HOPE did not want to be told all about the island and the castle. She did not want to be shown anything. She wanted to tell and to show herself. But there was nobody to listen, nobody who was in the least interested.
“First of all we got into the train. The boat train!”
“I know,” said Rosamund. “So did we.”
No adventure of Hope’s could astonish her. And yet her train must have been a very ordinary affair, just a receptacle for aunts and cousins, while Hope’s train had been a landmark. So was the boat. The little Napiers had never been taken across the sea before. For weeks they had been preparing themselves. Somebody had told them that you ought to lie on your back, in a berth, so as not to be sea-sick, and they had all practised lying on their backs, night after night.
“The crossing’s nothing,” said the intolerable Rosamund. “You wait till you’ve been to Norway!”
Cousins are like that. It was no use telling Rosamund about the boat train which was so immensely long that it only had a middle. Its ends, never clearly apprehended, were lost in the echoing caverns of the station. Only a little bit of it was stamped upon Hope’s mind for ever, a long row of carriage doors, the names of distant places written above in huge words that came straggling out of the darkness and disappeared into the infinite so that all she could read was … STER and HOLYH…. Crowds pushed under the glare of the lamps, there was a hiss of steam in the murky roof, and they were all climbing into a compartment that smelt of dust and soot, so narrow and dark that they could not see where to put things up on the luggage rack. The children thought that all trains at night must be dark like this, but it was only because the lamps were off, for somebody pulled a cord and there came a wan glare which revealed their solemn faces.
This was departure by night, a thing in itself so exciting that it made them feel a little sick. Enormous sacks were pushed past the carriage window on trucks and somebody said, “The Irish Mail!” They had seen the Irish Mail! A woman pushed past another truck with pillows on it, and the faces of the people, hurrying under the lamps, were charged with a tremendous importance, for they were all addressing themselves to this unique journey. “The Irish Mail” they were saying to themselves. “We are going by the Irish Mail!” Even the porters were full of it. They must know that this was a moment, that this was drama. Their faces, too, were solemn and urgent. They moved like generals on a battlefield. There was a rhythm in their activities. They were conducting this chaotic scene to its incredible climax, its curtain. A final pause, and the thing was happening. The train had begun to move. The white faces of porters slid past the window, an endless line of porters. The platform slid past. It vanished. What a moment of emptiness must fall upon the silent and deserted station! The drama has been played and the Irish Mail has gone.
It gathers speed, this train. It thunders through the night. Its music changes as it runs into tunnels or over points. Strange people pass up and down the corridors. A handful of rain-drops splash the smoky dullness of the window. “To Lancashire, to Lancashire, to fetch a pocket handkercher,” sings the train, and something nearer than the wheels, something in the carriage, has a short, sharp rattle of its own: “Conductor, conductor, conDUCtor, conductor,” and then: “Had a cap, had a CAP, had a cap, had a cap.” … More people file down the corridor. What are they looking for? Why do they seem so anxious? Two men are standing just outside the carriage door. Sometimes the shoulders of the overcoat of one of them comes into view. Sometimes they are hidden. They are talking endlessly. “To Lancashire! To Lancashire!” A guard hurries toward some imagined drama. For this train has a life of its own. It is a planet spinning through space and it is peopled, not by travellers but by inhabitants. From end to end of it they are living their hundreds of mysterious lives, talking and laughing, taking things down from the rack, tying up their heads, trying to sleep. They exist only in its medium.
Outside there is nothing. We are rushing through a void. Even the scattered lights of towns have no substance, and the dark, empty stations, through which we fly, are but the symbols of solid daytime places. At Crewe and Chester we pause and receive into our cosmos a few inferior people, scurrying rabbits who run past the window looking suitably abashed, for they can never join the community of true inhabitants. They are soon disposed of. The station is silent. It is dead. We go on again. “To Lancashire, to Lancashire.” … The void is now called Wales. But it has no reality until the thunder changes to an endless, earsplitting rattle, and somebody says: “The Menai Bridge.” It is happening to all of us. We are all going over Menai Bridge. We must hurry. We must prepare ourselves. The unseen hundreds are all astir. They are getting their things down out of the racks, and rolling up their hold-alls….
“And then we went on the boat. An enormous boat.”
