Through the Wall

Chapter 2

The compartment had been full when they left Victoria. The usual clutter of people who have been up to town for a day’s shopping and come piling into third-class carriages with bulging bags and tired feet. If you were one of the early ones you got a seat and had other people more or less standing on you. If you ran it fine you jostled the people who were standing in the narrow strip between the seats, or in the corridor if it was a corridor train.

Marian Brand had been in good time. She had the inside corner seat facing the engine. There was not so much crowding as there often was. Every seat full of course, but only three people standing, and all quite hearty-looking men. They stood as near the window as they could get and exchanged occasional remarks. On Marian’s left was one of those women who take up too much room in trains. She bulged and wheezed. She had three shopping-bags which were all quite full.

Marian looked through the glass pane on her other side and saw the corridor going away to a diminishing point, and the row of windows beyond it. It was her eyes that saw the standing men, the stout woman, the flashy girl in the other corner seat, the long receding line of the corridor, but her mind did not really register any of these things. They remained external images which conscious thought rejected because it was far too busy to be concerned with them. A man passed the window, coming up from the end of the corridor. She saw him in the same way that she had seen the other things. His passing meant no more to her than if she had seen a shadow go by.

The man was Richard Cunningham. As he walked along the corridor he saw a woman looking in his direction. There was no reason why he should notice her. The train was full. Each of the corridor windows presented him with a view of people packed like fish-faces pale, flushed, pretty, plain- old, young, middle-aged-a cross section of humanity so closely squeezed together that individuality and interest were lost. There was no reason why he should see one face and remember it. But he saw Marian Brand, checked for a moment, and passed on. When he had reached the first-class compartment which was his aim and had taken the last remaining seat, her face was still there, as vividly present as if it was she who was sitting opposite to him and not the blonde woman who was a little too blonde, a little too waved, a little too lavish in the matter of pearls. Nothing could have presented a more drastic contrast to the face he had seen at the window. He could see it still quite plainly. He contemplated it with an interest which had nothing sentimental about it. He was thirty-five, and though there is no age-limit for folly, he was by many years past an inclination for casual encounters.

He had no idea why this woman’s face should catch his attention. She was not beautiful-or was she? That was one of the points which interested him. She was certainly not pretty. Her clothes were the shabby clothes that are chosen for their wearing qualities and must be worn for as long as they can be made to look decent. No indication, therefore, of the character or taste of the woman who wears them, except in so far as the choice of something dark, plain and hardwearing is an indication of character. He dismissed the clothes. She had a good brow-good bones altogether, a certain line from cheek to chin, a certain balance. He put her age at twenty-five, perhaps a year or two more, perhaps a year or two less. She hadn’t lived soft. There was no bloom on the smooth, pale skin. But there were no lines either. That would be something to do with the shape of the bones beneath, but a good deal more to a habit of mind. A woman with a face like that didn’t fuss about trifles, didn’t fuss at all. She would do what she had to do, endure what she had to endure. He thought there had been a fair amount of enduring. She had the look of it in her eyes-patience. It was a look which moved him whenever he encountered it, in a child, in an animal. Sometimes it was the pitiful patience that doesn’t hope any longer. This was the other kind, the patience which rests on strength. It endures because in the end it will conquer.

He pulled himself up with half a laugh. Word-spinning! Well, it was his trade. If your brain stopped spinning you stories, you would stop being able to write them. But he couldn’t remember being so caught by anything in the way of an external impression for…He stared back across the years, could find no bridge to the other side. The impression appeared to be unique. It came to him with a shock that the word external was wrong. The whole thing went much deeper than that. He did just know that her hair was dark and her eyes were grey, but all that had nothing to do with his vivid sense of her.

About a quarter of an hour later he got up and went out into the corridor again. It was in his mind to walk slowly past her window to the end of the carriage, wait for a few moments, and then walk back again, but before he had taken more than three or four steps the train swayed, jerked horribly, and left the rails. The whole thing happened with the most appalling suddenness. Everything broke up in a violent cataclysm. A noise like all imaginable noises stunned the ear. The sudden impact of disaster paralysed the senses. The train reared upon itself, buckled, and crashed. A terrible screaming went up. The sliding doors of several of the compartments swung open as the train tilted. Marian Brand was flung from her seat into the corridor. She fell, and was caught in a desperate clutch. And then everything fell together and they went down into blackness.

When she came to, the blackness was still there. It hadn’t been dark before the crash, but it was dark now. She shut her eyes. After a minute she opened them again. Thought was beginning. There had been an accident. How long ago? It oughtn’t to be so dark. Darkness-burial-the words came to her with the drenching flood. She steadied herself against them, drew on her courage, and got enough to move the other hand. It went out a little way and touched a man’s arm. She felt the rough stuff, the hard muscle, and movement. The blessedness of that relief was not to be measured. Movement means life-not to be quite alone in the darkness with the dead. A man’s voice said, “I’m here. Don’t be afraid.”

