The old man dropped Jeremy’s arm, spun his great bulk round on his heel with surprising lightness and paced away to the other end of the room. There he stood apparently gazing with intent eyes into a little mirror which hung on the wall. Jeremy stayed where he had been left, forlorn, perplexed, hopeless, staring with no expectation of an answer at those huge, bowed, enigmatic shoulders. He was almost at the point of screaming aloud when the Speaker turned and said seriously with great deliberation:
“Well, I am going to show you something that you have not seen, something that not more than twenty persons know of besides myself. And you are going to see it because I trust you to be loyal to me, to be my man. Do you understand?” He did not wait for Jeremy’s doubtful nod, but abruptly jerked the bell-pull on the wall. When this was done they waited together in silence. A servant answered the summons; and the Speaker said: “My carriage.” The carriage was announced. The silence continued unbroken while they settled themselves in it, in the little enclosed courtyard that had once been Downing Street. It was not until they were jolting over the ruts of Whitehall that Jeremy said, almost timidly:
“Where are we going?”
“To Waterloo,” the Speaker answered, so brusquely that Jeremy was deterred from asking more, and leant back by his companion to muster what patience he could.
He had already been to Waterloo under Roger’s guidance. It was the station for the few lines of railway that still served the south of England; and they had gone there to see the train come in from Dover. But it had been so late that Roger had refused to wait any longer for it, though Jeremy had been anxious to do so. They had seen nothing but an empty station, dusty and silent. At one platform an engine had stood useless so long that its wheels seemed to have been rusted fast to the metals. Close by a careless or unfortunate driver had charged the buffers at full speed and crashed into the masonry beyond. The bricks were torn up and piled in heaps; but the raw edges were long weathered, and some of them were beginning to be covered with moss. The old glass roof, which he remembered, was gone and the whole station lay open to the sky. Pools from a recent shower glistened underfoot. Here and there a workman sat idle and yawning on a bench or lay fast asleep on a pile of sacks.
This picture returned vividly to Jeremy as he rode by the Speaker’s side. It seemed to him the fit symbol of an age which had loosened its grip on civilization, which cared no longer to mend what time or chance had broken, which did not care even to put a new roof over Waterloo Station. He reflected again, as he thought of it, that perhaps it did not much matter, that the grip on civilization had been painfully hard to maintain, that there was something to be said for sleeping on a pile of sacks in a sound part of the station instead of repairing some other part of it. “We wretched ants,” he told himself, “piled up more stuff than we could use, and though the mad people of the Troubles wasted it, yet the ruins are enough for this race to live in for centuries. And aren’t they more sensible than we were? Why shouldn’t humanity retire from business on its savings? If only it had done it before it got that nervous breakdown from overwork!”
He was aroused by the carriage lurching into the uneven slope of the approach. The squalor that had once surrounded the great terminus had withered, like the buildings of the station itself, into a sort of mitigated and quiescent ugliness. As, at the Speaker’s gesture, he descended from the carriage, he saw a young tree pushing itself with serene and graceful indifference through the tumbled ruins of what had once been an unlovely lodging-house. A hot sun beat down on and was gradually dispelling a thin morning haze. It gilded palely the gaunt, harsh lines of the station that generations of weathering could never make beautiful.
The Speaker, still resolutely silent, led the way inside, where their steps echoed hollowly in the empty hall. But the echoes were suddenly disturbed by another sound; and, as they turned a corner Jeremy was enchanted to see a long train crawling slowly into the platform. It slackened speed, blew off steam with appalling abruptness and force, and came to a standstill before it had completely pulled in. Jeremy could see two little figures leaping from the cab of the engine and running about aimlessly on the platform, half-hidden by the still belching clouds of steam.
“Another breakdown!” the Speaker grunted with sudden ferocity; and he turned his face slightly to one side as though it pained him to see the crippled engine. Jeremy would have liked to go closer, but dared not suggest it. Instead he dragged, like a loitering child, a yard or two behind his formidable companion and gazed eagerly at the distant wreaths of steam. But he only caught a glimpse of a few passengers sitting patiently on heaps of luggage or on the ground, as though they were well used to such delays in embarkation. He ran after his guide, who had now passed the disused locomotive rusted to the rails, and was striding along the platform and down the slope at the end, into a wilderness of crossing metals. Here and there in this desert could be seen a track bright with recent use; but it was long since many of them had known the passage of a train. In some cases only streaks of red in the earth or sleepers almost rotted to nothing showed where the line had been. They passed a signal-box: a man sat placidly smoking at the top of the steps outside the open door. They went on further into the desolation that surrounds a great station, here made more horrible by the absence of movement, by the pervading air of ruin and decay.
When they had walked a few hundred yards from the end of the platform, they came to a group of buildings, which, in spite of their dilapidation, had about them a certain appearance of still being used. “The repairing sheds,” said the Speaker, pointing through an open door to a group of men languidly active round what looked like a small shunting-engine. Then he entered a narrow passage between two buildings.