Tremendous Trifles

The Secret of a Train

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.