The way of him gave to this business the
importance of a ceremony. Meanwhile the fireman had climbed down from
the cab and raised his hand, ready to transfer a signal to the driver,
who stood looking at his watch. In the interval there had something
progressed in the large signal box that stands guard at Euston. This
high house contains many levers, standing in thick, shining ranks. It
perfectly resembles an organ in some great church, if it were not that
these rows of numbered and indexed handles typify something more acutely
human than does a keyboard. It requires four men to play this organ-like
thing, and the strains never cease. Night and day, day and night, these
four men are walking to and fro, from this lever to that lever, and
under their hands the great machine raises its endless hymn of a world
at work, the fall and rise of signals and the clicking swing of
switches.
And so as the vermilion engine stood waiting and looking from the shadow
of the curve-roofed station, a man in the signal house had played the
notes that informed the engine of its freedom. The driver saw the fall
of those proper semaphores which gave him liberty to speak to his steel
friend. A certain combination in the economy of the London and
Northwestern Railway, a combination which had spread from the men who
sweep out the carriages through innumerable minds to the general manager
himself, had resulted in the law that the vermilion engine, with its
long string of white and bottle-green coaches, was to start forthwith
toward Scotland.
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