Another Part of the Wood Read online

  If you are in the right mood for it, and have not actually got to share a carriage with those jigging arms and legs, it is a pleasant enough scene; for there can be no question that the citizens are enjoying themselves. Even the shortest holiday seems endless when viewed from the departure platforms of Newcliff Central, and the arrival platforms which are lurking all the while under the other span of the glass roof convey no warning message on the very day that the citizens have broken up. Away they go, with their heads protruding suicidally from the windows, and a last shower of hats, gloves, magazines and handkerchiefs fluttering on to the six-foot way. A prolonged scream accompanies the whistle of the engine, as it plunges into the tunnel beyond the gasometers. A red light blinks in the darkness, and vanishes. But already the porters are lining up to greet a fresh inrush of vehicles from St. Winefride’s or St. Wilfrid’s or Mr. Dudgeon’s establishment for backward boys, and thus the great educational dispersal continues until the last school has emptied and the last tennis-racquet has been taken to the lost-property office. Then Newcliff settles down to rest again, and to dream, perhaps, of the distant days when it was just an ugly little fishing-village, before the sea breezes had covered its sky-line with brick and slate and flagstaffs and goal-posts. Presently even the masters and mistresses depart, and the caretakers’ children have the playing-fields to themselves.

  So the omnibus from St. Ethelburga’s came clattering down the hill, and along the esplanade, and up Queen Street, and finally drew to a standstill in the station yard. And the porters began unloading it, and the passengers came pouring out of it, and Noodles Brett—who was now grownup, though she looked very much like the Noodles of half an hour ago—sprang on to the cobblestones, and whirled into the booking-hall, and in due course found herself in front of a small window with a wire grill, where she demanded, received, and paid one and elevenpence-halfpenny for, a third-class ticket to Pippingfold—which, as Miss Mulberry had truly observed, was not so very far away. The pressure from her ex-colleagues and others then drove her on towards an enormous pile of luggage, where she identified a very shabby brown trunk and had it labelled to the same destination; and after this she proceeded to Platform Number One, where the ex-colleagues and others were all waiting for the London express. Not until this had come and gone would the local train appear which was to take her back to Mr. Cottenham.

  For the next ten minutes or so, having propped her umbrella, hockey-stick and Going-Away-Prize against her battered dressing-case, she played a series of selections on the small stringed instrument which also formed part of her hand-baggage. Sometimes she sang as she played, and the ex-colleagues, gathering round her, both sang and danced. “Go on!” they said, whenever she showed signs of stopping, and on she went; twanging away with great brilliancy and accuracy, except when she attempted a very difficult refinement known as the upward roll. “Rotten!” said the ex-colleagues at such moments, and Noodles smiled and resumed her simpler and more straightforward twanging, while the feet of the dancers twinkled like summer rain.

  Presently, with a frightful hissing, the London express backed in from where it had been standing by the gasometers, and the dance changed into a mad rush for corner seats. The twanging ceased, and the stringed instrument was laid carefully down on the battered dressing-case. “Good-bye!” shouted the ex-colleagues. “Good-bye!” shouted Noodles, passing swiftly from window to window. Doors were slammed, opened, and slammed again. Orange-peel and tin-foil kept showering on the platform. The long train rocked and shuddered as the educational trunks and suitcases were hurled into the van, and as the citizens of the future jumped up and down and screamed. Now we’re off. No, we’re not Stand back there, please. Slam. Bang. Wild charge by contingent of backward boys who have been gaping into the signal-box on one of the arrival platforms, and have just been found there by one of Mr. Dudgeon’s long-suffering assistants. Hurry up there, please. Bang. Slam. High, reedy chanting by the junior students of St. Winefride’s, whose obvious intention it is to pass the entire journey in the corridor. A green flag. A shrill hoot from the distant engine. Accelerando of mighty snorts as it battles with the inertia of its load. Slowly it puffs away into the sunlight, and out of the sunlight into the tunnel. Again the red light glitters and disappears. Mr. Dudgeon’s long-suffering assistant wipes his forehead, and hurries off to start his own packing. The porters are already assembling for their next appointment with the special time-table. Noodles is left alone.

