His father let go of his arm.
“Good Lord!” he said, “I’ve had my day, but I never was so cracked as that.”
Then he acquiesced in his son’s indifference, nodded his head in a light parting, and went his way.
René’s thoughts were reaching out to Scotland, to his Aunt Janet’s, where he had known the best of his boyhood. He walked to a station and found the London express waiting, with little knots of people standing by the carriage doors, and porters bustling with luggage and lamps and pillows, all wearing the stealthy, excited air of importance of travelers by night. Putney was London, or near London. Why Putney? He did not know, but he wanted to go there. He bought a ticket, boarded a train as it was moving, and sat in a corner seat gazing at the lights of the towns and saying to himself: “That’s Ockley,” because when he had taken his first railway journey by night he had asked what the lights were, and his mother had said: “That’s Ockley.”
[BOOK TWO
ANN PIDDUCK]
. . . and make
Strange combinations out of common things
Like human babes in their brief innocence,