It was the most beautiful sound she had ever heard. It was, in plain fact, a voice naturally pleasant, but a good deal handicapped by choking dust. She said,

“Where are we?”

“Under what’s left of the train. They’ll get us out presently. Are you all right?”

She hadn’t got as far as thinking about that. She began to think about it now, clutching at his arm, experimenting to see what she could move. After a moment she said,

“I’m all right, I think. Everything moves a little, but I can’t lift up or turn-there’s something over us.”

“Yes-lucky for us. There was a ditch-we went down into it. Fortunately we got there first. A door opened and shot us out before the train came down on us. I was in the corridor just outside your compartment. I grabbed you, and we came down together. We’re in the bottom of the ditch. There’s a good deal of stuff over us, and it may take some time to get us out, but we shall be all right.”

As his voice ceased, she began to be aware of sounds which had not come to her before. They must have been there, but they had not reached her-movement, voices, the scrape of metal on metal, a heavy thudding, a sound of groaning, a sound of someone crying, and once, high-pitched and terrible, a scream. It all seemed to be a long way off, not in distance but-removed. The sensation of being withdrawn from her surroundings had not been broken by the accident but intensified. What she thought and felt seemed to come to her from the other side of a misty barrier which made everything unreal.

She drew a long breath. Whether it was heard or felt she did not know. She was still holding to the stuff of his coat. His left hand came over now and took her wrist, feeling for the pulse. Then, releasing that, he took her hand.

“You’re all right. We’ve just got to pass the time. Take your hand away if you want to-but you’re a bit cold-I thought perhaps something to hold on to-”

She said, “Yes,” and, after a long pause, “Thank you.”

It didn’t do to think what it would have been like to be there alone. She was glad when he spoke again.

“Well, we’ve got the time to put in. By the bye, they know we’re here, so you needn’t worry about that. I was calling out, and a man came and spoke to me just before you woke up. They can’t get this stuff off till the breakdown gang rolls up. Fortunately there’s lots of air. What would you like to talk about? My name is Richard Cunningham, and I write- novels, plays, verse, belles lettres.”

He heard her take another of those long breaths, but this time it was quicker.

“You wrote The Whispering Tree.”

“Yes.”

“I read when I can-there’s so little time. My sister reads a lot. She isn’t strong-she can’t take a job. I’ve always tried to manage a library subscription for her. She runs through the books so quickly that I can’t keep up-there’s no time. But I did read The Whispering Tree. I loved it.”

“Why isn’t there time? What do you do?”

“I work in a house-agent’s office in Norwood. We live there.”

“Who is we?”

“My sister and I, and her husband-when he’s there.”

He repeated the last words.

“When he’s there. Why isn’t he there?”

“He’s an actor. He gets a part in a touring company-now and then.”

“Like that?”

“Yes. They oughtn’t to have married. She was eighteen and he was twenty. He was in a bank, but it bored him. He thought he was going to do wonders on the stage. He has a light tenor voice, and he’s quite nice-looking. He got small parts easily at first-and then not so easily. Ina isn’t strong. There’s nothing actually the matter, but she cracks up.”

There was a odd inflection in his voice as he said,

“And you are the bread-winner?”

“There isn’t anyone else.”

There was a curious dream quality about their talk. They lay in the dark-strangers, with clasped hands. Shock and terror had broken down the barrier which convention builds. It was as if their thoughts spoke. It was as if anything could be asked and anything said with a naked truthfulness which needed no excuse. Even looking back upon it afterwards, it all seemed natural to Marian Brand. They had never met before, and they would never meet again.They were on the edge of terror. They lay in the dark and held hands. She said things that she had never said to anyone before. Sometimes there were long pauses. Once or twice there was a faintness, but it cleared. If they were silent for too long, the darkness came too close. Sometimes he asked a question. Whenever that happened she had the feeling that the answer mattered.

When she said in a surprised voice, “But it’s all very dull,” he laughed a little.

“People aren’t dull. They’re my trade. What they do and why they do it-it may be horrifying, or humiliating, or surprising, but it’s never dull. If it is, it’s because you’re dull yourself-one of those whose touch turns all to dust brigade.” Then, quite abruptly, “So you’ve got everything on your shoulders. Haven’t you any family?”

“We hadn’t. My father quarrelled with his people. I suppose you would call him a rolling stone. We went all over the world- France, Italy, Africa, the Argentine, California, New York. Sometimes there was plenty of money, and sometimes there wasn’t any at all. We came back to England when I was ten, and my mother died. Ina and I were put in a school at Norwood, and my father went off again.”

It didn’t come out all at once. There would be a whole sentence, and then three or four words, and then two or three more. The gaps between did not seem to have any relation to the sense, they just happened. The voice would stop, and go on for a bit, and stop again. It was rather like listening to someone talking in her sleep.

