Gerald and Harriett and Elspeth starting for Canada. Without good-bye. None of us dared to say good-bye. Outside the gaslit compartment seemed nothing but whirling darkness and cruel laughter. We jested without a gap. Annoying Elspeth, who longed only for the train to start and the relations who kept attention from centring on herself, to be gone. The sound of her childish complaints was one with the laughter of the outer darkness. She stood on the seat, a shining little figure in the harsh gaslight, clutching the doll Sarah had found time, on that awful last day, to dress. Beneath her unconscious feet was the machinery that would carry her into exile.
There they were in the imprisoning carriage. And then gone. It was a death. Something buried alive. I dared not feel. There was relief afterwards in walking down the platform with Gerald’s sister, a stranger just met, in knowing by the hard clutch of her hand that she, too, was not daring to feel. We both knew we had witnessed a crime.
“Can you get home?”
“Yes.” Our voices were rough and shuddering.
“We’ll meet again.”
We unclasped our hands and parted abruptly, our faces distorted with not weeping.
I came home and read the Punch Gerald had left behind.
Michael’s telegram. Once more the presence of him in the early morning, plunging along across the wide shadow of St. Pancras Church, his voice at my side and again the discomfort of hearing unknown people lightly and swiftly described as they appeared to him: delocalised, people in a void. The things he said about her told me nothing but that she was courting him and he had no idea of it. And I let him go in ignorance. Pushed him into the arms of a stranger.
“Take flowers. One always takes flowers to people when they are ill. And stay long enough to tell her all she wants to know about the congress.”
And I knew when he told me of the engagement that he was uneasy, neither happy nor confident. And it was broken. Broken by him. And no one will ever know why, and the obstinate little gentleman can’t see that it casts a greater shadow on her than if he spoke out and that if he can’t speak out he should invent. There she goes, back into her life with a shadow, cast by Michael.