The Secret Vanguard Read Online Free PDF Page B

lay.
     
    Pennyfeather droned on, his eyes still shut. Burge, too, had shut his eyes, evidently as the next best thing to stopping his ears. Even the sandy-haired young man – about whom there was an obscure air of habitual vigilance – looked sleepy. Only the pulse of the train beat faster, as if it had scented moor and glen far in front. And Pennyfeather, forging ahead as steadily as the smooth projectile in which he sat, presently announced that as a god self-slain on his own strange altar Death lay dead. Never again would it be possible for the aggressive Burge to say or imply that he knew nothing of Swinburne.
    And with this issue of the affair the severe Pennyfeather appeared satisfied. Without attempting to add argument to demonstration he flicked the Scotsman back into place. Nor did Burge seem disposed to retaliation. A man who, on being offered a few rousing lines about our flagship being the Lion , could spout in that offensive way was plainly beyond the social pale. Burge produced a newspaper of his own and was presently absorbed in what appeared to be a crossword puzzle. Silence fell upon the compartment and lasted till the train ran into Perth.

 
     
5:   She Begins to Understand It
    Here, thought Sheila, we used to get the luncheon baskets. And the creak of the wicker lid, the weight on her lap of the big thick plate, the tug at her teeth of the drumstick of a cold boiled fowl – these came upon her suddenly with a hallucinatory vividness. And it was here, of course, that they would thrust hot sandbags into the carriages to alleviate the rigours of the Highland line – long ago… For she had not been north since childhood and this visit to unknown relations was bringing up innumerable memories.
    Sheila frowned. Was it possible that an unmarried woman of twenty-six was already on the verge of a morbid relationship with time? She looked out of the window as the train drew to a halt and took an objective view of Perth. She saw a poster advising a visit to York; a poster, rather better designed, advising a visit to Bavaria; a poster about National Service. There was scope for reflection, but not for reminiscence, in all that.
    Pennyfeather was first out; he was closely followed by the young man with sandy hair. Then Burge departed and Sheila was left to collect her luggage. She did so slowly, sniffing the air. The air, as was to be expected, smelt chiefly of railway station, but it was possible to believe that there blew through it another smell which came from the very portals of the north. A smell known to Scott’s genteel young men and which had in no wise changed since, a smell of peat and bell heather and true heather and pine needles thick upon the ground. The very names of the places down the line had this smell: Kingussie, Blair Atholl, Aviemore – astonishing names with which the lowlands of Scotland had nothing to do. At one of them, Sheila remembered, a shabby old fiddler used to appear and trudge up and down the platform playing; he would travel with the train for a time, playing at each stop, playing now a wild and broken pibroch and now some Scotch comedian’s banal tune. And in the intervals of scraping at his fiddle he would peddle a little volume of his own verses – poor verses enough, but not exactly such as the purchasers would laugh at unless they were vulgar folk. A shabby and perhaps disreputable old man, he had nevertheless his status with the railway people and the regular travellers on the line. He would sit among the shepherds and their dogs in the guard’s van, and his talk would be the shepherds’ talk. A last surviving example of a beggar of the romantic sort. And surely dead by now.
    Because of these reflections and because she wanted to make a telephone call before going on Sheila almost missed her connection; she would actually have done so had a powerful and raw-boned porter not insisted with some vigour that it should be otherwise. As it was, she found herself