Short Stories 1895-1926 (2012)
“I just sat and basted my travel-wearied bones in the sunshine; and thanked heaven for so delicious a place to be alive in.
It was, I agree, like catching sight of it in hungry glimpses through a rather dingy window. There had been frequent interruptions. First had come a goods train. It had shunted this way, it shunted that. Its buffers crashed; its brakes squealed; its sheep baa-ed, and its miserable, dribbling cattle, with their gleaming horns, stared blindly out at us under their long ey...elashes in a stagnant dumb despair.
When that had gone groaning on its way, a ‘local’ – a kind of nursery train – puff-puffed in on the other side. And then we enjoyed a Strauss-like interlude of milk-cans and a vociferous Sunday school excursion – the scholars (merely tiny tots, many of them) engaged even on this weekday in chaunting at intervals the profoundest question man can address to the universe: ‘Are we downhearted? No!’ These having at last wandered off into a dark-mouthed tunnel, the noonday express with a wildly-soaring crescendo of lamentation came sweeping in sheer magnificence of onset round its curve, roared through the little green empty station – its windows a long broken faceless glint of sunlit glass – and that too vanished.MoreLess
It was, I agree, like catching sight of it in hungry glimpses through a rather dingy window. There had been frequent interruptions. First had come a goods train. It had shunted this way, it shunted that. Its buffers crashed; its brakes squealed; its sheep baa-ed, and its miserable, dribbling cattle, with their gleaming horns, stared blindly out at us under their long ey...elashes in a stagnant dumb despair.
When that had gone groaning on its way, a ‘local’ – a kind of nursery train – puff-puffed in on the other side. And then we enjoyed a Strauss-like interlude of milk-cans and a vociferous Sunday school excursion – the scholars (merely tiny tots, many of them) engaged even on this weekday in chaunting at intervals the profoundest question man can address to the universe: ‘Are we downhearted? No!’ These having at last wandered off into a dark-mouthed tunnel, the noonday express with a wildly-soaring crescendo of lamentation came sweeping in sheer magnificence of onset round its curve, roared through the little green empty station – its windows a long broken faceless glint of sunlit glass – and that too vanished.MoreLess
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