The Secret of a Train

All this talk of a railway mystery has sent my mind back to a
loose memory. I will not merely say that this story is true:
because, as you will soon see, it is all truth and no story.
It has no explanation and no conclusion; it is, like most of the other
things we encounter in life, a fragment of something else which
would be intensely exciting if it were not too large to be seen.
For the perplexity of life arises from there being too many
interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any
of them; what we call its triviality is really the tag-ends
of numberless tales; ordinary and unmeaning existence is like ten
thousand thrilling detective stories mixed up with a spoon.
My experience was a fragment of this nature, and it is, at any rate,
not fictitious. Not only am I not making up the incidents
(what there were of them), but I am not making up the atmosphere
of the landscape, which were the whole horror of the thing.
I remember them vividly, and they were as I shall now describe.

. . . . .

About noon of an ashen autumn day some years ago I was standing
outside the station at Oxford intending to take the train to London.
And for some reason, out of idleness or the emptiness of my mind
or the emptiness of the pale grey sky, or the cold, a kind of caprice
fell upon me that I would not go by that train at all, but would step
out on the road and walk at least some part of the way to London.
I do not know if other people are made like me in this matter;
but to me it is always dreary weather, what may be called
useless weather, that slings into life a sense of action and romance.
On bright blue days I do not want anything to happen; the world
is complete and beautiful, a thing for contemplation. I no more
ask for adventures under that turquoise dome than I ask for
adventures in church. But when the background of man's life is
a grey background, then, in the name of man's sacred supremacy,
I desire to paint on it in fire and gore. When the heavens fail
man refuses to fail; when the sky seems to have written on it, in
letters of lead and pale silver, the decree that nothing shall
happen, then the immortal soul, the prince of the creatures, rises
up and decrees that something shall happen, if it be only the
slaughter of a policeman. But this is a digressive way of stating
what I have said already--that the bleak sky awoke in me a hunger
for some change of plans, that the monotonous weather seemed to
render unbearable the use of the monotonous train, and that I set
out into the country lanes, out of the town of Oxford. It was,
perhaps, at that moment that a strange curse came upon me out of
the city and the sky, whereby it was decreed that years afterwards
I should, in an