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Locomotivo

Ver in the railway yards, on rails that spanned deep concrete pits, two engines were being walked up and down like racehorses after a race. From their funnels came the varying voices of steam. One, slanting upward, throttled its wheezing kettle song, like that which made young Watt's brain tease itself many, many years ago. The other funnel shouted in rich steam choked voice: “Hoh! Hoh! Sssh!” while a red, blossomy flare moved swayingly around the rear of the engine and breathed a flamy breath along its sides. The man holding it strode up into the cab, and after giving it a twirl or two, stood beside his companion and puffed hard at the hot colour he held. It gasped out. In the cold air his breath still streamed grey to the flare's dead head. After awhile it was swung into life again and with spasmy glow, splashed the ribs of the engine and the grey clothes and faces of the men. Their two faces looked up to the walls of the blue-grey iron cab as though reading a notice there or looking for a tool that they had carried high above in slung racks. The light anchored them for an immortal moment as two grey faces and steaming breaths bathed in dry radiance red.

Then, almost unexpectedly, as though of its own impatient volition, the engine trod the rails smoothly as it left the pit. Walked they as on ice, slidingly. The waiting engine now advanced with long white mediaeval lances and pennons of smoke shooting from it. One slanting. Two straight. Steam oozed from every iron pore as it strode forward to settle above its pit. The other swept out to meet it. Like Armadas they swung forward, belligerently, to meet one another, with hissings and pantings, with battle spittings. Boilers as round and clean as rifle barrels shone under the weak little electric lights on the high poles above, and bathed their roundness and clean curves in columns of steam. With almost human pride and stiffness they passed, their hissing and steaming and cauldron glow seeming to be intensified by merely doing so.

In the engine above the pit, a far away door clanged, and from underneath the cab, with a roaring clatter and a startled splutter, ran her life-blood, red hot coal. Streaming down into the pit with a mutable scorch, a changing fieriness, a brilliance of starting flame and fading flare.

A tall, earnest man with a thin black rake that pencilled its existence across the fire, dug and scraped to bring lurching out, more and more of the glowing mass on which the train had fed, and from which she had sucked the power of mile and hill eating and freight bearing. Now it fell down, heating her heels, her great sinews and spider spoked wheels, against which a man waved a warm vermillion flare. Past the wide wheels the light fluttered. Over the square iron connecting joints ran the old anxious, experienced hands of her acolyte. Flushing the flame into the deeper worries of her limbs, the unseen crannies. Still unsatisfied, he slowly descended into the pit, and we could see the deeper red of his flesh where the torch smote it. Above, the rake tore out coal food from the furnace's coils, while smoke and steam rose to the over-hanging face of the sky. The acolyte slowly uprose from his pit, and halting in front of the engine, opened its grey face. It lay sacriligiously open, as wide as a cheek torn by a stone. The raker leapt up with high held flare, on to the platform that surrounded the engine, and felt gropingly around for some weakness he suspected there. It seemed to evade him, for there was still a profound dissatisfaction in the back that carefully descended. He stood off, and with his stance mutely rebuked the train for her hidden weakness. The acolyte came too, and joined him; they both stood off, speechless, and considered. From the coal-filled pit came only dry hisses and gaping cries of dying fire, and the engine seemed to have undergone a fading, failing change. The flame and the fire that they had withdrawn from her left only a fitfully puffing shell and a dull, lighted cab. A steamy mask surrounded her. The cloud note of the battle and the passing had succumbed to the dispassionate wind.

The two pilots climbed into the cab. The shadow of the last, meeting the mask, wavered in it, went crookedly into it, and by it was elongated and grotesqued. Calmly the two touched things that were about and above them. Important, quiet, they moved and bent to vital veins of her. The lordliest Her they knew. In the waning light and steam of their charge's emotional outpourings they loomed as nurses of the public, seeming in their careful, intelligent look and the skilled survey of their searching hands, to be guarding it as a curious child that could not be expected to know of the bitter twisted pains carelessness reposed with. For them they moved at night with bright flares, for them they passed over hot and cold metal, a hand that knew the feel of a flaw, the gap of a break. Alike for the good and the bad, poets, musicians, financiers, strugglers, dreamers and lovers, they worked and thought. Pledged of their own conscience to assure that they should be moved safely to the places wherein they played out the frayings of comedies and tragedies.

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