University of Virginia Library

30. CHAPTER XXX.
LONDON.

Short's Cut-off shut out all other subjects from
my head next morning.

It was an innovation, a revolution. Mankind
objects to both. It came from America, and
though America has given tobacco, woman's
rights, the potato, model yachts, model States,
and trotting horses to the Old World, that World
still distrusts our work as boyish. We in turn
deem the Old World a mere child, and our youth
based on a completer maturity than they will attain
for half a millennium.

Short's Cut-off was so simple that it puzzled
everybody.

I consulted half a dozen eminent engineers.

“Very pretty, indeed!” they said, and at once
turned the conversation to the explosions on
Western rivers. “Had I ever been blown up?
How did it feel?”

But as to Short's Cut-off, they only thought it
a neat contrivance, but evidently by a person
who did not comprehend intricate machinery.

I took it to a man of another order. England
is the world's machine-shop; he was England's
chief engineer. A great man he was, dead,
alas! now. A freeman, who recognized the world
as his country, and genius everywhere as his
brother.

He understood Short's Cut-off at a glance.

How I wish old Short could have been there,
to see this great man's eye glow with enthusiasm
as he said: “Admirable! This is what we have
all been waiting for. Padiham must see this. We
must have it in every engine in England. Command
my services to aid in making it known.”

“Can you recommend me,” said I, presently,
“a thorough mechanic. I want some more models
made of these valves and machinery, to illustrate
their action.”

“You must go to Padiham, the best artisan I
know in all England.”

“Worth seeing for himself, as the man whom
you name best among these millions of craftsmen.”

“Padiham is the man.”

“He ought to have name and fame.”

“He might if he chose.”

“Worth knowing, again, for this rare abnegation.”

“He is an oddity. Some unlucky mode of life
stunted him, mind and body, until he was a mature

man. He is dwarfed in person, and fancies
his mind suffers too. It makes him a little gruff
to feel that he is a man of tools, and not of principles,
— a mechanic, not a philosopher. There is
nothing of morbidness or disappointment in him.
Only he underrates himself, and fancies his powers
blunted by his deformity. He keeps out of the
way, and works alone in a little shop. He will
only do special jobs for me and one or two others.
He says he would be our equal, if he were
full-grown. We deem him our peer, and treat
him as such; but he will not come out and take
the place he could have at once before the world.
I thought of him, and wished him to see this Cut-off,
as soon as you showed it to me. You must
tell him I sent you, or he may be surly at first,
and so drive you away, or perhaps refuse to do
your work.”

“I think I can make my way with such a person;
but if not, I will use your name. Where is
he to be found?”

“This is his address. An out-of-the-way place,
you see, if you know London. A by-street on
the Surrey side of the Thames. He is well to
do; but lives there for a special economy. He has
a method of charity, which is like himself thoroughly
original. More good he does in his odd
way than any man I know. He owns the whole
house over his shop, and uses it as a private

hospital or hospice for poor but worthy sick and
broken-down people.”

“His own dwarfishness makes him sympathetic?”

“Yes; instead of souring, it softens him to
the feeble. He may perhaps feel a transitory
resentment at big, strong fellows like you and
me; but he is always tender to the weak. His
wonderful knowledge of machinery comes into
play in his hospital. From the machines man
makes, he has passed to a magical knowledge of
the finest machine of all.”

“The human body?”

“The machine that invents and executes machines,
the human body, — the most delicate
mechanism of all, the type of all its own inventions.
Padiham achieves magical cures. He is
working by practice, and lately by study, into
profound surgical skill. There is no man in
England whom I would trust to mend me if I
broke, as I would Padiham.”

“He avenges himself upon Nature for not perfecting
him, by restoring her breakages. Why
do you not suggest to him to become a professed
repairer of mankind?”

“I have suggested it. He says he must take
his own way. Besides, mechanics can hardly
spare him. Many of my own inventions would
have stayed in embryo in my brain, if Padiham

had not played Vulcan, and split a passage for
them. I talk over my schemes to him; he
catches the idea and puts it into form at once.”

“You interest me very much,” said I. “I
must see the man and know him, for my own
sake as well as for Short's Cut-off.”

“Take care he does not drive you away in a
huff. You 'll find him a rough-hewn bit.”

