The Secret of a Train - Page 2

article in the DAILY NEWS, talk about Sir George
Trevelyan in connection with Oxford, when I knew perfectly well
that he went to Cambridge.

As I crossed the country everything was ghostly and colourless.
The fields that should have been green were as grey as the skies;
the tree-tops that should have been green were as grey as the clouds
and as cloudy. And when I had walked for some hours the evening
was closing in. A sickly sunset clung weakly to the horizon,
as if pale with reluctance to leave the world in the dark.
And as it faded more and more the skies seemed to come closer and
to threaten. The clouds which had been merely sullen became swollen;
and then they loosened and let down the dark curtains of the rain.
The rain was blinding and seemed to beat like blows from an enemy
at close quarters; the skies seemed bending over and bawling
in my ears. I walked on many more miles before I met a man,
and in that distance my mind had been made up; and when I met
him I asked him if anywhere in the neighbourhood I could pick up
the train for Paddington. He directed me to a small silent station
(I cannot even remember the name of it) which stood well away
from the road and looked as lonely as a hut on the Andes.
I do not think I have ever seen such a type of time and sadness
and scepticism and everything devilish as that station was:
it looked as if it had always been raining there ever since
the creation of the world. The water streamed from the soaking
wood of it as if it were not water at all, but some loathsome
liquid corruption of the wood itself; as if the solid station
were eternally falling to pieces and pouring away in filth.
It took me nearly ten minutes to find a man in the station.
When I did he was a dull one, and when I asked him if there was
a train to Paddington his answer was sleepy and vague. As far as I
understood him, he said there would be a train in half an hour.
I sat down and lit a cigar and waited, watching the last tail
of the tattered sunset and listening to the everlasting rain.
It may have been in half an hour or less, but a train came rather
slowly into the station. It was an unnaturally dark train;
I could not see a light anywhere in the long black body of it;
and I could not see any guard running beside it. I was reduced
to walking up to the engine and calling out to the stoker to ask
if the train was going to London. "Well--yes, sir," he said, with
an unaccountable kind of reluctance. "It is going to London;
but----" It was just starting, and I jumped into the first
carriage; it was pitch dark. I sat there smoking and wondering,
as we steamed through the continually darkening landscape, lined
with desolate poplars, until we slowed down and