Lady Bountiful. George A. Birmingham
what I told you all along, Michael,” said the guard. “He’s a mighty determined gentleman, so he is. I knew that the moment I set eyes on him.”
The guard was perfectly right. Sir James was a man of most determined character. His career proved it. Before the war he had been professor of economics in a Scottish University, lecturing to a class of ten or twelve students for a salary of £250 a year. When peace came he was the head of a newly-created Ministry of Strikes, controlling a staff of a thousand or twelve hundred men and women, drawing a salary of £2,500 a year. Only a man of immense determination can achieve such results. He had garnered in a knighthood as he advanced. It was the reward of signal service to the State when he held the position of Chief Controller of Information and Statistics.
“Let him not be saying afterwards that he didn’t get a proper warning,” said the engine driver.
He walked towards his engine as he spoke. The guard and the station master followed him.
“I suppose now, Michael,” said the guard, “that you’ll not be wanting me.”
“I will not,” said the engine driver. “The train will do nicely without you for as far as I’m going to take her.”
Sir James did not hear either the guard’s question or the driver’s answer. He did hear, with great satisfaction, what the station master said next.
“Are you right there now?” the man shouted, “for if you are it’s time you were starting.”
He unrolled a green flag and waved it. He blew a shrill blast on his whistle. The driver stepped into the cab of the engine and handled his levers. The train started.
Sir James leaned back in the corner of his compartment and smiled. The track over which he travelled was badly laid and the train advanced by jerks and bumps. But the motion was pleasant to Sir James. Any forward movement of that train would have been pleasant to him. Each bump and jerk brought him a little nearer to Dunadea and therefore a little nearer to Miss Molly Dennison. Sir James was very heartily in love with a girl who seemed to him to be the most beautiful and the most charming in the whole world. Next day, such was his good fortune, he was to marry her. Under the circumstances a much weaker man than Sir James would have withstood the engine driver and resisted the invitation of Mrs. Mulcahy’s hotel in Finnabeg. Under the circumstances even an intellectual man of the professor type was liable to pleasant day dreams.
Sir James’ thoughts went back to the day, six months before, when he had first seen Miss Molly Dennison. She had been recommended to him by a friend as a young lady likely to make an efficient private secretary. Sir James, who had just become Head of the Ministry of Strikes, wanted a private secretary. He appointed Miss Dennison, and saw her for the first time when she presented herself in his office. At that moment his affection was born. It grew and strengthened day by day. Miss Molly’s complexion was the radiant product of the soft, wet, winds of Connaugh, which had blown on her since her birth. Not even four years’ work in Government offices in London had dulled her cheeks. Her smile had the fresh innocence of a child’s and she possessed a curious felicity of manner which was delightful though a little puzzling. Her view of strikes and the important work of the Ministry was fresh and quite unconventional. Sir James, who had all his life moved among serious and earnest people, found Miss Molly’s easy cheerfulness very fascinating. Even portentous words like syndicalism, which rang in other people’s ears like the passing bells of our social order, moved her to airy laughter. There were those, oldish men and slightly less oldish women, who called her flippant. Sir James offered her his hand, his heart, his title, and a share of his £2,500 a year. Miss Molly accepted all four, resigned her secretaryship and went home to her father’s house in Dunadea to prepare her trousseau.
The train stopped abruptly. But even the bump and the ceasing of noise did not fully arouse Sir James from his pleasant dreams. He looked out of the window and satisfied himself that he had not reached Dunadea station or indeed any other station. The rain ran down the window glass, obscuring his view of the landscape. He was dimly aware of a wide stretch of grey-brown bog, of drifting grey clouds and of a single whitewashed cottage near the railway line. He lit a cigarette and lay back again. Molly’s face floated before his eyes. The sound of Molly’s voice was fresh in his memory. He thought of the next day and the return journey across the bog with Molly by his side.
At the end of half an hour he awoke to the fact that the train was still at rest. He looked out again and saw nothing except the rain, the bog, and the cottage. This time he opened the window and put out his head. He looked up the line and down it. There was no one to be seen.
“The signals,” thought Sir James, “must be against us.” He looked again, first out of one window, then out of the other. There was no signal in sight. The single line of railway ran unbroken across the bog, behind the train and in front of it. Sir James, puzzled, and a little wet, drew back into his compartment and shut the window. He waited, with rapidly growing impatience, for another half hour. Nothing happened. Then he saw a man come out of the cottage near the line. He was carrying a basket in one hand and a teapot in the other. He approached the train. He came straight to Sir James’ compartment and opened the door. Sir James recognised the engine driver.
“I was thinking,” said the man, “that maybe your honour would be glad of a cup of tea and a bit of bread. I am sorry there is no butter, but, sure, butter is hard to come by these times.”
He laid the teapot on the floor and put the basket on the seat in front of Sir James. He unpacked it, taking out a loaf of home made bread, a teacup, a small bottle of milk, and a paper full of sugar.
“It’s not much to be offering a gentleman like yourself,” he said, “but it’s the best we have, and seeing that you’ll be here all night and best part of to-morrow you’ll be wanting something to eat.”
Sir James gasped with astonishment.
“Here all night!” he said. “Why should we be here all night? Has the engine broken down?”
“It has not,” said the driver.
“Then you must go on,” said Sir James. “I insist on your going on at once.”
The driver poured out a cup of tea and handed it to Sir James. Then he sat down and began to talk in a friendly way.
“Sure, I can’t go on,” he said, “when I’m out on strike.”
Sir James was so startled that he upset a good deal of tea. As Head of the Ministry of Strikes he naturally had great experience, but he had never before heard of a solitary engine driver going on strike in the middle of a bog.
“The way of it is this,” the driver went on. “It was giv out, by them that does be managing things that there was to be a general strike on the first of next month. You might have heard of that, for it was in all the papers.”
Sir James had heard of it. It was the subject of many notes and reports in his Ministry.
“But this isn’t the 1st of next month,” he said.
“It is not,” said the driver. “It’s no more than the 15th of this month. But the way I’m placed at present, it wouldn’t be near so convenient to me to be striking next month as it is to be striking now. There’s talk of moving me off this line and putting me on to the engine that does be running into Athlone with the night mail; and it’s to-morrow the change is to be made. Now I needn’t tell you that Athlone’s a mighty long way from where we are this minute.”
He paused and looked at Sir James with an intelligent smile.
“My wife lives in the little house beyond there,” he said pointing out of the window to the cottage. “And what I said to myself was this: If I am to be striking—which I’ve no great wish to do—but if it must be—and seemingly it must—I may as well do it in the convenientest place I can; for as long as a man strikes the way he’s told, there can’t be a word said to him; and anyway the 1st of next month or the 15th of this month, what’s the differ? Isn’t one day as good as another?”