Driving back from Euston, he noticed another affiche, bearing the words, "Steamer Sunk. Lives Lost." He paid no attention to it. He wondered vaguely, as he had often wondered in the past, what kind of a mind browsed upon these things. A disaster, an attack upon the Government, and a column of betting news. That was what God's image brooded upon, night after night. That was what God's image wrote about nightly, after an expensive education.
He was very tired; but there could be no rest for him till he had enquired after Mrs. Pollock. She had given birth to a little girl, who was likely to live. She herself was very weak, but not in serious danger. Pollock was making good resolutions in a mist of cigarette smoke. Roger was not wanted there. He went home, to bed, tired out. He slept heavily.
He was fresh and merry the next morning. He packed at leisure, breakfasted at ease, and drove away to the station, feeling like a boy upon a holiday. He was leaving this grimy, gritty wilderness. He was going to forget all about it. In a few hours he would be over the border, in a new land. That night he would be over the sea, so changed, and in a land so different, that all this would seem like a horrid, far-away dream, indescribably squalid and useless. London was a strong, poisonous drug, to be taken in minute doses. He was going to take a strong corrective.
The train journey was long and slow; but after Carlisle was passed, his mind began to feel the excitement of it. In a couple of hours he would be in a steamer, standing well forward, watching for the double lights to flash, and the third light, farther to the south, to blink and gleam. The dull, low, Scottish landscape, where Burns lived and Keats tramped, gave way to irregular low hills, indescribably lonely, with boggy lowland beneath them and forlorn pools. He looked out for one such pool. He had often noticed it before, on his journeys that way. It was a familiar landmark to him. Like all the rest of that Scottish land, it was associated in his mind with Ottalie. All the journey was associated with her. He had travelled past those hills and pools so often, only to see her, that they had become a sort of ritual to him, a part of seeing her, something which inevitably led to her. After the hill with the cairn, he saw his landmark. There glittered the pool under the last of the sun. The little lonely island, not big enough for a peel, but big enough, years ago, for a lake-dwelling, shone out in a glimmer of withered grass. A few bents, bristling the shallows, bowed and bowed and bowed as the wind blew. A reef of black rocks glided out at the pool's end, like an eel swimming. Roger again had the fancy, which had risen in his mind before a dozen times, when passing the pool, that he would like to be a boy there, with a toy boat. Another landmark tenderly looked for, was a little white house rather far from the line, high up on the moor. He had once thought (in passing) that that would be a pleasant place for a week's stay when he and Ottalie were married. The tenderness of the original fancy lingered still. It had become an inevitable part of the journey. After a few minutes of looking, it came into view, newly whitewashed, or, it may be, merely very bright in the sunset. A woman stood at a little garden gate. He had seen her there once before. Perhaps she looked out for this evening train. It might be an event in her life. She must be very lonely there, so many miles from anywhere. After this, he saw only one more landmark, a copse of spruce-fir by the line. A faint mist was gathering. There was going to be a fog. The boat would make a slow passage.
The mist was dim over everything when the train stopped. He got out on to a platform which was wet with mist. Wet milk-cans gleamed. Rails shone below his feet. A bulk of a mail-train rose up, vacant and dim. People shouted and passed. There was a hot whiff of ship's engine. A man passed, with nervous hurry, carrying two teacups from the refreshment-room. Somebody cried out to come along with the mails. An Irish voice answered excitedly, with a witty bitterness which defined the owner to Roger, in vivid outline. Mist came driving down under the shed. A few moist steps took him to a rail of chains, beyond which was motionless sea, a dim, grey-brown under the mist, with a gull or two drifting and falling. A row of lights dimly dying away beyond, shewed him the steamer. The gangway slanted down, dripping wet from the handrail. A man was saying that "Indeed, it was," in the curt, charming accent of the hills.
He did not recognise the steamer. Her name, seen upon a life-belt, was new to him. He did not remember a Lady of Lyons on this line. He laid his bag in a corner of the saloon, where already timid ladies were preparing for the worst, by lying down, under rugs, with bottles of salts at hand. The smell of the saloon, the smells of disinfectant, oil, rubber, and food, mixed with the sickliness of a place half aired and overheated, drove him on deck again. An elderly man was telling his wife that it had been a terrible business. The lady answered with the hope that nothing would happen to them, for what would poor Eddie do?
Somebody near the gangway, a hills-man by his speech, probably the ticket-collector, or mate, was speaking in the intervals of work. He was checking the slinging-in of crates, and talking to an acquaintance. Roger had no wish to hear him. He was impatient for the ship to start. But sitting down there, wrapped in his mackintosh, he could not help overhearing odds and ends of a story among the clack of the winches. Something terrible had happened, and Tom would know about it, and, indeed, it was a sad thing for the widow O'Hara; but it was a quick death, anyway, and might come on any man, for the matter of that. Indeed, it was a quick death, and the fault lay in these fogs, which never gave a man a chance till she was right on top of you. What use were sidelights, when a fog might make a headlight as red as blood? She had come right into her, just abaft the bridge, and cut her clean down. They never saw a stim of her. She wasn't even sounding her horn. Yes. One of these big five-masted Yankee schooners. The John P. Graves. Just out of Glasgow. They hadn't even a look-out set. Taking her chance. Her crowd was drunk. And one of the dead was an English wumman only married that morning. No. The man was saved. Like a stunned man. The most of the bodies was ashore to the wast of the light. There was a fierce jobble wast of the light.
There had been a collision somewhere. There were always being collisions. Roger listened, and ceased to listen, thinking of that "Steamer Sunk, Lives Lost" on the London placard. He thought that these vivid, picturesque talkers, professional men; but full of feeling, gave such an event a kind of poetry, and made it a part of their lives, while the paper-reader, very far away in the city, glanced at it, among a dozen similar events, none of them closely brought home to him, or, indeed, to be understood by him, and dismissed the matter with an indifferent "Really. How ghastly!" He reproved himself for thinking thus. This collision had affected the men near him in their daily business. Londoners were affected by disasters which touched themselves. This disaster, whatever it was, did not touch him. He was in a contrary, bitter mood, too much occupied with himself to feel for others. He was thinking that the men who did most were self-centred men, shut away from the world without. A snail, suddenly stung on the tender horn, may think similarly.
It was dark night, but clear enough, when they reached Ireland. The lights in the bay shone as before. The lights on the island had not changed. One, high up, which he had often noticed, was as like a star as ever. Little glimmers of light danced before him, as he dined in the hotel, attended by a grave old waiter. The hotel was fuller than usual at that time of year. It was full of restless, anxious, sad-looking people, some of whom had been with him in the boat. They gave him the fancy that they had all come over for a funeral. After supping, he went hurriedly to bed.
In the morning, at breakfast, there were the same sad-looking people. They sat at the next table, talking in subdued voices, drinking tea. They were breakfasting on tea. An old woman with that hard, commercial face, assumed by predatory natures without energy, mothered the party. Her red eyes, swollen by weeping, emphasised the vulpine in her. A late-comer rustled up. "Alice won't come down," she said. "She'll have some tea upstairs."