Well, the man on my train watched me very hard, but if he had his trousers open I never saw; and at last he tilted his hat to me and got off. There were more stops after that, and at every one someone else got off, from further down along the train; and no-one got on. The stations grew smaller and darker, until finally there was nothing at them but a tree— there was nothing to see anywhere, but trees, and beyond them bushes, and beyond them fog— grey fog, not brown— with the black night sky above it. And when the trees and the bushes seemed just about at their thickest, and the sky was blacker than I should have thought a sky naturally could be, the train stopped a final time; and that was Marlow.
34
Here no-one got off save me. I was the last passenger of all. The guard called the stop, and came to lift down my trunk. He said,
'You'll want that carrying. Is there no-one come to meet you?'
I told him there was supposed to be a man with a trap, to take me up to Briar. He said, Did I mean the trap that came to fetch the post? That would have been and gone, three hours before. He looked me over.
'Come down from London, have you?' he said. Then he called to the driver, who was looking from his cab. 'She've come down from London, meant for Briar. I told her, the Briar trap will have come and gone.'
'That'll have come and gone, that will,' called the driver. 'That'll have come and gone, I should say three hours back.'
I stood and shivered. It was colder here than at home. It was colder and darker and the air smelt queer, and the people— didn't I say it?— the people were howling simpletons.
I said, Ain't there a cab-man could take me?'
A cab-man?' said the guard. He shouted it to the driver. 'Wants a cab-man!'
A cab-man!'
They laughed until they coughed. The guard took out a handkerchief and wiped his mouth, saying, 'Dearie me, oh! dearie, dearie me. A cab-man, at Marlow!'
'Oh, fuck off,' I said. 'Fuck off, the pair of you.'
And I caught up my trunk and walked with it to where I could see one or two lights shining, that I thought must be the houses of the village. The guard said, 'Why, you hussy— ! I shall let Mr Way know about you. See what he thinks— you bringing your London tongue down here— !'
I can't say what I meant to do next. I did not know how far it was to Briar. I did not even know which road I ought to take. London was forty miles away, and I was afraid of cows and bulls.
But after all, country roads aren't like city ones. There are only about four of them, and they all go to the same place in the end. I started to walk, and had walked a minute when there came, behind me, the sound of hooves and creaking wheels. And then a cart drew alongside me, and the driver pulled up and lifted up a lantern, to look at my face.
'You'll be Susan Smith,' he said, 'come down from London. Miss Maud've been fretting after you all day.'
He was an oldish man and his name was William Inker. He was Mr Lilly's groom. He took my trunk and helped me into the seat beside his own, and geed up the horse; and when— being struck by the breeze as we drove— he felt me shiver, he reached for a tartan blanket for me to put about my legs.
It was six or seven miles to Briar, and he took it at an easy sort of trot, smoking a pipe.
I told him about the fog— there was still something of a mist, even now, even there— and the slow trains.
He said, 'That's London. Known for its fogs, ain't it? Been much down to the country before?'
'Not much,' I said.
'Been maiding in the city, have you? Good place, your last one?' 'Pretty good,' I said.
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'Rum way of speaking you've got, for a lady's maid,' he said then. 'Been to France ever?'
I took a second, smoothing the blanket out over my lap. 'Once or twice,' I said.
'Short kind of chaps, the French chaps, I expect? In the leg, I mean.'
Now, I only knew one Frenchman— a housebreaker, they called him Jack the German, I don't know why. He was tall enough; but I said, to please William Inker, 'Shortish, I suppose.' 'I expect so,' he said.
The road was perfectly quiet and perfectly dark, and I imagined the sound of the horse, and the wheels, and our voices, carrying far across the fields. Then I heard, from rather near, the slow tolling of a bell— a very mournful sound, it seemed to me at that moment, not like the cheerful bells of London. It tolled nine times.
'That's the Briar bell, sounding the hour,' said William Inker. We sat in silence after that, and in a little time we reached a high stone Wall and took a road that ran beside it.
Soon the wall became a great arch, and then I saw behind it the roof and the pointed windows of a greyish house, half-covered with ivy. I thought it a grand enough crib, but not so grand nor so grim perhaps as Gentleman had painted it. But when William Inker slowed the horse and I put the blanket from me and reached for my trunk, he said,
'Wait up, sweetheart, we've half a mile yet!' And then, to a man who had appeared with a lantern at the door of the house, he called: 'Good night, Mr Mack. You may shut the gate behind us. Here is Miss Smith, look, safe at last.'
The building I had thought was Briar was only the lodge! I stared, saying nothing, and we drove on past it, between two rows of bare dark trees, that curved as the road curved, then dipped into a kind of hollow, where the air— that had seemed to clear a little, on the open country lanes— grew thick again. So thick it grew, I felt it, damp, upon my face, upon my lashes and lips; and closed my eyes.
Then the dampness passed away. I looked, and stared again. The road had risen, we had broken out from between the lines of trees into a gravel clearing, and here— rising vast and straight and stark out of the woolly fog, with all its windows black or shuttered, and its walls with a dead kind of ivy clinging to them, and a couple of its chimneys sending up threads of a feeble- looking grey smoke— here was Briar, Maud Lilly's great house, that I must now call my home.
We did not cross before the face of it, but kept well to the side, then took up a lane that swung round behind it, where there was a muddle of yards and out- houses and porches, and more dark walls and shuttered windows and the sound of barking dogs.
High in one of the buildings was the round white face and great black hands of the clock I had heard striking across the fields. Beneath it, William Inker pulled the horse up, then helped me down. A door was opened in one of the walls and a woman stood gazing at us, her arms folded against the cold.
'There's Mrs Stiles, heard the trap come,' said William. We crossed the yard to join her.
Up above us, at a little window, I thought I saw a candle- flame shine, and flutter, and then go out.
The door led to a passage, and this led to a great, bright kitchen, about five times the size of our kitchen at Lant Street, and with pots set in rows upon a whitewashed wall, 36
and a few rabbits hanging on hooks from the beams of the ceiling. At a wide scrubbed table sat a boy, a woman and three or four girls— of course, they looked very hard at me. The girls studied my bonnet and the cut of my cloak. Their frocks and aprons being only servants' wear, I didn't trouble myself to study them.
Mrs Stiles said, 'Well, you're about as late as you could be. Any longer and you should've had to stay at the village. We keep early hours here.'
She was about fifty, with a white cap with frills and a way of not quite looking in your eye as she spoke to you. She carried keys about her, on a chain at her waist. Plain, old-fashioned keys, I could have copied any one of them.
I made her half a curtsey. I did not say— which I might have— that she should be thankful I had not turned back at Paddington;
that I wished I had turned back; and that for anyone to have had the time that I had had, in trying to get forty miles from London, perhaps went to prove that London wasn't meant to be left— I did not say that. What I said was: