Mark Twain’s ‘squttering’ tube recollections from 1896 on the 150th anniversary of this ‘invention of Satan’
This year is the 150th anniversary of the London
Underground and to mark this momentous event, I am reproducing below the incomparable
Mark Twain’s hilarious encounter with the tube in the summer of 1896. Little has changed, as you will see. Enjoy …
… underground railway, which is an invention of Satan
himself. It goes no direct course, but always away around. When the train
arrives you must jump, rush, fly, and swarm with the crowd into the first cigar
box that is handy, lest you get left. You have hardly time to mash yourself
into a portion of a seat before the train is off again. It goes blustering and
squttering along, puking smoke and cinders in at the window, which some one has
opened in pursuance of his right to make the whole cigar box uncomfortable if
his comfort requires it; the fog of black smoke smothers the lamp and dims its
light, and the double row of jammed people sit there and bark at each other,
and the righteous and the unrighteous pray each after his own fashion.
The train stops every few minutes, and there is a new
rush and scramble each time. And every quarter of an hour you change cars, and
fly thirty yards to a stairway, and up the stairway and fifty yards along a
corridor, and down another stairway, and plunge headlong into a train just as
it moves off; and of course it is the wrong one, and you must get out at the
next station and come back. But it is no matter. If you had stopped to ask the
official on duty, it would have been the right train and you would have lost it
by stopping to ask; and so none but idiots stop to ask.
The next time that you ought to change cars you are
not aware of it, and you go on. You keep on going on and on and on, wondering
what has become of St. John's
Wood, and if you are ever likely to get to that brick-and-mortar forest; and by
and by you pull your courage together and ask a passenger if he can tell you
whereabouts you are, and he says "We are just arriving at Sloane Square."
You thank him, and look gratified, look as gratified
as you can on the spur of the moment and without sufficient preparation, and
step out, saying "It is my station." And so it is. That is where you
started from. It is an hour or an hour and a half ago, and is getting toward
bedtime, now.
You have been plowing through tunnels all that time,
and have been all around under London amongst its entrails, and been in first,
second and third-class cars on a third-class ticket, and associated with all
sorts of company, from Dukes and Bishops down to rank and mangy tramps and
blatherskites who sat with their drunken trunnions in their laps and caressed
and kissed them unembarrassed.
You have missed the dinner you were aimed for, but you
are alive yet, and that is something; and you have learned better than to go by
tunnel any more, and that is also a gain. You cannot telephone your friend to
go to bed and not keep the dinner waiting. There is not a telephone within a
mile of you, and there is not a telephone within a mile of him. Years ago there
was a telephone system in England,
but in the country parts it is about dead, now, and what is left of it in London has no value. So
you send a telegram to your friend, stating that you have met with an accident,
and begging him not to wait dinner for you. You are aware that all the offices
in his neighborhood close at eight in the evening and it is ten now; it is also
Saturday night, and England keeps Sunday; but the telegram will reach his house
Monday morning, and when he gets back from business at five in the evening he
will get it, and will know then that you did not come Saturday evening, and
why.
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