The Signal-Man

One evening, from the edge of a deep railway cutting, I saw a man far below, at the door of a signal-box beside the black mouth of a tunnel. I called down to him: "Halloa! Below there!" He ought to have looked up, since my voice came from above. Instead, he turned and stared down the line towards the tunnel, as though the shout had come from there. Only after a long pause did he raise his eyes to where I stood.

I made my way down a rough zigzag path cut into the rock. The cutting was damp and gloomy, and a red danger light glowed at the tunnel's entrance. The signal-man watched me approach with something very close to dread. When I remarked that he seemed afraid of me, he replied quietly that he had been wondering whether he had seen me before. "Where?" I asked. He pointed at the red light. "There."

I assured him that I had never stood there in my life, and he seemed relieved. By his fire, he told me about his work: the signals, the telegraph and the electric bell that announced approaching trains. Twice he broke off, glanced at the silent bell and went to the door to look at the red light. When I rose to leave, he asked me to come back the following night, and begged me not to call out when I arrived.

That second night, he confessed what was troubling him. Once, he had seen a figure standing by the red light, its left arm across its face and its right arm waving violently. It had cried out in the very words I had used: "Halloa! Below there! Look out! Look out!" Within six hours, two trains had collided in the tunnel. Months later, the figure had returned, silent this time, its hands before its face as though in mourning, and that same day a young woman had died in a passing train. Now, he whispered, the spectre had come back. For a week it had been waving at him, and sometimes it rang his bell, although I, sitting beside him, had heard nothing.

"If it means to warn me," he said, "why doesn't it tell me plainly what the danger is, and where? If I telegraph that there's danger and can't say what or where, they'll think I've gone mad." I tried to persuade him that it was all a trick of his exhausted senses, but privately I resolved to take him to a doctor. Walking home, I could not shake off the gesture he had imitated for me, to which my mind had silently attached a phrase of its own.

At sunset the next day, I returned to the edge of the cutting. Below, near the mouth of the tunnel, a man stood with his left arm across his eyes, passionately waving his right. Then I saw that he was real, and that others stood beside a low shape covered with a cloth. The signal-man, they told me, had been struck by an engine at dawn. He had been standing on the line, staring at something, and had not stepped aside.

The man I had seen waving was the engine-driver, who had been showing the others how it had happened. Coming out of the tunnel, he had seen the signal-man at the far end, too late to stop. "I called to him, 'Below there! Look out! Look out! For God's sake, clear the way!'" he said, and he made the gesture once more, one arm across his face so as not to see, the other waving. I said nothing of what I knew. His first words were the ones that had haunted the dead man. But his final cry, "For God's sake, clear the way!", was the very phrase that I myself, and only in my own mind, had attached to the gesture.