doctors have in mind when they use the tactful expression ‘change of scene.’
With a smile, Miss Yates settled herself in her place and looked round the carriage. There was a slight touch of luxury about it all which she found extremely soothing. The menu did not look exceedingly inviting, but to her there was a certain sense of adventure about dining in the train. And the man was so delightfully polite, particularly after she had ordered herself half a bottle of burgundy.
As dinner was served, she began unobtrusively to take note of her fellow-travellers, and build up for herself an imaginary picture of their lives. For Miss Yates had a keen curiosity about all strangers with whom she came in contact, and it amused her to fit each of them with a personal history. Sometimes she enjoyed the additional pleasure of contrasting her guesses with the later-appearing facts.
She had little hesitation in measuring up the tall, straight-backed, distinguished man, carefully dressed and with well-tended grey moustache, who sat nearest to her, reading a magazine. Not quite military, she decided; a more thoughtful type. Something diplomatic, undoubtedly; perhaps a newly-appointed ambassador or minister. Her conjecture would not have pleased the object of it, who prided himself on looking every inch a soldier. He was in fact a very eminent professor of history, on his way to Tunis, where he hoped to establish new facts about the battle of Thapsus that would blast the reputation of another eminent historian, whom he had been after for years.
Miss Yates was not much nearer the mark in placing the well-groomed young man of magnificent physique who came next under her eye. She thought the slight crookedness of his nose rather added to his attractiveness; too regular features often went, she had found, with an undesirable vanity in men. Some people might think his chest and shoulders over-developed, but that was often the case with rowing men, who were usually very nice boys; and Miss Yates thought of this youth as a Cambridge undergraduate going to join his parents abroad. His clothes were certainly quite right. At dinner he displayed a very healthy appetite, and drank only a little mineral water, while he happily studied a letter which Miss Yates surmised to be from a girl. She wondered what the young man could have been doing to his left ear.
The state of that organ, alas! was none of the young man’s doing. Miss Yates was looking at the beginnings of what is known as a cauliflower ear, the work of Baker Isaacs of Hoxton; and the youth himself was Gunner Brand, formerly heavy-weight champion of the army, holder of the Abingdon Belt, winner of a series of lucrative professional battles, and looking forward to a contest for the world title in three months’ time. He was on the way to join his trainer at their camp in Cap d’Antibes, and was now reading and re-reading a long letter from his fiancée, whose equal the world did not, in his opinion, contain.
Miss Yates was less at fault in her judgment of the neighbouring couple. Her quick glance took in a multitude of details of expression and turnout. The very pretty girl she set down unhesitatingly, and quite correctly, as a vain, selfish and bad-hearted fool. Her manner to the waiters as the train dinner was served appealed to Miss Yates as the very acme of the sort of hauteur represented in American films of English high-life. The young man, evidently her lately married husband, was a weak but not unamiable fool. Their whole appearance bespoke considerable wealth; and Miss Yates reflected, not for the first time, on the dangerous extent to which complete worthlessness is represented among the rich.
She understood best of all, perhaps, the kind of man who had so narrowly escaped missing the train. She liked his face, with its clean-cut lines and cloven chin. About thirty, she said to herself; an earnest type; a trained mind and a worker; perhaps a doctor; normally well controlled, but now showing signs of illness and all but ungovernable agitation. There was something reckless and haunted about his appearance. The term ‘Byronic’ occurred to Miss Yates’s unmodern mind. Was he, perhaps, suffering from a broken heart? Miss Judith believed in broken hearts, though she had learned that they can be broken in more ways than one. Certainly this man was desperately worried about something. He ate but little at dinner, and he drank a whole bottle of champagne without any visible improvement of his spirits. His hand shook as he raised his glass. Miss Yates wondered if he were flying from justice; but she could not think him an evil-doer.
As soon as he had finished his wine, he called on the waiter to clear the table at which he was sitting alone. The table clear, he planted on it his kit-bag and opened it. Miss Yates observed that on the top of its contents lay a number of paper packages, each secured with an elastic band; and of these the man proceeded to make one compact parcel, wrapped in a sheet of newspaper and tied with string. Replacing this in the bag, he next took from it a handful of sheets of paper, which he laid on the table before him.
Snapping the bag as if he was shutting up in it a guilty secret, he turned to writing busily in pencil. From where she sat Miss Judith could follow the ebb and flow of his inspiration. He would cover some sheets with a big scrawling hand, then suddenly shake his head critically, and seem to begin all over again.
‘Can he be an author?’ Miss Yates asked herself. ‘But surely no one could compose at that rate. And he doesn’t look like a literary man. A journalist, perhaps—but would a journalist be in such a dither over his work? He may be preparing a speech—but then he looks like the kind of man who would always know what he wanted to say, and would say it in plain words.’
As Miss Yates toyed with these speculations, the man wrote on. At length, rejecting yet another draft, he paused and considered; then scribbled what appeared to be a much briefer document. As he threw down his pencil, his glance met that of Miss Yates: and the blue eyes seemed to look right through her, focussed on something far beyond. So, at least, she hoped; for she saw him shudder violently before she turned her gaze away, with a sense as if she were spying on something that she had no right to see.
Vaguely she looked round the carriage, and remarked that the passengers were preparing for the arrival at Newhaven. Some with a half-furtive air were stowing cigarettes or tobacco from their bags in their pockets, with a view to the eluding of the French Customs. Others even more shamefaced were gulping down tablets and cachets of the drugs guaranteed to defy the demon of seasickness.
Miss Yates began to follow their example and prepare for transit to the boat. She had no fear of seasickness and no tobacco to conceal, but she got ready her tickets and passport. Her eyes wandered back to the agitated traveller. He had folded his final copy and placed it in a long envelope. The rest of his writing he folded into a wad, which he thrust beneath the fastenings of the newspaper-covered packet that Miss Yates had already observed.
As the train drew up at the platform he was the first to leave the Pullman; and Miss Yates noticed that as he started from his chair a piece of thin paper was wafted from it, unseen by him, to the floor of the carriage. It was unmistakably a leaf torn from an engagement-block, being headed by a printed date in thick capitals, with pencilled jottings below. So much Miss Yates could not but notice as she bent to pick it up; but the man was already heading a stream of travellers passing out, and she saw nothing of him as she stepped to the platform.
‘But certainly,’ she thought, ‘he will be crossing to Dieppe, and I shall see him on the boat.’
There, indeed, he was, already striding rapidly up and down the upper deck on the starboard side. Miss Yates attended first to the stowing of her own hand luggage. The turmoil of cargo-shifting and the casting-off of moorings ended at length; the steamer began to plough its steady way towards France. It was then that Miss Yates approached the man who had so much engaged her sympathy.
‘When you left the train, sir,’ she said without any nervous preliminary, ‘you left this little sheet of paper which had fallen from your seat to the floor. I thought it might be something of importance, so I had better return it to you.’
The man gazed at her a little wildly; then at the leaf which she was holding out to him. His eyes narrowed as he examined it in the half-light of the deck lamps; then he looked away, his face contorted as if with fear or keen anxiety.
Suddenly he turned to Miss Yates squarely. ‘You have made a mistake, ma’am,’ he said, in a shaking voice. ‘Very kind indeed of you to take the trouble, but that paper is not mine. I never saw it before. Many thanks all the same.’ He jerked a bow at her and immediately resumed his uneasy pacing