he caught dimly a glimpse of an old
nurse whom he remembered trying to break into bits with a hop-pole he
could barely lift; and, most singular thing, on the Sidcup platform, a
group of noisy schoolboys, with smudged faces and ridiculously small
caps stuck on the back of their heads, had scrambled viciously to get
into his compartment. They carried brown canvas satchels full of
crumpled books and papers, and though the names had mostly escaped
him, he remembered every single face. There was Barlow—big, bony chap
who stammered, bringing his words out with a kind of whistling sneeze.
Barlow had given him his first thrashing for copying his stammer.
There was young Watson, who funked at football and sneaked to a master
about a midnight supper. He stole pocket-money, too, and was expelled.
Then he caught a glimpse of another fellow with sly face and laughing
eyes; the name had vanished, but he was the boy who put jalap in the
music-master's coffee, and received a penny from five or six others
who thus escaped a lesson. All waved their hands to him as the train
hurried away, and the last thing he saw was the station lamp where he
had lit the cigar that made three of them, himself included, deadly
sick. Familiar woods and a little blue-eyed stream then hid the vision
... and a moment later he was standing on the platform of his
childhood's station, giving up his first-class ticket (secretly
ashamed that it was not third) to a station-master-ticket-collector
person who simply was not real at all.
For he had no beard. He was small, too, and insignificant. The way he
had dwindled, with the enormous station that used to be a mile or so
in length, was severely disappointing. That STATION-MASTER with the
beard ought to have lived for ever. His niche in the Temple of Fame
was sure. One evening he had called in full uniform at the house and
asked to see Master Henry Rogers, the boy who had got out 'WHILE-THE-
TRAIN-WAS-STILL-IN-MOTION,' and had lectured him gravely with a face
like death. Never again had he left a train 'whilestillinmotion,'
though it was years before he discovered how his father had engineered
that awful, salutary visit.
He asked casually, in a voice that hardly seemed his own, about the
service back to town, and received the answer with a kind of wonder.
It was so respectful. The porters had not found him out yet; but the
moment they did so, he would have to run. He did not run, however. He
walked slowly down the Station Road, swinging the silver-knobbed cane
the office clerks had given him when he left the City. Leisurely,
without a touch of fear, he passed the Water Works, where the huge
iron crank of the shaft rose and fell with ominous thunder against the
sky. It had once been part of that awful hidden Engine which moved the
world. To go near it was instant death, and he always crossed the road
to avoid it; but this afternoon he went down the cinder pathway so
close that he could touch it with his stick. It was incredible that so
terrible a thing could dwindle in a few years to the dimensions of a
motor piston. The crank that moved up and down like a bending,
gigantic knee looked almost flimsy now. ...
Then the village street came into view and he suddenly smelt the
fields and gardens that topped the hill beyond. The world turned gold
and amber, shining beneath a turquoise sky. There was a rush of
flaming sunsets, one upon another, followed by great green moons, and
hosts of stars that came twinkling across barred windows to his very
bedside ... that grand old Net of Stars he made so cunningly. Cornhill
and Lombard Street flashed back upon him for a second, then dived away
and hid their faces for ever, as he passed the low grey wall beside
the church where first he had seen the lame boy hobbling, and had
realised that the whole world suffered.
A moment he stood here, thinking. He heard the wind sighing in the yew
trees beside the dark brown porch. Rooks were cawing among the elms
across the churchyard, and