quip that Quentin Hope produced so often that even Michael, who hardly knew the man, had overheard it half a dozen times before. Michael hastened to assure the optimist that his gesture had not been intended as a denial, and that he was indeed looking forward to telling his wonderstruck grandchildren that he had traveled from London to York on a train pulled by the Sir Richard Trevithick on the afternoon of Thursday the fifteenth of August 1822, a mere nine days after her first scheduled round trip.
Instead of rejoicing in this news, however, Hope sighed again. This time, the locomotive was not sympathetic.
Michael guessed that the third sigh had been occasioned by the fact that the older man might be beginning to wonder whether he would ever have the opportunity to dandle awestruck grandchildren on his own knees, in order that he could replicate the proud boast in question before an appropriate audience. Although it was by no means uncommon for gentlemen who had turned forty to marry, it was