The Voice of the Machines | Page 7

by the track the other night, Michael the switchman was
holding the road for the nine o'clock freight, with his faded flag, and his
grim brown pipe, and his wooden leg. As it rumbled by him, headlight,
clatter, and smoke, and whirl, and halo of the steam, every brakeman
backing to the wind, lying on the air, at the jolt of the switch, started, as
at some greeting out of the dark, and turned and gave the sign to
Michael. All of the brakemen gave it. Then we watched them, Michael
and I, out of the roar and the hiss of their splendid cloud, their
flickering, swaying bodies against the sky, flying out to the Night, until
there was nothing but a dull red murmur and the falling of smoke.
Michael hobbled back to his mansion by the rails. He put up the foot
that was left from the wreck, and puffed and puffed. He had been a
brakeman himself.
Brakemen are prosaic men enough, no doubt, in the ordinary sense, but
they love a railroad as Shakespeare loved a sonnet. It is not given to
brakemen, as it is to poets, to show to the world as it passes by that
their ideals are beautiful. They give their lives for them,--hundreds of
lives a year. These lives may be sordid lives looked at from the outside,
but mystery, danger, surprise, dark cities, and glistening lights, roar,
dust, and water, and death, and life,--these play their endless spell upon
them. They love the shining of the track. It is wrought into the very
fibre of their being.

Years pass and years, and still more years. Who shall persuade the
brakemen to leave the track? They never leave it. I shall always see
them--on their flying footboards beneath the sky--swaying and
rocking--still swaying and rocking--to Eternity.
They are men who live down through to the spirit and the poetry of
their calling. It is the poetry of the calling that keeps them there.
Most of us in this mortal life are allowed but our one peephole in the
universe, that we may see IT withal; but if we love it enough and stand
close to it enough, we breathe the secret and touch in our lives the
secret that throbs through it all.
For a man to have an ideal in this world, for a man to know what an
ideal is, even though nothing but a wooden leg shall come of it, and a
life in a switch-house, and the signal of comrades whirling by, this also
is to have lived.
The fact that the railroad has the same fascination for the railroad man
that the sea has for the sailor is not a mere item of interest pertaining to
human nature. It is a fact that pertains to the art of the present day, and
to the future of its literature. It is as much a symbol of the art of a
machine age as the man Ulysses is a symbol of the art of an heroic age.
That it is next to impossible to get a sailor, with all his hardships, to
turn his back upon the sea is a fact a great many thousand years old.
We find it accounted for not only in the observation and experience of
men, but in their art. It was rather hard for them to do it at first (as with
many other things), but even the minor poets have admitted the sea into
poetry. The sea was allowed in poetry before mountains were allowed
in it. It has long been an old story. When the sailor has grown too stiff
to climb the masts he mends sails on the decks. Everybody
understands--even the commonest people and the minor poets
understand--why it is that a sailor, when he is old and bent and obliged
to be a landsman to die, does something that holds him close to the sea.
If he has a garden, he hoes where he can see the sails. If he must tend
flowers, he plants them in an old yawl, and when he selects a place for
his grave, it is where surges shall be heard at night singing to his bones.

Every one appreciates a fact like this. There is not a passenger on the
Empire State Express, this moment, being whirled to the West, who
could not write a sonnet on it,--not a man of them who could not sit
down in his seat, flying through space behind the set and splendid
hundred-guarding eyes of the engineer, and write a poem on a dead
sailor buried by the sea. A crowd on the street could write a poem on a
dead sailor (that is, if they were sure he was dead), and now that sailors
enough have