Where shall we go?
A. To the railway.
So to the railway they went, and as soon as they started for the railway they saw where the garden had hidden itself. It was right behind the stables, and it had a high wall all round.
“Oh, never mind about the garden now!” cried Peter. “Mother told me this morning where it was. It’ll keep till to-morrow. Let’s get to the railway.”
The way to the railway was all down hill over smooth, short turf with here and there furze bushes and grey and yellow rocks sticking out like candied peel from the top of a cake.
The way ended in a steep run and a wooden fence—and there was the railway with the shining metals and the telegraph wires and posts and signals.
They all climbed on to the top of the fence, and then suddenly there was a rumbling sound that made them look along the line to the right, where the dark mouth of a tunnel opened itself in the face of a rocky cliff; next moment a train had rushed out of the tunnel with a shriek and a snort, and had slid noisily past them. They felt the rush of its passing, and the pebbles on the line jumped and rattled under it as it went by.
“Oh!” said Roberta, drawing a long breath; “it was like a great dragon tearing by. Did you feel it fan us with its hot wings?”
“I suppose a dragon’s lair might look very like that tunnel from the outside,” said Phyllis.
But Peter said:—
“I never thought we should ever get as near to a train as this. It’s the most ripping sport!”
“Better than toy-engines, isn’t it?” said Roberta.
(I am tired of calling Roberta by her name. I don’t see why I should. No one else did. Everyone else called her Bobbie, and I don’t see why I shouldn’t.)
“I don’t know; it’s different,” said Peter. “It seems so odd to see ALL of a train. It’s awfully tall, isn’t it?”
“We’ve always seen them cut in half by platforms,” said Phyllis.
“I wonder if that train was going to London,” Bobbie said. “London’s where Father is.”
“Let’s go down to the station and find out,” said Peter.
So they went.
They walked along the edge of the line, and heard the telegraph wires humming over their heads. When you are in the train, it seems such a little way between post and post, and one after another the posts seem to catch up the wires almost more quickly than you can count them. But when you have to walk, the posts seem few and far between.
But the children got to the station at last.
Never before had any of them been at a station, except for the purpose of catching trains—or perhaps waiting for them—and always with grown-ups in attendance, grown-ups who were not themselves interested in stations, except as places from which they wished to get away.
Never before had they passed close enough to a signal-box to be able to notice the wires, and to hear the mysterious ‘ping, ping,’ followed by the strong, firm clicking of machinery.
The very sleepers on which the rails lay were a delightful path to travel by—just far enough apart to serve as the stepping-stones in a game of foaming torrents hastily organised by Bobbie.
Then to arrive at the station, not through the booking office, but in a freebooting sort of way by the sloping end of the platform. This in itself was joy.
Joy, too, it was to peep into the porters’ room, where the lamps are, and the Railway almanac on the wall, and one porter half asleep behind a paper.
There were a great many crossing lines at the station; some of them just ran into a yard and stopped short, as though they were tired of business and meant to retire for good. Trucks stood on the rails here, and on one side was a great heap of coal—not a loose heap, such as you see in your coal cellar, but a sort of solid building of coals with large square blocks of coal outside used just as though they were bricks, and built up till the heap looked like the picture of the Cities of the Plain in ‘Bible Stories for Infants.’ There was a line of whitewash near the top of the coaly wall.
When presently the Porter lounged out of his room at the twice-repeated tingling thrill of a gong over the station door, Peter said, “How do you do?” in his best manner, and hastened to ask what the white mark was on the coal for.
“To mark how much coal there be,” said the Porter, “so as we’ll know if anyone nicks it. So don’t you go off with none in your pockets, young gentleman!”
This seemed, at the time but a merry jest, and Peter felt at once that the Porter was a friendly sort with no nonsense about him. But later the words came back to Peter with a new meaning.
Have you ever gone into a farmhouse kitchen on a baking day, and seen the great crock of dough set by the fire to rise? If you have, and if you were at that time still young enough to be interested in everything you saw, you will remember that you found yourself quite unable to resist the temptation to poke your finger into the soft round of dough that curved inside the pan like a giant mushroom. And you will remember that your finger made a dent in the dough, and that slowly, but quite surely, the dent disappeared, and the dough looked quite the same as it did before you touched it. Unless, of course, your hand was extra dirty, in which case, naturally, there would be a little black mark.
Well, it was just like that with the sorrow the children had felt at Father’s going away, and at Mother’s being so unhappy. It made a deep impression, but the impression did not last long.
They soon got used to being without Father, though they did not forget him; and they got used to not going to school, and to seeing very little of Mother, who was now almost all day shut up in her upstairs room writing, writing, writing. She used to come down at tea-time and read aloud the stories she had written. They were lovely stories.
The rocks and hills and valleys and trees, the canal, and above all, the railway, were so new and so perfectly pleasing that the remembrance of the old life in the villa grew to seem almost like a dream.
Mother had told them more than once that they were ‘quite poor now,’ but this did not seem to be anything but a way of speaking. Grown-up people, even Mothers, often make remarks that don’t seem to mean anything in particular, just for the sake of saying something, seemingly. There was always enough to eat, and they wore the same kind of nice clothes they had always worn.
But in June came three wet days; the rain came down, straight as lances, and it was very, very cold. Nobody could go out, and everybody shivered. They all went up to the door of Mother’s room and knocked.
“Well, what is it?” asked Mother from inside.
“Mother,” said Bobbie, “mayn’t I light a fire? I do know how.”
And Mother said: “No, my ducky-love. We mustn’t have fires in June—coal is so dear. If you’re cold, go and have a good romp in the attic. That’ll warm you.”
“But, Mother, it only takes such a very little coal to make a fire.”
“It’s more than we can afford, chickeny-love,” said Mother, cheerfully. “Now run away, there’s darlings—I’m madly busy!”