  “I don’t mind a bit,” she is saying to herself. “I’m thankful I’m not staying on for another term. One always feels a bit stupid when one sees a train going off like that, but it would be absurd when I’m more than eighteen.”

  She sits down on a deserted bench, picks up the stringed instrument, twangs a few subdued chords, and puts it back.

  “Of course it’ll be a bit dull at Pippingfold,” she is thinking. “But I dare say Beaky’ll come down for Easter, and anyhow I’m grown-up now so that I can do all sorts of things that I couldn’t do before. At least—— Oh, well, one’s almost bound to have some adventures after one’s left school for good. Nobody could possibly just go on living in the country for ever. If only I’d got any money, I think I’d travel—like Aunt Caroline. I wonder what it feels like in one of those big ships, like in that picture there.”

  She gets up, and examines the coloured poster of an Atlantic liner which has been pasted up near the door of the general waiting-room on Platform Number One. It steams majestically through a very choppy sea, in which a quantity of smaller vessels appear to be in imminent danger of foundering.

  “I think I’d like to sleep up there,” murmurs Noodles, as she plants her forefinger on the captain’s bridge. “You’d get such an awfully good view.”

  Further examples from Newcliff Central’s art gallery draw her gradually on towards the sunlight. A ruined abbey rather takes her fancy as a residence in which “things might happen.” A view of Edinburgh produces an expression of wistfulness, for she has always taken an affectionate interest in Mary, Queen of Scots. A lake in Ireland reminds her of Snubs Tipton, her brother Beaky’s friend and fellow-lodger in London, for the rather remote reason that Snubs’s father (whom she has never met) used to fish when he lived in Devonshire. But she frowns at a semi-humorous picture of two dogs labelled for conveyance in a guard’s van; for though Mr. Cottenham has never let her have a dog of her own, she is convinced by some powerful instinct that they will be miserable in such inhuman quarters.

  And then there is a rumbling and jolting behind her, as the short and very dirty local train is pushed alongside the platform by its stumpy and very dirty engine. No more art gallery, and—rather a thrilling thought—no more Newcliff. Miss Brett leaves the imaginary dogs to their fate, and runs back to gather up her belongings.

  3

  The local train followed its usual deliberate habits. Its engine left it and went for a little run by itself; came back presently with an empty horse-box, and hit the other coaches so as to show them what it had found; then stood still and panted as if it had just fetched somebody’s stick out of the water, or occasionally sighed as if it were the most misunderstood engine on the whole of the line. Meanwhile the porters came back and played a game with some milk-cans and large wooden boxes, pausing every now and then as though they weren’t quite certain of the rules, and then beginning again with more noise than ever. A man in a cloth cap and blue cotton suit came climbing along the footboard on the off side, staring in at the windows and whistling; and another man walked very heavily up and down the roof. During these preparations for departure Noodles read the first three poems in her Going-Away-Prize, without deriving any very definite impression from them except that their heroines had awfully queer names—though the author might well have been excused for thinking them less queer than her own. And then the stumpy engine suddenly thrust its neck into the collar and tugged the horse-box and the dirty coaches right past the gasometers and through the tunnel and nearly five hundred yard
s beyond it, after which effort it stopped again—and again panted and sighed—at that outpost of civilisation known as Newcliff Junction, which was the point where the single line branched off towards Pippingfold and the valley of the Clewer.

