The moving staircase

Text 1: The Staircase at Pendlebury’s, by Euphemia Starling

An original letter written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

My dear Harriet, I have ridden upon the moving staircase at Pendlebury’s, and I am alive to tell of it, though for a full minute I was not at all certain that I should be. It is a great belt of wooden slats, driven by an engine in the cellar, which carries a lady from the ground floor to the first without her lifting a foot. The papers called it the wonder of the age. Mamma called it an impertinence, and stayed at home.

It stands at the far end of the hall, beyond the gloves and the umbrellas, and it makes a low, steady grinding, like a mill heard across a meadow. Each slat slid out from beneath the floor, flat and innocent, then rose, and lifted itself into a step, and bore away whoever stood upon it, solemn as a parcel. A gentleman in a grey topper went up reading his newspaper. A small boy went up three times running, until his nurse fetched him down by the collar.

Then it was my turn. I watched the slats come gliding out, one after another after another, and could not for the life of me decide which was mine. The attendant said, “Step lively, madam.” I did not step lively. I stepped, I think, upon the crack between two, and the floor beneath me divided like a quarrel, one boot carried upward and the other left behind. For one dreadful instant I was a respectable woman being torn in two before the haberdashery counter.

I clutched the moving rail. My left foot, by some mercy, followed my right. And then, Harriet, I rose. The hats and parasols sank gently away beneath me; the chandeliers came down to meet me; I was carried upward through the warm, scented air as smoothly as a thought, and the grinding of the engine seemed now not a threat but a kind of purr.

At the top a young man stood with a silver tray, offering brandy to any lady who felt faint. I took a glass. I did not feel faint. I felt that I should like very much to walk down by the ordinary stairs and do it all again. I did, twice. Mamma shall hear only of the first time.

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