All this talk of a railway mystery has sent my mind back to a loose
memory. I will not merely say that this story is true: because, as you
will soon see, it is all truth and no story. It has no explanation and
no conclusion; it is, like most of the other things we encounter in
life, a fragment of something else which would be intensely exciting if
it were not too large to be seen. For the perplexity of life arises from
there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested
properly in any of them; what we call its triviality is really the
tag-ends of numberless tales; ordinary and unmeaning existence is like
ten thousand thrilling detective stories mixed up with a spoon. My
experience was a fragment of this nature, and it is, at any rate, not
fictitious. Not only am I not making up the incidents (what there were
of them), but I am not making up the atmosphere of the landscape, which
were the whole horror of the thing. I remember them vividly, and they
were as I shall now describe.
.....
About noon of an ashen autumn day some years ago I was standing outside
the station at Oxford intending to take the train to London. And
for some reason, out of idleness or the emptiness of my mind or the
emptiness of the pale grey sky, or the cold, a kind of caprice fell upon
me that I would not go by that train at all, but would step out on the
road and walk at least some part of the way to London. I do not know
if other people are made like me in this matter; but to me it is always
dreary weather, what may be called useless weather, that slings into
life a sense of action and romance. On bright blue days I do not want
anything to happen; the world is complete and beautiful, a thing for
contemplation. I no more ask for adventures under that turquoise dome
than I ask for adventures in church. But when the background of man’s
life is a grey background, then, in the name of man’s sacred supremacy,
I desire to paint on it in fire and gore. When the heavens fail man
refuses to fail; when the sky seems to have written on it, in letters
of lead and pale silver, the decree that nothing shall happen, then the
immortal soul, the prince of the creatures, rises up and decrees that
something shall happen, if it be only the slaughter of a policeman. But
this is a digressive way of stating what I have said already--that
the bleak sky awoke in me a hunger for some change of plans, that the
monotonous weather seemed to render unbearable the use of the monotonous
train, and that I set out into the country lanes, out of the town of
Oxford. It was, perhaps, at that moment that a strange curse came
upon me out of the city and the sky, whereby it was decreed that years
afterwards I should, in an 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 stopped, irrationally, in the middle
of a field. I heard a heavy noise as of some one clambering off the
train, and a dark, ragged head suddenly put itself into my window.
“Excuse me, sir,” said the stoker, “but I think, perhaps--well, perhaps
you ought to know--there’s a dead man in this train.”
.....
Had I been a true artist, a person of exquisite susceptibilities
and nothing else, I should have been bound, no doubt, to be finally
overwhelmed with this sensational touch, and to have insisted on
getting out and walking. As it was, I regret to say, I expressed myself
politely, but firmly, to the effect that I didn’t care particularly if
the train took me to Paddington. But when the train had started with
its unknown burden I did do one thing, and do it quite instinctively,
without stopping to think, or to think more than a flash. I threw
away my cigar. Something that is as old as man and has to do with
all mourning and ceremonial told me to do it. There was something
unnecessarily horrible, it seemed to me, in the idea of there being
only two men in that train, and one of them dead and the other smoking
a cigar. And as the red and gold of the butt end of it faded like a
funeral torch trampled out at some symbolic moment of a procession,
I realised how immortal ritual is. I realised (what is the origin and
essence of all ritual) that in the presence of those sacred riddles
about which we can say nothing it is more decent merely to do something.
And I realised that ritual will always mean throwing away something;
DESTROYING our corn or wine upon the altar of our gods.
When the train panted at last into Paddington Station I sprang out of
it with a suddenly released curiosity. There was a barrier and officials
guarding the rear part of the train; no one was allowed to press towards
it. They were guarding and hiding something; perhaps death in some too
shocking form, perhaps something like the Merstham matter, so mixed up
with human mystery and wickedness that the land has to give it a sort of
sanctity; perhaps something worse than either. I went out gladly enough
into the streets and saw the lamps shining on the laughing faces.
Nor have I ever known from that day to this into what strange story I
wandered or what frightful thing was my companion in the dark.