  And here Noodles was constrained to take her feet off the opposite cushion by the entrance of a fat woman, a thin woman, a little girl, a little boy, and a man with canvas gaiters. They all stared at her, and she stared at them. The fat woman then asked her if she thought this was the train for Friar’s Holt, and Noodles said she thought it was. As a matter of fact, she knew perfectly well that it was, but it seemed politer somehow not to appear too certain. Then the thin woman asked the man in canvas gaiters if he thought it was the train for Friar’s Holt, and the man in canvas gaiters said that was quite right. Notwithstanding this double assurance, both women then plucked the children away from the window, and leant out of it and asked a very old man of an agricultural aspect for his views on the matter, and when the old man said he didn’t know, they were thrown into a great state of alarm, and slapped the children, and started getting out again. At this stage an adolescent porter came by and tried to take their bags and parcels away from them. In reply to the same inquiry, however, he admitted that this was undoubtedly the train for Friar’s Holt; whereupon the women became extremely flustered, slapped the children again, recovered their booty, and darted back into the compartment. They then sat down with an air of having done something exceptionally clever, and Newcliff Junction gave a jerk and began sliding away backwards. The wheels ground against the sharp curve of the rails, the scenery changed from back-gardens with washing and aerials to a deep cutting covered with primroses, and Noodles started reading a poem called Leonine Elegiacs and wondered again why poetry was written in such awfully queer language, and why they were always leaving letters out and putting apostrophes in instead—even when it sounded just the same as before.

  And the local train jolted out of the cutting, and whistled through Snickley Halt, and crawled across the marshes, and slowed down, and stopped. And as they had now reached Friar’s Holt, the fat woman and the thin woman slapped the two children again, and ejected them, and ejected themselves, and looked very suspicious when Noodles handed them the string bag which they had overlooked, and were last seen all standing still on the platform as though they expected it to begin moving presently and to take them to their ultimate destination.

  And the man in canvas gaiters coughed, and crossed his legs.

  “Bother!” said Noodles to herself. “This is the kind of man who talks to one. I wish they wouldn’t.” And she started reading about yet another awfully queer woman called Mariana.

  “Do you mind if I smoke, miss?” said the man.

  “Not in the least,” said Noodles.

  “Thank you, miss,” said the man, and he got up and came and sat down opposite her. Noodles allowed herself to see nothing but his gaiters, but she could hear the rustling of paper, and presently she could smell his rather pungent cigarette. “I wonder what would happen,” she thought, “if I went and sat in the other corner.” But perhaps that would look rude. Perhaps, also, she had been wrong in her classification, for the man was preserving an unbroken silence. Except that he still coughed every now and then.

  The train rumbled into Sawbridge and Wissingfield station, and rumbled out again. “It would have looked silly,” Noodles was thinking, “if I’d got out and got into another carriage. Besides, he might have tried to help me with my things.” She took a quick glance at the smoking stranger, and he flung the end of his cigarette out of the window.

  “Going far, miss?” he asked.

  “What?” said Noodles.

  “Nice day,” said the man.

  “Oh, lovely,” said Noodles.

  “I say,” said the man, leaning forward suddenly; “you don’t know of a place for a stable-hand, do you, miss?”

  “I’m awfully sorry,” said Noodles, “but I’m afraid I don’t.”

  “I’ve been in the ’orspital, you see,” said the man. “I’ad a promise of a job, but that’s the way they treat you nowadays.”

  The ellipsis here beat anything attempted by Lord Tennyson, but on the other hand even Lilian’s or Claribel’s heart could hardly have been softer than Miss Brett’s. She could no more withhold a look of sympathy than she could understand why it was being demanded.

  “It’s these motor-cars that done it,” said the man, leaving Noodles to guess whether he had been run over or was suffering from the competition of mechanical traction. “Six weeks I was there, miss, and didn’t ought to be out yet. You can see that, cancher, miss?”

  The man looked particularly healthy, but one certainly didn’t want him to go into details.

  “How ghastly!” said Noodles. “I’m most awfully sorry.”

  “Don’t think I’m complaining, miss,” said the man, leaning nearer still. “But I wouldn’t wish to mislead you. I wouldn’t wish you to think ‘There’s a man asking for a reckermendation what doesn’t deserve it.’ I could show you a letter from Colonel Williams—you know ’im, don’t you, miss?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t,” said Noodles, apologetically.

  “Wot!” The man in gaiters seemed to be stunned by this answer. The whole bottom had fallen out of his world, if Noodles didn’t know Colonel Williams. “But I’ve got the letter ’ere,” he protested, thumping himself on the side of his jacket. “You’ll believe that, won’t you, miss?”

  “Oh, of course,” said Noodles.

