"You'll tell me all about it," she said. "I wonder we didn't run across
one another before."
They rolled out of the grey station into the light, and the plate-glass
drew the rays together till they burnt the face and hands. They sped
alongside of the upper windows nearly on a level with the red and yellow
chimney-pots; they passed open spaces filled with cranes, old iron, and
stacks of railway sleepers, pictorial advertisements, sky signs, great
gasometers rising round and black in their iron cages over-topping or
nearly the slender spires. A train steamed along a hundred-arched viaduct;
and along a black embankment the other trains rushed by in a whirl of
wheels, bringing thousands of clerks up from the suburbs to their city
toil.
The excursion jogged on, stopping for long intervals before strips of
sordid garden where shirts and pink petticoats were blowing. Little
streets ascended the hillsides; no more trams, 'buses, too, had
disappeared, and afoot the folk hurried along the lonely pavements of
their suburbs. At Clapham Junction betting men had crowded the platform;
they all wore grey overcoats with race-glasses slung over their shoulders.
And the train still rolled through the brick wilderness which old John
said was all country forty years ago.
The men puffed at their pipes, and old John's anecdotes about the days
when he and the Gaffer, in company with all the great racing men of the
day, used to drive down by road, were listened to with admiration. Esther
had finished telling the circumstances in which she had met Margaret; and
Sarah questioned her about William and how her marriage had come about.
The train had stopped outside of a little station, and the blue sky, with
its light wispy clouds, became a topic of conversation. Old John did not
like the look of those clouds, and the women glanced at the waterproofs
which they carried on their arms.
They passed bits of common with cows and a stray horse, also a little
rural cemetery; but London suddenly began again parish after parish, the
same blue roofs, the same tenement houses. The train had passed the first
cedar and the first tennis lawn. And knowing it to be a Derby excursion
the players paused in their play and looked up. Again the line was
blocked; the train stopped again and again. But it had left London behind,
and the last stoppage was in front of a beautiful June landscape. A thick
meadow with a square weather-beaten church showing between the spreading
trees; miles of green corn, with birds flying in the bright air, and lazy
clouds going out, making way for the endless blue of a long summer's day.