She reached the station. It was full of stopped clocks marking the hours of appointed departures. The stopped clocks and the stir of people in the electric-lighted shed made one feel that the world had stopped. The motionless agitation reminded one of the restless stillness of the dead.
It was very dirty. An employee in a blue denim jacket pushed a trash receiver along the platform and carelessly swept up some piles of fruit peel and cigarette stubs, and smeared over places where people had spit.
Alice walked through the gate and out to the track. Sunshine came through the roof of the shed and burned the cinders like black diamonds. The atmosphere had a palpable texture and was acrid with smoke. An engine rushed down upon her, steaming and shining. The red cars were covered with a yellow-gray film of dust that made them orange bright. The windows glittered.
Alice climbed into the long car filled with grimy, green plush seats, and sat down by a window that was smeared along the ledge with cinders. People came in. Girls, men. A woman with a crying baby. Their faces, too, looked wan and orange in the bright clear morning sunlight.
The train started. Feeling it move, Alice was terrified. It seemed to her that already something had begun which she could not control. It was as though the train were carrying her out of herself.
Fields swept by. There was a marsh where the water twinkled with a moving shudder among the still reeds. Then came an aqueduct. On a hill were red brick houses set with shimmering glass, and above the cold roofs the raw green of fresh leaves against the cold pure blue of the morning sky.
A station with a neat park about it. Another station.
Alice rose and swayed forward down the aisle of the moving train. At the next stop she got out.
It was lonely. The station house was a little deserted brick building of only one room. Alice walked along the dusty road between the wet bright fields. It was going to rain. The sky was clotted with cloud. Through the vapors the illumined shadows of the sun's rays were outspread, fan-shaped, like shadowy fingers of fire.
By itself, close to the road, was a whitewashed wooden church, and a bush with pagan-red leaves burnt up against it in beauty and derision. Alice felt, all at once, that she could go no further. She took out the pistol.