The Lonely Read Online Free PDF Page B

in the hours of the night past. Nothing was left but understanding love and generosity and the young, sweet hunger of her being.
    She looked down at Jerry’s wrist watch and said, as though she were reading from a page: “It began at thirty-one minutes past ten hours, the morning of June 18, in the year 1945 . . .”
    Jerry finished: “. . . when he took her in his arms, kissed her, and said: ‘All clear, baby—let’s go!’ ”
    Arm in arm, they went out into the street.

They came to their first rest, the second night out, in a huge, grimy, smoke-blackened hotel over the railroad station in Glasgow, where they secured the only remaining room, a gloomy, high-ceilinged chamber in which the sad light from one begrimed window fell athwart the ugly maple washstand with bowl and pitcher.
    The height of the room, the huge bolstered bed big enough for four, the enormous wardrobe, made them feel overwhelmed like Lilliputians. The grey smudge of light that came from the drizzle without was depressing, but by this time they were both so exhausted it did not matter. Jerry was glad they had found some place where Patches could sleep . . .
    The maid who puttered about the room, trying with a touch here and a whisk there to bring it a little cheer, said: “ ’Tis no much for luiks, but ’tis quiet, and I ha’ nae doot ye’ll rest well.”
    The trip north had been a kind of half nightmare of overcrowded railway carriages, dirt, and bad food, and wearied even their young physiques; but it never strained their tempers or altered the patience and good humor of Jerry or the sweetness and mood of play and mischief that had come over Patches from the moment they had closed behind them the door of the house in Bishop’s Lane back in Kenwoulton.
    They had made the wretched journey, hand in hand, half in laughter, half, at times, in mock despair at ever getting anywhere, occupying eight inches of seat together in some filthy, third-class compartment, jammed to suffocation with squalling children, weary soldiers, and nerve-racked civilians, or standing up cramped and crowded in the packed train corridors when they could not get even a place to sit.
    Patches and Jerry trudged blacked-out Birmingham looking fruitlessly for a place to stay overnight, and returned despairing to the dark cavern of the railway station, a gloomy vault of steel and glass filled with steam and smoke and clangor and the endless shuffling feet of thousands of half-seen people, wandering like the lost souls at the approaches to hell, where dim yellow lights would pick up the badges of the regiments of England, or momentarily illumine G.I. or sailor, men and women of the Army and Navy, or drab families lugging heavy boxes and worn suitcases—the endless traffic of wartime England.
    There Jerry had had a sudden inspiration, and, inventing a general and a mission, he chivvied a fusty, wing-collared old clerk in the booking-office into parting with two tickets on the Glasgow sleeper, while Patches stood by in open-mouthed admiration at the beautiful lies Jerry was telling.
    When the train came they discovered that their tickets called for two bare shelves out of four in a third-class cabin complete with one piece of sheetless ticking, a thin blanket, and a bare pillow the size of a book and the same consistency. Also the compartment had two other occupants: a gabby little bagman from Glasgow, with a suitcaseful of apples and tomatoes that he insisted upon sharing with them, and a fat minor official of the Ministry of Information, who lay precariously upon his shelf and snored to wake the dead.
    Patches maintained that it was the booking-clerk’s revenge upon Jerry for the outrageous stories he had told, and dissuaded Jerry from getting off the train and having his life. The M.o.I. man woke up and informed Jerry he was lucky to get the space at all, and that they always booked four people into a third-class sleeper, and usually everybody got on capitally. Jerry was