I went at once. A man who had warred with
Pikes at the Foolonner Mine, to say nothing of
other ruder characters, was not to be baffled, so
he trusted, by a surly genius.

As I walked through the crush of the streets,
again there came to me that vision of the old
man and his daughter lost in the press, — more
sadly lost, more vainly seeking refuge here, than
in the desert solitudes where we had found them.

Every one familiar with great cities knows of
strange rencounters there, and at every turn I
looked narrowly about, fancying that I should
see the forms I sought, just vanishing, but leaving
me a clew of pursuit. This expectation grew
so intense, that I exaggerated slight resemblances
of costume or of port, and often found myself
excitedly hurrying quite out of my way, and
shouldering through huddles of people, to come
at some figure in the distance. But when I overtook
the old man of feeble step, or the young
woman moving fearlessly amid the pitiless crowd,

or the pair I had followed, and stared at them
eagerly, strange and offended looks met me instead
of the familiar, perhaps the welcome, look
I had hoped; and I turned away forlornly exaggerating
the disappointment as I had the fancy.

I cooled at last from this flurry. Nothing but
blanks in the lottery. It was folly to be wasting
my energy in this way. Trusting Providence, or
rather this semblance of Providence, this mere
chance, was thin basis for action. So I resumed
my proper course, and turned my steps quietly
toward Padiham's shop.

But when presently I stood upon London
Bridge, between two cities of men, between the
millions I had escaped and the million I was to
plunge among, a great despair grew heavier and
heavier upon me.

This terrible throng, here as everywhere hurrying
by me! And I compelled to note every man
and every woman, and to say to myself, “This is
not he,” — “This is not she,” — “These are not
they!” All the while this stream of negatives
rushing by, and every one brazing a little fraction
of hope away.

In that great city — in its nests and its prisons
— were people who had been living side by side
for a life-time, and yet had never had one glimpse
of each other's form or feature; who were, each
to each, but a name on a door, a step overhead, a

tread on the stair, a moan of anguish, a laugh,
or a curse. There were parallel streets, too,
whose tenants moved parallel and never met, and
never would meet. There were neighborhoods
farther distant than Cornhill is from Cairo, or
Pimlico from Patagonia. It was a dark den —
that monster city — for any one who loved to
lurk, or be buried away from sight of friend or
foe; it was a maze, a clewless labyrinth for one
who sought a foe to punish or a friend to save.

Evening was approaching. I must consider
Short and his Cut-off, and all England wasting
steam at the rate of millions of pounds a year
(enough to save the income tax) until that
Cut-off should be applied. In that populous
realm were ten thousand cylinders devouring
one third more steam than was healthy working
allowance; and I was halting on London Bridge,
staring like a New-Zealander at the passers, a
mere obstacle to progress, a bad example, a stationary
nuisance now, as I had been a mobile
and intrusive one before.

I had some little difficulty in finding Padiham's
retiring-place. I had already dissected it out on
the map, identified it by its neighborhood to a
certain artery and its closer neighborhood to a
certain ganglion. It was Lamely Court, a quiet
retreat in a busy region. It looked, indeed, as if
it had never taken a very active part in the
world, or as if, when it offered itself to bustle

and traffic, more enterprising localities had hustled
it aside, and bade it decline into a lethargy.
The withered brick houses had the air and visage
of people who have seen better days, and subsided
into the desponding by-ways, apart from
the thoroughfares of the bold and sturdy. Mean
misery and squalor did not abide there. It was
not a den for the ragged, but a shy retreat for
the patched, — for the decent and decorous poor.

Half-way down the court, on the sunny side,
I found Padiham's house. It was quietly, not
obtrusively, neater and fresher than its neighbors.
Its bricks had a less worm-eaten look, and
its window-panes were all of glass and none of
newspaper. The pot roses in an upper story
window were in bloom, and had life enough to
welcome the June sunshine, while sister plants
in other garrets all about the court were too far
blighted ever to dream of gayer product than
some poor jaundiced bud. These roses up in
Padiham's window cheered the whole neighborhood
greatly, with their lively coloring. It was
as if some pretty maiden, with rosy cheeks and
riper rosy lips, were looking down into that
forlorn retreat, and warming every old, faded
soul, within every shabby tenement, with bright
reminiscence of days when life was in its perfume
and its flower.

Such was the aspect of Padiham's abode. His
shop lurked in the basement.