Page 39 - The English Carnival 7

directed them earnestly towards the same spot.

“No,” he answered. “It is not there.”

“Agreed,” said I.

We went in again, shut the door, and resumed our seats. I was thinking how best to
improve this advantage, if it might be called one, when he took up the conversation in
such a matter-of-course way, so assuming that there could be no serious question of fact

between us, that I felt myself placed in the weakest of positions.

“By this time you will fully understand, sir,” he said, “that what troubles me so dreadfully
is the question, What does the spectre mean?”

I was not sure, I told him, that I did fully understand.

“What is its warning against?” he said, ruminating, with his eyes on the fire, and only
by times turning them on me. “What is the danger? Where is the danger?

There is danger overhanging somewhere on the Line. Some dreadful calamity will happen.
It is not to be doubted this third time, after what has gone before. But surely this is a
cruel haunting of me. What can I do?”

He pulled out his handkerchief, and wiped the drops from his heated forehead.

“If I telegraph Danger, on either side of me, or on both, I can give no reason for
it,” he went on, wiping the palms of his hands. “I should get into trouble, and

do no good. They would think that I was mad. This is the way it would work,—
Message: ‘Danger! Take care!’ Answer: ‘What Danger? Where?’ Message: ‘Don’t know.
But, for God’s sake, take care!’

They would displace me. What else could they do?”

His pain of mind was most pitiable to see. It was the mental torture of a conscientious
man, oppressed beyond endurance by an unintelligible responsibility involving life.

“When it first stood under the Danger-light,” he went on, putting his dark hair back from
his head, and drawing his hands outward across and across his temples in an extremity
of feverish distress, “why not tell me where that accident was to happen,—if it must

happen? Why not tell me how it could be averted,—if it could have been averted? When
on its second coming it hid its face, why not tell me, instead, ‘She is going to die. Let
them keep her at home’? If it came, on those two occasions, only to show me that its
warnings were true, and so to prepare me for the third, why not warn me plainly now?
And I, Lord help me! A mere poor signalman on this solitary station! Why not go to
somebody with credit to be believed, and power to act?”

When I saw him in this state, I saw that for the poor man’s sake, as well as for the
public safety, what I had to do for the time was to compose his mind. Therefore, setting

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The Englsih Carnival-8