Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team.
1917
With a somewhat prolonged grinding of the brakes and an unnecessaryamount of fuss in the way of letting off steam, the afternoon train fromLondon came to a standstill in the station at Detton Magna. An elderlyporter, putting on his coat as he came, issued, with the dogged aid ofone bound by custom to perform a hopeless mission, from the small,redbrick lamp room. The station master, occupying a position of vantagein front of the shed which enclosed the booking office, looked up anddown the lifeless row of closed and streaming windows, with an expectancydulled by daily disappointment, for the passengers who seldom alighted.On this occasion no records were broken. A solitary young man stepped outon to the wet and flinty platform, handed over the half of a third-classreturn ticket from London, passed through the two open doors andcommenced to climb the long ascent which led into the town.
He wore no overcoat, and for protection against the inclement weatherhe was able only to turn up the collar of his well-worn blue serge coat.The damp of a ceaselessly wet day seemed to have laid its cheerlesspall upon the whole exceedingly ugly landscape. The hedges, blackenedwith smuts from the colliery on the other side of the slope, weredripping also with raindrops. The road, flinty and light grey in colour,was greasy with repellent-looking mud—there were puddles even in theasphalt-covered pathway which he trod. On either side of him stretchedthe shrunken, unpastoral-looking fields of an industrial neighbourhood.The town-village which stretched up the hillside before him presentedscarcely a single redeeming feature. The small, grey stone houses, hardand unadorned, were interrupted at intervals by rows of brand-new,red-brick cottages. In the background were the tall chimneys of severalfactories; on the left, a colliery shaft raised its smoke-blackenedfinger to the lowering clouds.
After his first glance around at these familiar and unlovely objects,Philip Romilly walked with his head a little thrown back, his eyes liftedas though with intent to the melancholy and watery skies. He was a youngman well above medium height, slim, almost inclined to be angular, yetwith a good carriage notwithstanding a stoop which seemed more theresult of an habitual depression than occasioned by any physicalweakness. His features were large, his mouth querulous, a littlediscontented, his eyes filled with the light of a silent and rebelliousbitterness which seemed, somehow, to have found a more or less permanentabode in his face. His clothes, although they were neat, had seen betterdays. He was ungloved, and he carried under his arm a small parcel,which appeared to contain a book, carefully done up in brown paper.
As he reached the outskirts of the village he slackened his pace.Standing a little way back from the road, from which they were separatedby an ugly, gravelled playground, were the familiar school buildings,with the usual inscription carved in stone above the door. He laid hishand upon the wooden gate and paused. From inside he could catch thedrone of children's voices. He glanced at his watch. It was barely twentyminutes past four. For a moment he hesitated. Then he strolled on, and,turning at the gate of an adjoining cottage, the nearest to the schoolsof a little unlovely row, he tried the latch, found it yield to histouch, and stepped inside. He closed the door behind h