“Not so far,” laughed Peter, following him down with remarkable celerity; “eleven times eleven is not a hundred and eleven, well, not usually! and our unknown mathematician seems himself to have had doubts on the subject, for he has broken off at that juncture of reckoning.”
Stuart evoked a touching image of the Self-Improving Porter, hoping one day to be a County Councillor; and stealing away from his soulless burden of trundling, to practise his tables in stillness and solitude upon the props of Euston.
“Euston more than any other place will be a home of ghosts, after we have finally torn ourselves asunder,” remarked Peter, as they strolled through dim archways into the circular booking-hall. “You, of course, can avoid the building; but unless I contrive to alight always at Kilburn, which will be inconvenient, my raw wounds will be kept well salted.” She glanced down at the sprawling silent figures from which the wooden benches were never free; phantom figures for ever waiting for some phantom train; never moving, never asking,—indissoluble adjuncts to the mystery of Euston. “I will not consent to have my feelings lacerated in chance fashion,” she declared; “I’m going to take you now, and solemnly lay you, as a hen lays eggs, in different portions of the building; so that in years to come I shall know exactly at what points to wince with a sudden pain. If we arrange our own exists, we will also premeditate our own agonies.”
Peter had not yet learnt to refrain from playing at God.
So thrice they sought to trespass in the gallery which, close up to the smoke-black ceiling, ringed the hall. And were twice ejected by a sympathetic stoker; and once by a policeman, who smiled not nor scowled when Stuart quoted to him art and Lucullus in argument against the law, but said simply and stolidly, “Maybe, sir, but them’s my orders,” which is the essential condition of mind for a policeman, and one to be encouraged, ranking him in excellence beside the Self-Improving Porter. And they sought for the elusive platform, from which trains are rumoured to depart on Sundays, but which on all other days lies beyond platform nine, and beyond the world, and beyond space; drifting formless platform to which the evil familiars of Euston occasionally lure a harmless passenger-train, then to chuckle at the bewildered victims of their devilry. And they found also the platform of a thousand milk-cans; and a model steamship in a glass case, reported to perform marvellous feats at the insertion of one penny, but which, clutching Stuart’s penny to its iron breast, stirred not from tranced sleep; thinking doubtless: he is a millionaire and can well spare it. And they planned to hold a Roman feast on a great scale, in the bathroom at Euston; weary sooty travellers to be lured inside and plunged forthwith into cooling floods of water, and given stale sandwiches to eat, and a third-class ticket to Willesden, gratis with every bar of soap. Finally, they entered Euston through seven different portals, beheld it from seven different aspects, all fearsome with the clankings and throbbings of metal, and the oblique approach of red goblin eyes from the outside glooms.
And Peter said that her train was due, and that the premises were now quite sufficiently imbued with sad sweet memories hereafter as ghosts to haunt her.
“It would be rather funny if my aching heart should turn inartistic and refuse to perform.”
“Oh, if we can’t cheat Ladye Art, at our age!” he leant against the door of the carriage, and lit a cigarette; “she belongs to the first stages of consciousness. I put out my tongue at Art. A man with the artistic sense of things, would never again take you home by train to Thatch Lane, after having once done it so successfully; ‘for fear of spoiling things,’ he would say.”
The guard passed along the line of doors, his passage punctuated by heavy slams.
“But you——” she mocked.