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On the very spot which the railway station has usurped, with its long slate roof, wooden signal-box, and advertisements in blue and white enamel, I can recall a still pool shining between beds of the flowering rush; and to this day, as I wait for the train, the whir of a vanished water-wheel comes up the valley.
Lilly sat out on the steps of the signal-box, rather ashamed, while the long telegram was shouted over the telephone to the junction town first the young lady and her address, then the message "Meet me X. station 3:40 tomorrow walk back great pleasure Jim." Anyhow that was done. They went home to tea.
So Phil left the hot signal-box and followed Peter across the fields to the farm. When the farm men, led by Peter and Phyllis and carrying a hurdle covered with horse-cloths, reached the manhole in the tunnel, Bobbie was fast asleep and so was Jim. Worn out with the pain, the Doctor said afterwards. "Where does he live?" the bailiff from the farm asked, when Jim had been lifted on to the hurdle.
But the moment he WAS awake he leapt to his feet, put his hands to his head "like a mad maniac," as Phyllis said afterwards, and shouted: "Oh, my heavens what's o'clock?" "Twelve thirteen," said Peter, and indeed it was by the white-faced, round-faced clock on the wall of the signal-box. The man looked at the clock, sprang to the levers, and wrenched them this way and that.
Perkins hands in his up bag, receives a bag in exchange, and half his task is done. Forty minutes to wait before he can perform the other half of it. Then, having passed over the metals with the cart, he will attend to the down train; hand in his other bag, receive the London bag; and, as soon as the people in the signal-box will release the crossing-gates, he may come home.
The train was a fast one, but that journey seemed absolutely endless. Now at length we had slowed down at the Dunchester signal-box, and now we were running into the town. If my friend the lawyer had anything really striking to tell me he would send to meet me at the station, and, if it was something remarkable, he would probably attend there himself.
"Come, Phil," and marched out of the signal-box with flaming cheeks. Phyllis hesitated. Then she took the hand, still held out stupidly, that the shillings had been in. "I forgive you," she said, "even if Peter doesn't. You're not in your proper senses, or you'd never have done that. I know want of sleep sends people mad. Mother told me. I hope your little boy will soon be better, and "
The pointsman aloft in the signal-box made the motions of drawing, with some difficulty, hogsheads of beer. Down Train! More bear! Up Train! More beer. Cross junction Train! More beer! Cattle Train! More beer. Goods Train! Simmering, whistling, trembling, rumbling, thundering.
A signal- box, says an English essayist, such as one sees along the railroads, is only called a signal-box, but it is the house of life and death, a place "where men in an agony of vigilance light blood-red and sea-green fires to keep other men from death."
Perhaps there was a curve of infinite grace, a sudden hollow explosive effect made by the passing of a signal-box that was close to the track, and then the deadly lunge to shave the edge of a long platform.
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