  “Well, then,” said the man, sitting back again—very much to Noodles’s relief; “you can tell your father—see?—when you get ’ome. You tell ’im I’ll take any job ’e fancies. See? Any job what’ll keep me going. See? You tell ’im from me——”

  “But I can’t,” said Noodles, faintly. Nothing would induce her to explain that she hadn’t got a father, whatever this unfortunate stranger might think. And the same negative undoubtedly covered Mr. Cottenham, who had no vacancies on his small staff and was always saying how poor he was. How could one and why should one arrive back from school with a message like that, for parent, guardian or anyone else? “He must know I’m not the sort of person to get jobs for people,” said Noodles to herself. But whether the unfortunate stranger knew this or not—and on the whole it appears possible that he did—he seemed quite incapable of closing or changing the subject.

  “Can’t, miss?” he echoed, hoarsely. “But where do you think I’m a-going to sleep to-night?”

  Noodles didn’t know. It seemed to depend, very largely, on how far he travelled up the valley of the Clewer. But why spend one’s little all on a third-class ticket and a packet of cigarettes, if—— No; how would she like to have been six weeks in a hospital? She’d have hated it. And he couldn’t be an impostor, because he had that letter from Colonel Williams. It was awful, the way the world was full of people who hadn’t got any money. “Dash!” said Noodles to herself. “I suppose I’ll have to give him that half-crown, and it’s absolutely all I’ve got left, and I shan’t get my allowance for nearly three weeks. I don’t suppose it would be the faintest use asking him for change.”

  She glanced at the unfortunate stranger again, as if hoping to see something in his expression or appearance that might let her off; but she saw nothing of the sort. In the light of his recent observations he was hardly recognisable as the perfectly ordinary passenger who had got into the train at the Junction. He had shrunk and sagged; his clothes had become more threadbare; his whole aspect more pitiful and helpless. Even his complexion seemed no longer a sign of health, but a symptom of the disease for which he still ought really to be having hospital treatment. As the train hiccupped over the points by the brickworks, half a mile this side of Pippingfold, Noodles reached an inevitable decision, and at the same moment thanked her stars that she had not reached it too late.

  “—not asking for charity,” the man was muttering hypnotically.

  “No, no,” said Noodles, standing up
and feeling for her dressing-bag on the rack. “Of course not.”

  The man’s eyes followed her greedily.

  “But if everyone ’ad your kind ’eart, miss …”

  The dressing-bag seemed to have become wedged into a tangle with the stringed instrument, the hockey-stick and the umbrella; and as Noodles climbed on to the seat and tugged at it, the point of this last piece of property slipped through the meshes of the netting, making the deadlock even more complete than before.

  “Bother!”

  “Can I ’elp you, missie?”

  “No, thank you. I can manage it if—— There!”

  There, indeed. The brakes of that local train were always less remarkable for their delicacy than their power, and particularly was this the case on a sharp down-grade such as that which marks the approach to Pippingfold. Even so, however, Noodles would probably have recovered herself if she hadn’t been standing on the seat, and if the hockey-stick hadn’t chosen that precise moment to come loose from the general jumble—which it certainly wouldn’t have done if she hadn’t been pulling it quite so hard. And even then it wouldn’t have caught the unfortunate stranger such a frightful whack on the side of the head, if in his eagerness to snatch at Noodles’s purse as soon as it appeared—for there is really no other explanation for his behaviour both before and after this accident—he hadn’t been standing on tiptoe just behind her.

  So at the word “There!” all these things happened in far less time than it takes to describe; and the man gave a squeal of surprise and agony, and Noodles gave a squeal of surprise and remorse; and the stout little station-master came trotting up, and opened the door, and began shouting very excitedly; and the porter and the man who drives the hired Ford came trundling to his assistance, also shouting; and the station-master said: “Well done, miss. We’ve got ’im this time”; and the man in gaiters opened the other door and jumped out on the line, and ran away, and disappeared—though not before the engine-driver had tried to hit him with a piece of coal at a distance of about seventy-five yards, and had failed in this gallant attempt. And the heroic Noodles descended from the compartment by the more conventional exit, to find that no amount of explanation could check the plaudits of a crowd which now consisted of no less than five persons.