It is almost frightening to get out of the train. There is a moment of dismay, of blankness, as we meet the cold night wind that smells of the sea. What shall we do next? What is going to happen to us? We don’t belong to the train any more. The crowd has become alien, incoherent. We cling together. We are the Napiers; Hope and Peter and mother and Emily and the babies. We are travellers, with no place of our own, hurrying through the darkness and the night.
And now the drama has taken shape again, for here suddenly is the boat, almost before we remember that we were going on a boat. It seems to be part of the station, but its two funnels and its long line of port-holes leap out at us with their promise of adventure. It too has no ends, only a middle with a gang plank, up which we stumble. A hurried and perfunctory business this, and over too soon, so that nobody seems to be saying: “Now we are on a boat.” It is too much like being on land, even when we climb down those unusual stairs, are pushed into a narrow, smelly place and see what we have been picturing for weeks and weeks, our berths, one above the other. This part of it, which we have so vividly imagined, is dull. It is flat. The drama stands still. The boat will not go. It is not a real boat. For hours and hours nothing seems to happen at all, save senseless noises which go on and on: thumps and bumps, footsteps overhead, low voices, shouts, the screaming rattle of a crane, bumps and thumps. What can they be doing all this time?
This is not being on a boat. It is lying shut up in a horrid little place that is clammy and stuffy The top berth is too near the ceiling and the trampling footsteps. It was fun to climb up there, but now it is not fun any more. Just below, in the dark caverns of the under-berth, mother is already trying to go to sleep. If you lean over you can see her head, tied up in a scarf. Emily and the babies are somewhere else. Peter is poking his head out of the other top berth, a bright yellow head on the end of a long, thin neck. His eyes are popping, and he makes a face. “I say, Hope! This cabin smells of sick!” Oh, disgusting! It does. But we have been trying not to think so. We have not even started and already we have begun…. “Mother! Mother! I feel sick.” “Try to go to sleep, darling.”
Let me get to sleep! Oh, please, let me get to sleep! But what … oh, what is that! What a glorious noise! VOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM! VOOOOOO—OOOOOOM—ooooooom! We are on a boat. At last we are on a boat. It is alive and it has spoken. The echoes of its tremendous, jarring voice come back, and back, over the water of a harbour which is really there, outside. There is space, out there, the gleam of lights in the water, a vista of wharves and quays, the waiting funnels of other ships, and somewhere, close at hand, the sea. Now the harbour knows that the boat is going. She has discovered her purpose. She is gathering herself together with a faint vibration of engines. She has become separate from the land. Now, surely, she is moving, surely that is a sound of waves rushing past. The pulse of machinery grows louder.
The footsteps still scurry overhead. The bumps and the thumps go on. They never go to bed on a boat. They run up and down, up and down. Everything in the cabin sways slowly, first one way and then slowly the other. We must be out of the harbour by now. We are on the sea! The tossing, desolate, uneventful waves are all round us.
The sea knows nothing. Its waves fall this way and that, without end or purpose. But our boat knows. She is more wonderful than the train. The train had a path. Here there is no path. But our boat goes on, straight as an arrow, towards Ireland and the morning. She stalks through the night so proudly that she makes even the sea seem unimportant….
If Hope could have told it all … but there was nobody to listen. They had all been in the train. They had all been in a boat. Yet she still felt that it must have happened only to herself, even though she had not composed a poem on arrival, like Rosamund. She was shown Rosamund’s poem and she thought it affected. What she herself could have told would have been ever so much more exciting. But she could not tell it. She could only say:
“First we got in a train. And then we got in a boat.”
Rosamund did the honours of the island patronisingly. She spoilt it all. She always knew about everything first. She allowed no exploring.
“And that’s the Haunted Glen. Isn’t it beautiful?”
“All right,” said Hope, gazing at it stolidly.
“I’m glad you appreciate it. I’m going to write my next poem about it. What shall we do now? I can show you a place up in the woods…. Shall we go up there and tell secrets?”
Down by the lake edge Charles and Peter were throwing ducks and drakes. Their little flat stones went skipping over the surface of the water. They were shouting and scuffling about, in cheerful, mindless activity.
“I’ll go and throw stones with the boys,” said Hope.
Rosamund sighed. It is impossible to love one’s cousins.