“Four-forty,” said Blake, curtly.
“And when do we get to Leeds?”
“How the devil should I know? If you want to know, there’s the guard. Ask him.”
With which he moved away and joined two or three others a few steps off. Joyce felt too sick with misery to resent the rudeness. He walked a short distance along the train, and seeing one of his colleagues in a compartment, concluded that it was reserved for the chorus-men and crept into the far corner, where he sat down, holding a newspaper before his face.
The compartment filled and the train started. At first there was a general constraint in the talk. Then a game at nap was instituted; but no one spoke to Joyce. At Selby there was over an hour’s wait. With a feeling that he must be alone at any cost, he rushed out of the station, and, avoiding the town, wandered aimlessly through lanes and fields until it was time to return. He was too dazed and overwhelmed by this sudden blow to think coherently. Now it was the girl’s deliberate cruelty that passed his comprehension; now the sickening shame at being known in his true colours to a whole society burned into his flesh. Only one thought stood out from the rest in lurid clearness—the impossibility of his continuing the tour. Even if the management took no notice of the discovery, he felt he would rather starve to death in a hole than live through that hell of daily aversion and contempt. To return to the company and travel with them as far as Leeds was pain enough. He would face that, however, and then—
It was gathering dusk when he arrived at the station, just in time to see the guard about to wave the green flag. The handle of the compartment was in his grasp when he heard McKay say:—
“Well, because a fellow’s happened to be in quod, that doesn’t mean he’s likely to sneak your watches out of the dressing-room!”
He opened the door and entered amid a dead silence, which lasted, with few interruptions, all the rest of the journey. Joyce looked round at his seven companions, with an awful sense of isolation. Only four-and-twenty hours before he had loved them for their warm good-fellowship. He was wrung with the pity of it. McKay’s words still sounded in his ear. They were horrible enough, but it was evident they were meant in his defence. Once he met his glance, and read in it a signal of kind intent. But the others steadily looked another way when his eye fell upon them.
When they left the train at Leeds, McKay touched him on the shoulder and drew him apart from the hurrying stream of passengers and porters.
“What’s all this yarn that Annie Stevens has been telling us?”