R. BANNISTER chose his carriage with some care. He was always careful in the train because if you had work to do it was obviously necessary to have the place to yourself—when people were talking nothing could be done.
It was a dark, windy day in late November. The platform at King’s Cross was nearly deserted, and it was all very cold and gloomy. The book-stall stared vacantly across the empty lines and its books and papers fluttered discontentedly as though they protested indignantly against their unhappy neglect—a porter pushed a load of luggage vacantly down the platform and ran into Mr. Bannister; he apologized still vacantly and passed on, dreaming.
Mr. Bannister chose his carriage—a dirty, unappetizing third class furnished with six highly colored representations of “The Spa Longton,” “The Beach,” “Hicheton-on-Sea," “The Station Hotel, Trament,” “The High Street, Wotton”—illustrations that were neither truthful nor entrancing.
Mr. Bannister was thin and wore glasses; he had high cheekbones and sandy hair—his eyes were pale gray, watery and red at the edges; his great coat was threadbare and shiny, his collar was a little frayed and his trousers had never been intended to turn up. Mr. Bannister was a journalist.
Times were hard just then, and, to be strictly truthful, his meals had, of late, been desperately uncertain. On Monday there had been breakfast, on Tuesday lunch, on Wednesday an excellent supper, owing to the happy discovery of a new friend; but to-day there had, as yet, been nothing—he sat in the corner of his carriage and thought of sausages.
During a year and a half he had worked on the Daily Post and pay had been, on the whole, regular. He was a bachelor and claims on his purse were few, so things had gone well with him.
But the Daily Post had found the world a cold and unfeeling place and had passed silently away, leaving very few to regret its departure. Mr. Bannister missed it very sincerely, and he discovered how hard life could be. Everything that he handled seemed to be a lost cause, and one paper after another faded away at his eager touch—he depended, eventually, for his living, on the crimes and misfortunes of his fellow men—the world seemed to his tired brain a procession of thieves and murderers with the divorce courts for a background.
To-day he was hurrying down to a little village in a remote part of Wiltshire to investigate a crime of the night before. It was an affair of the usual kind—a woman had been murdered and there were suspicions of a lover. Mr. Bannister went to it as he would to his bath or morning cigarette—to his heated brain murder was the game that everybody played; and he must be back again by the evening to report on a religious revival meeting in Clapham. The clouds were lifting—it was long since he had had two jobs in one day, and the Telegraph had given him both of them. The Telegraph was an excellent paper.
They had told him that he must be prepared, if necessary, to sleep there during the night—it would be annoying if that were to happen—he would miss the revival. He determined, therefore, to be as speedy as possible, and he would, he hoped, be able to catch the four-thirty train back to town.
It was dark and stormy and the wind whistled outside the carriage—the scudding clouds seemed to catch the top of the trees and drag them in their own hurrying direction—but the riots clung to the gray earth and the furious heavens tossed the trees back again to their original abiding-place.
Mr. Bannister’s coat was thin and he shivered in his corner—it was too dark to see, and the train shook so that it was impossible to write; he flung his note-book down and stared moodily out of the window. He was very hungry and was inclined to regard the world as an evil place; his mind flew back to his younger days when his ambition had challenged heaven and his poverty had seemed certain proof of genius. He had breakfasted on Swinburne, lunched on Pater, and dined on Meredith—now his library had been sold to pay his debts and his debts were still unpaid; he was very hungry.
At a small wayside station there came an old woman—a very massive old woman with a bright print skirt of blue and an immense bosom; she had also a large basket, a bundle of sticks and a little boy. The basket and the sticks she placed carefully at her side; the boy she flung behind her—he fell into the corner and crouched there, against the cushions, softly sobbing.
From her treatment of the boy Mr. Bannister concluded that she was cruel, and he hated her cruelty—so he looked at her sternly and frowned. She sat staring straight in front of her, her hands planted firmly on her knees—she was an enormous woman.