Kitty Alone. Baring-Gould Sabine

      CHAPTER IV

       THE ATMOSPHERIC RAILWAY

       Table of Contents

      The engineer Brunel was fond of daring and magnificent schemes, carried out at other people’s expense. One of these schemes was the construction of the South Devon Railway, running from Exeter to Plymouth, for some portion of its way along the coast, breasting the sea, exposed to the foam of the breaking tide, and worked by atmospheric pressure. Brunel was an admirer of Prout’s delightful sketches--Prout, the man who taught the eye of the nineteenth century to observe the picturesque. Brunel, having other folks’ money to play with, thought himself justified in providing therewith subjects for sepia and Chinese white studies in the future. Taking as his model Italian churches, with their campaniles, he placed engine-houses for the atmospheric pressure at every station, designed on these models. That they were picturesque no one could deny, that they were vastly costly the shareholders were well aware.

      For a while the atmospheric railway was worked from these Italian churches, the campaniles of which contained the exhausting pumps. Then the whole scheme collapsed, when the pumps had completely exhausted the shareholders’ pockets.

      The system was ingenious, but it should have been tried on a small scale before operations were carried on upon one that was large, and in a manner that was lavish.

      The system was this. A tube was laid between the rails, and the carriages ran connected with a piston in the tube. The air was pumped out before the piston, and the pressure of the atmosphere behind was expected to propel piston and carriages attached to it. The principle was that upon which we imbibe sherry-cobbler.

      But there was a difficulty, and that was insurmountable. Had the carriages been within the tube they would have swung along readily enough. But they were without and yet connected with the piston within; and it was precisely over this connection that the system broke down. A complex and ingenious scheme was adopted for making the tubes air-tight in spite of the long slit through which slid the coulter that connected the carriages with the piston. The train carried with it a sort of hot flat-iron which it passed over the leather flap bedded in tallow that closed the slit.

      But the device was too intricate and too open to disturbance by accident to be successful. Trains ran spasmodically. The coulter, raising the flap, let the air rush into the artificially formed vacuum before it, and so act as a break on the propelling force of the air behind. The flap became displaced. The tallow under a hot sun melted away. The trains when they started were attended on their course by a fizzing noise as of a rocket about to explode, very trying to the nerves. They had a habit of sulking and stopping in the midst of tunnels, or of refusing to start from stations when expected to start. By no means infrequently they arrived at their destination propelled by panting passengers, and the only exhaustion of atmosphere of which anything could be spoken, was that of the lungs of those who had paid for their tickets to be carried along the line, not to shove along the carriages with their shoulders.

      At the time when our story opens, this unfortunate venture, so ruinous to many speculators, was in process of demonstrating how unworthy it was of the Italian churches and campaniles that had been erected for its use.

      After a while steam locomotives were brought to the stations and held in readiness to fly to the aid of broken-down atmospheric trains. A little later, and the atmospheric engines and tubes were broken up and sold for old iron, and the ecclesiastical edifices that had contained the pumps were let to whoever would rent them, as cider stores or depôts of guano and dissolved bone.

      John Pooke, only son of the wealthiest yeoman in the parish of Coombe-in-Teignhead, had been put across the estuary that morning so that he might go by train to Exeter, to be fitted for a suit and suitably hatted for the approaching marriage of his sister. In two or three parishes beside the Teign the old yeoman has held his own from before Tudor days. From century to century the land has passed from father to son. These yeomen families have never extended their estates, and have been careful not to diminish them. The younger sons and the daughters have gone into trade or into service, and have looked with as much pride to the ancestral farms as can any noble family to its baronial hall. These yeomen are without pretence, do not affect to be what they are not, knowing what they are, and content, and more than content, therewith. There are occasions in which they do make some display, and these are funerals and weddings.

      It was considered at the family gathering of the Pooke clan that, at the approaching solemnity of the marriage of the daughter of the house, no village tailor, nay, not even one of the town of Teignmouth, could do justice to the occasion, and that it would be advisable for the son and heir to seek the superior skill of an Exeter tradesman to invest his body in well-fitting and fashionable garments, and an Exeter hatter to provide him with a hat as worn by the leaders of fashion.

      John Pooke had been ferried over in the morning, and had requested that the boat might be in waiting for him on his return in the evening by the last train.

      Kate had often been sent across on previous occasions. She could handle an oar. The tide was still flowing, and there was absolutely no danger to be anticipated. At no time was there risk, though there might be inconvenience, and the latter only when the tide was ebbing and the mud-banks were becoming exposed. To be stranded on one of these would entail a tedious waiting in mid-river till return of tide, and with the flow the refloating of the ferry-boat.

      Kate rowed leisurely across the mouth of the Teign. The evening was closing in. The sun had set behind the green hills to the west; a cold wind blew down the river, sometimes whistling, sometimes with a sob in its breath, and as it swept the tide it crisped it into wavelets.

      Now that the sunlight was no longer on or in the water, the latter had lost its exquisite greenness, and had assumed a sombre tint. The time of the year was March; no buds had burst on the trees. The larch plantations were hesitating, putting forth, indeed, their little blood-purple “strawberry baskets”--their marvellous flower, and ready at the first warm shower to flush into emerald green. The limes, the elms, were red at every spray with rising sap. The meadows, however, were of an intense brilliancy of verdure.

      At the mouth of the Teign rose the Ness, a very Bardolph’s nose for rubicundity, and the inflowing tide was warm in colour in places where it flowed over a loosely compacted bank of sand or mud. Thus the river was as a piece of shot silk of two tinctures.

      Kate was uncertain whether the train had passed or not. The atmospheric railway had none of the bluster of the steam locomotive. No puffs of vapour like white cotton wool rose in the air to forewarn of a coming train, or, after one had passed, to lie along the course and tell for five minutes that the train had gone by. It uttered no whistle, its breaks produced no jar. Its lungs did not pant and roar. It slid along almost without a sound.

      Consequently, Kate, knowing that the ferry-boat had been despatched late, almost expected to find John Pooke stamping and growling on the hard. When, however, she ran the boat aground at the landing-place, she saw that