Chapter 24 - Page 2

wished to get at a white officer if
possible, but there wasn't one about); was turned out of a garden which
belonged to an Authority; hung round the gate of a bungalow with an
old-established compound and two white men sitting in chairs on a
verandah; wandered down towards the river under the palm trees, where
the last red light came through; lost myself among rusty boilers and
balks of timber; and at last loafed back in the twilight escorted by the
small boy and an entire brigade of ghosts, not one of whom I had ever
met before, but all of whom I knew most intimately. They said it was the
evenings that used to depress _them_ most, too; so they all came back
after dinner and bore me company, while I went to meet a friend arriving
by the night train from Khartoum.

She was an hour late, and we spent it, the ghosts and I, in a
brick-walled, tin-roofed shed, warm with the day's heat; a crowd of
natives laughing and talking somewhere behind in the darkness. We knew
each other so well by that time, that we had finished discussing every
conceivable topic of conversation--the whereabouts of the Mahdi's head,
for instance--work, reward, despair, acknowledgment, flat failure, all
the real motives that had driven us to do anything, and all our other
longings. So we sat still and let the stars move, as men must do when
they meet this kind of train.

Presently I asked: 'What is the name of the next station out from
here?'

'Station Number One,' said a ghost.

'And the next?'

'Station Number Two, and so on to Eight, I think.'

'And wasn't it worth while to name even _one_ of these stations from
some man, living or dead, who had something to do with making the line?'

'Well, they didn't, anyhow,' said another ghost. 'I suppose they didn't
think it worth while. Why? What do _you_ think?'

'I think, I replied, 'it is the sort of snobbery that nations go to
Hades for.'

Her headlight showed at last, an immense distance off; the economic
electrics were turned up, the ghosts vanished, the dragomans of the
various steamers flowed forward in beautiful garments to meet their
passengers who had booked passages in the Cook boats, and the Khartoum
train decanted a joyous collection of folk, all decorated with horns,
hoofs, skins, hides, knives, and assegais, which they had been buying at
Omdurman. And when the porters laid hold upon their bristling bundles,
it was like MacNeill's Zareba without the camels.

Two young men in tarboushes were the only people who had no part in the
riot. Said one of them to the other:

'Hullo?'

Said the other: 'Hullo!'

They grunted together for a while. Then one pleasantly:

'Oh, I'm sorry for _that_! I thought I was