Beneath the station roof

Text 1: The New Terminus, by Charles Pemberton

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

I had been warned that the new terminus was large. I had not been warned that it was a cathedral. You come to it through a mean little street of pawnshops and coffee-houses, so narrow that the cabs must go in single file, and then the street ends, and the roof begins, and you stop, as I did, with your mouth open, and are jostled by a porter who has seen it every day for a year and thinks you a fool.

The roof is a single span of iron and glass, flung across the whole width of the platforms in one great leap, without a pillar to hold it up. I am told it is the widest in the world. I can well believe it. Looking up, one sees girder after girder curving away into the distance, diminishing, like the inside of some vast whale’s belly, and between them panes of glass already grimed with soot, through which the daylight falls dim and yellow, as though it had been strained through tea.

And beneath this calm and lofty arch, what tumult! Engines stand panting at the buffers, sending up columns of white steam that roll against the glass and hang there like clouds caught indoors. Whistles shriek. Porters bellow. Cab horses stamp and steam. A thousand people seem to be going in a thousand directions, all at once, all in a hurry, all certain that the others are in their way.

I stood for an hour beneath the clock and watched them. A soldier embraced his mother. A clerk ran for a train and missed it, and stood, chest heaving, staring after it with the face of a man betrayed. A small boy, separated from his nurse, wept bitterly until a stoker gave him an orange.

Our fathers built cathedrals to the glory of God. We have built this, I suppose, to the glory of getting somewhere quickly. I cannot decide whether that is a falling-off or a kind of faith. But I know that when the last train had gone and the great roof stood empty and echoing in the gaslight, I felt very much as I feel in church.

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