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.
