Meanwhile the author of their misfortunes sat all alone in his comfortable carriage, looking at the houses slipping by and the beginning of the countryside. Then he grew drowsy and sank into his corner and fell asleep. He half awoke at a hand tapping upon his shoulder and a voice asking him for his ticket. He had it upon him; he felt for it, found it in an inside pocket and handed it over, and in a moment was asleep again.
When he woke it was but slowly, for evidently he had been more fatigued than he knew, and the strain of a rough voyage had weighed upon him. The express was already roaring past Newbury Race-course.
He recognized the place and suddenly connected it in his mind with a name ... the name of some one living thereabouts.... Yes, ... it was certainly some one connected with those trees and heaths beyond ... but what was the name? He sought and sought, and nothing would come. It was very aggravating, this little lapse. He remembered how often of late he had had slight trouble of that kind. Then he set out to try and recover the name by a chain. He had passed a race-course. He knew it of old. He would connect things up link by link. First he looked at his watch. It was just at 12.30. He had started from.... Where had he started from?
That really $1m> exasperating ... that was even serious.
He shook his head with the sharp gesture a man makes when he is trying to be rid of some passing nervous affection, and he did what the efficiency men call “concentrating.” But his concentration was poor. Not a word would come.
Then overwhelmingly, in a flash, the truth broke upon him. He had lost all conception of his past: every image of it. He knew where he was. All about him, the landscape, the type of railway carriage—everything was familiar, but of any name or place or action or movement in connection with himself prior to that sleep nothing whatsoever remained.
He passed his hand across his forehead, and stared at the empty cushions opposite him, waiting for this very unpleasant mental gap to close up, and for his normal self to return. It did not return. What was worse, he felt a sort of certitude within him that it had gone for ever—that it was no good looking for it. It was as though he had died.
Through all the remaining hour of the run into Paddington he was seeking, seeking, seeking. The Thames, distant Windsor, Slough went past, the first houses of London: he knew them all as well as he knew his own voice; but of any link between these and himself, of any action or emotion of his past identity, there was no trace at all. It was not even blank. It was nothingness.
The train drew up, the herd of passengers bundled out, and he, at the head of the train, among the first. He went uncertainly sauntering down the platform. He was half inclined to ask some one where the train had come from. He even found himself listening to one or two groups of people in the hope that he should hear its name; but he was ashamed to listen too long, and still more ashamed to put the question which had at first occurred to him. It was a pity. If he had acted there and then he would have saved himself a great deal of coming trouble. But he had already begun to feel a mixture of shame and fear lest his humiliation should be discovered. That dangerous mood was to grow.
Mechanically he hailed one of the new rotor taxis—he recognized them, though he could not tell where or how (they had just been coming in the year before he left England; but of that year there was nothing now in his mind). It suddenly broke upon him that he could not tell the taxi where to drive.