I noted that two of its
compartments were marked FIRST, the rest THIRD. And in some of them, I
noted, you might smoke. But of this opportunity you were not availing
yourself. All the compartments, the cheap and the dear alike, were
vacant. They were transporting air only--and this (I conceived)
abominable. The sun slanted fiercely down on the old iron roof, the
old wooden walls, the dingy shut windows. The fume and grime of a
thousand familiar tunnels, of year after year of journeys by night,
journeys by day, from time immemorial, seemed to have invested the
whole structure with a character that shrank from the sun's scrutiny
and from the nearness of sea and fields. Fuliginous, monstrous,
slowly, shamefully, the thing went by--to what final goal?--in the
lovely weather.
There attended it, besides the driver of the lorry, a straggling
retinue of half-a-dozen men on foot--handy-looking mechanics, very
dusty. I should have liked to question one or another of these as to
their mission. But I was afraid to do so. There is an art of talking
acceptably to people who do not regard themselves as members of one's
own class; and I have never acquired it. I suppose the first step is
to forget that any art is needed-to forget that one must not be so
wildly cordial for fear of seeming to `condescend,' nor be more than a
trifle saturnine, either, for the same motive.
Pages:
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228