It was, perhaps, with some idea of wakening a sleeper that he asked abruptly,

“How old are you now?”

“Twenty-seven. Ina is a year younger.”

“I thought you would be about that when I saw you in the train.”

She said in that expressionless way,

“Did you-see me?”

“Oh, yes. You were sitting next to the door into the corridor. I saw you, but you didn’t see me-you were about a million miles away.”

The tone of her voice changed for the first time. It had been grave and level. Now it was touched by a faint shade of something which might have been surprise. She said,

“Not quite so far as that.”

“Go on-I interrupted. You and Ina went to school. Were you happy?”

“Ina was. I should have been. But it was the same thing all over again-the money part of it, you know. Sometimes it came, and sometimes it didn’t. Just before I was eighteen my father came to England and died. There wasn’t any money. I learned to type, and Miss Fisher got me a job. Ina had one too, but-I told you-she married Cyril Felton. There was a lot of worry, and she can’t stand worry-it knocks her over. We’ve just managed to carry on.”

“And why were you a million miles away? Something happened. What?”

She said, “How did you know? Yes, something did happen.”

“Go on.”

She laughed.

“I don’t really believe in it, you know-not yet. I haven’t told anyone-there hasn’t been time. Perhaps if I tell you, it will make it feel real.”

“You can always try.”

Her hand moved in his, not withdrawing itself, just turning a little. When she spoke there were not quite so many of those pauses.

“It began about six months ago, only I didn’t know there was anything in it then. A Mr. Brook came into the office and asked about houses. He was oldish-rather sharp in his manner. He took a long time, going through the particulars of everything we had on our books. He asked a lot of questions-about the neighbourhood-about shops, social things-where did I shop myself-did I belong to a tennis club, a dramatic society. I thought he was asking on account of his own family. Actually, I can see now that he wanted to know how I lived, what I did. I had to tell him about Ina, to explain why I didn’t do any of the things he asked about. Of course he must have made other enquiries too-in fact I know he did. He went away without doing anything about a house, and I put him down as one of those people who just go round wasting time.”

“And what was he really?”

She said, “You’re quick.” And then, “He was my father’s brother-my uncle, Martin Brand.”

“And? What happened next?”

“Nothing for six months. Then yesterday I got a letter from a firm of solicitors-Ashton & Fenwick, Lawton Street. They’re big people, quite well known.”

“Yes.”

“They said to come up and see them-there was something to my advantage. You know, just a stiff lawyer’s letter. It didn’t tell me anything. I didn’t say anything to Ina and Cyril, but I showed it to Mr. Morton where I work, and he was very kind. He gave me the day off, and I went up-today.”

“And was there something to your advantage?”

“Yes, there was. Mr. Ashton told me about Mr. Brook being my uncle. He said he was dead and he hadn’t wished me to be told until after the funeral. Then he said that he had left me all his money. That’s the part that keeps on floating away. I just can’t get it to feel real. When I think of it-I don’t feel- quite real either.”

The hand that was holding hers closed firmly.

“You’ll get used to it. It’s surprising how soon you can get used to having money. It’s much easier than getting used to not having it.”

There was a long pause, after which she said rather faintly,

“It’s such a lot-”

He wondered what she would call a lot. What had she been managing on? Five pounds a week? With the delicate sister thrown in, to say nothing of Cyril who almost certainly didn’t earn his keep, let alone come anywhere near supporting his wife! He would have liked to know what Martin Brand’s pile amounted to, but even at this moment he did not feel quite equal to putting the question. Instead he laughed, found that it hurt him sharply, and wondered if he had a broken a rib, or ribs. Hideously inconvenient if he had.

The train of thought set up by this induced his next remark.

“I’m supposed to be flying to America in ten days’ time.”

She said in an abstracted voice,

“I liked being there. I’d like to go back. Are you going to stay?”

“Only a month. Business. My mother was an American, and I have a sister married over there-about the only relation I’ve got.”

Her hand moved. He thought the movement was involuntary.

“I’ve come in for a lot of relations as well as the money. It’s rather frightening. My uncle didn’t like them. He wrote me-an odd letter. I don’t know why he went on living with them if he felt like that.”

He began to be quite sure about the rib. It just didn’t do to laugh. He said,

“Perhaps they lived with him.”

“Oh, yes, they did. There’s a house-it sounds big-and they must have expected-they must have thought it would come to them-and the money too. I haven’t had time to think about it yet, but I shall have to.”

His hand was steady on hers.

“These things have a way of settling themselves. I shouldn’t worry about it now.”

After a very long silence she said,

“If I’d been killed, Ina would have got some of it, and the relations would have had the rest. It would have saved a lot of trouble. If we don’t get out-”

He said quite loudly and firmly,

“Oh, but we’re going to get out.”