And then he walked on to the Green Man.
John, on the platform of Whortley station, surveyed the people there collected with idle interest.
It was market day in Whortley. Stout market women, clutching empty, or partially empty, baskets, sat on benches, their feet squarely planted on the ground. Leather-gaitered men, whose clothes gave forth a powerful aroma of horses and cattle, strolled up and down, and talked in groups. Children, hot and tired, and consequently slightly irritable, bickered with each other, or poked sticks at bewildered and exhausted hens in crates. Somewhere in the back regions of the station a couple of refractory oxen were being driven into trucks. An atmosphere of almost aggressive patience pervaded the much-tried porters.
“’Eat may be mighty good for the ’arvest,” remarked one motherly looking woman, wiping her face with a large white handkerchief, “but I do say as ’ow it’s a bit trying to the spirit, and likewise the body.”
“It’s the tempers of most people it gets at,” replied her neighbour succinctly.
To which remark John responded with an inward and fervent acquiescence. There was no denying the heat; there was no denying the sultriness of the dusty platform.
John strolled down to its further end.
Behind the town the sky was crimsoning to sunset. The roofs of the dingy houses were being painted red-gold in its light. The smoke from a factory hung like a veil in the still air, lending mystery to the atmosphere. The buildings lay in a web of colour,—blue, grey, purple, and gold. A cynic might have likened the sunset glory to the glamour with which some foolish people endow a merely sordid existence. In a measure, too, his simile might have been justifiable; but, whereas he would have scoffed, John, with something of the same simile in mind, thanked God for the gift of imagination.
And then, far to the right, he caught a glimpse of white smoke above a dark serpent of an oncoming train.