The Signal-Man

"Halloa! Below there!" When the man on the line below heard the voice calling down to him, he was standing at the door of his box, with a flag in his hand. One would have thought, considering how steep and narrow the path was, that he could not have mistaken where the voice came from; but instead of looking up to where I stood on the top of the deep cutting, he turned himself about and looked down the line. There was something remarkable in his manner of doing so, though I could not have said for my life what it was.

The cutting was extremely deep, and unusually precipitate. It was made through a clammy stone that became oozier and wetter as I went down. For these reasons I found the way long enough to give me time to recall the singular air with which he had looked down the line.

His post was as solitary and dismal a place as ever I saw. On either side, a dripping-wet wall of jagged stone, shutting out all view but a strip of sky; the perspective one way only a crooked prolongation of this great dungeon; the shorter perspective in the other direction terminating in a gloomy red light, and the gloomier entrance to a black tunnel, in whose massive architecture there was a barbarous, depressing, and forbidding air. So little sunlight ever found its way to this spot that it had an earthy, deadly smell; and so much cold wind rushed through it that it struck chill to me, as if I had left the natural world.

He was a dark, sallow man, with a dark beard and rather heavy eyebrows. He directed a most curious look towards the red light near the tunnel's mouth, and looked all about it, as if something were missing from it, and then looked at me.

"That light was part of his charge? Was it not?"

He answered in a low voice that it was. He had been there a long time, he said, and the place had grown upon him. He had learned the work without much help; he had taught himself a language, if only to know it by sight, and to have a crude idea of its pronunciation. He had been, when young, a student of natural philosophy — but he had run wild, misused his opportunities, gone down, and never risen again. He had no complaint to make of that. He had made his bed, and he lay upon it.

When I came down again the following evening, he was waiting for me at the bottom, with his lighted lamp in his hand. He was troubled, and he told me at last what weighed upon him. He had been visited, he said, by something he could not name.

"One moonlight night, I was sitting here, when I heard a voice cry, 'Halloa! Below there!' I started up, looked from that door, and saw some one standing by the red light near the tunnel, waving. The left arm was across the face, and the right arm was waved — violently waved. 'Clear the way!' it seemed to say."

He had run towards the figure, he told me, but it was gone. He had run on into the tunnel, five hundred yards, calling out, with his own lamp lifted high; but there was nothing — no one. He had telegraphed both ways: An alarm has been given. Is anything wrong? The answer came back, both ways: All well.

Within six hours of the appearance, he said, the memorable accident on that line had happened, and within ten hours the dead and wounded had been brought along through the tunnel, over the spot where the figure had stood. He shuddered as he told me this, and I felt the cold of the place settle on me.

"That was a year ago. Six or seven months passed, and I had recovered from the surprise, when one morning, as the day was breaking, I, standing at the door, looked towards the red light, and saw the spectre again."

This time, he said, the figure had not cried out. It had stood by the light, both hands before the face, in an attitude of mourning. And that very day, as a train came out of the tunnel, he had seen at one of the carriage windows what looked like a confusion of hands and heads, and something waved. He had shown the danger-light; the train had been stopped; and a beautiful young lady had died inside, instantly, and had been brought into his box, and laid down on the floor between us where we were standing.

Now, he told me, the spectre had come back, a week ago. It was there, at intervals, by the red light. He had seen it again and again, the left arm across the face, the right arm waving, and the cry — though no sound reached him — "For God's sake, clear the way!" It gave him no peace. It rang his little bell in a way that no living hand could ring it. And it would not tell him what was wrong, nor where, nor when.

"What is the danger? Where is the danger? There is danger overhanging somewhere on the Line. Some dreadful calamity will happen. After what I have seen, I cannot doubt it. But surely it is a cruel haunting of me. What can I do? I cannot send warning up or down the line that there is danger, for I should be discharged. They would say I was mad."

I left him that night uneasy. I did not like the way the place had worked upon him, nor the way it now worked upon me. I resolved to return the next evening, and to find some means of helping a man so troubled, so faithful to his lonely post, so plainly sane in every matter but this one.

When I came to the top of the cutting the following evening, the sun had not yet quite gone down. I saw, at the bottom, near the mouth of the tunnel, the appearance of a man, with his left sleeve across his eyes, passionately waving his right arm. For an instant my blood ran cold; then I saw that this was no apparition, but a small group of men, and that the figure of warning was one of them.

Something had happened. There had been an accident on the line. The signalman was dead.

He had been cut down by an engine that morning, as he stood with his back to it in the mouth of the tunnel. He had been looking at the red light, they said. The day was bright, the line was clear, and yet he had not moved.

I asked the engine-driver to tell me how it had happened. He was much shaken, and he told it in broken words.

"I saw him at the end of the tunnel, as if through a glass. There was no time to check speed, and I knew him to be very careful. As he did not seem to take heed of the whistle, I shut it off when we were running down upon him, and called to him as loud as I could call."

"What did you say?"

"I said, 'Below there! Look out! Look out! For God's sake, clear the way!'"

I started.

"Ah! it was a dreadful time, sir. I never left off calling to him. I put this arm before my eyes not to see, and I waved this arm to the last; but it was no use."

And as the driver said the words, and laid his left sleeve across his eyes, and waved his right arm, I understood. The gesture was the gesture of the spectre. The words were the words the signalman had heard, with no living mouth to speak them: "For God's sake, clear the way!"