She was going to throw herself under the first car as its center came opposite where she stood. Her little red traveling-bag caused her to lose the moment; she could not detach it from her arm. She awaited the second. A feeling like that she had experienced once, just before taking a dive in the river, came over her, and she made the sign of the cross. This familiar gesture called back to her soul a whole series of memories of her youth and childhood; and suddenly the darkness which hid everything from her was torn asunder. Life, with its elusive joys, glowed for an instant before her. But she did not take her eyes from the car; and when the center, between the two wheels, appeared, she threw away her red bag, drawing her head between her shoulders, and, with outstretched hands, threw herself on her knees under the car. For a second she was horror-struck at what she was doing.
“Where am I? What am I doing? Why?”
She tried to get up, to draw back; but something monstrous, inflexible, struck her head, and threw her on her back.
“Lord, forgive me all!” she murmured, feeling the struggle to be in vain.
A little muzhik was working on the railroad, mumbling in his beard.
And the candle by which she had read the book that was filled with fears, with deceptions, with anguish, and with evil, flared up with greater brightness than she had ever known, revealing to her all that before was in darkness, then flickered, grew faint, and went out forever.
Mr. Berger read the passage twice, then leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. It was all there right down to the detail of the little red bag, the bag that the woman on the tracks had cast aside before the express had hit her, just as Anna had thrown away her bag before she was struck. The woman’s gestures in her final moments had also been similar to Anna’s: she too had drawn her head between her shoulders and stretched out her arms, as though the death to come was to take the form of crucifixion rather than iron and wheels. Why, even Mr. Berger’s own memory of the incident had been couched in similar phrases.
“My God,” said Mr. Berger to the listening books, “perhaps the inspector was right and I have been spending too much time alone with only novels for company. There can be no other excuse for a man believing that he has seen the climactic scene of Anna Karenina reenacted on the Exeter-to-Plymouth railway.”
He placed the volume on the arm of the chair and went to the kitchen. He was briefly tempted to reach for the brandy again, but no particular good had come of their previous shared moments, and so he opted for the routine of making a big pot of tea. When all was in place, he took a seat at the kitchen table and drank cup after cup until he had drained the pot dry. For once he did not read, nor did he distract himself with the Times crossword, still left untried at this late stage of the morning. He simply stared at the clouds and listened to birdsong and wondered if he was not, after all, going gently insane.
Mr. Berger did not read anything else that day. His two examinations of Chapter XXXI of Anna Karenina remained his sole contact with the world of literature. He could not recall a day when he had read less. He lived for books. They had consumed every spare moment since the revelation in childhood that he could tackle a novel alone without his mother having to read it to him. He recalled his first halting encounters with the Biggles stories of W. E. Johns, remembering how he had struggled through the longer words by breaking them up into their individual syllables so that one difficult word became two easier ones. Ever since then books had been his constant companions. He had, perhaps, sacrificed real friendships to these simulacra, because there were days when he had avoided his chums after school or ignored their knocking on his front door when his parents’ house was otherwise empty, taking an alternative route home or staying away from the windows so that he could be sure that no football game or exploration of orchards would get in the way of finishing the story that had gripped him.
In a way, books had also been partly responsible for his fatal tentativeness with the girl from accounts. She seemed to read a little — he had seen her with a Georgette Heyer novel and the occasional “book in brown” from the twopenny library — but he had the sense that it was not a passion with her. What if she insisted that they spend hours at the theater or the ballet or shopping simply because it meant that they would be “doing things together”? That was, after all, what couples did, wasn’t it? But reading was a solitary pursuit. Oh, one could read in the same room as someone else or beside them in bed at night, but that rather presumed that an agreement had been reached about such matters and the couple in question consisted of a pair of like-minded souls. It would be a disaster to find oneself embroiled with the sort of person who read two pages of a novel and then began humming, or tapping her fingers to attract attention, or, God help us, started fiddling with the dial on the radio. The next thing one knew, she’d be making “observations” on the text in hand, and once that happened there would be no peace forever after.
But as he sat alone in the kitchen of his deceased mother’s house, it struck Mr. Berger that he had never troubled himself to find out the views of the girl in accounts on the subject of books or, indeed, ballet. Deep inside he had been reluctant to disturb his ordered lifestyle, a world in which he rarely had to make a more difficult decision than selecting the next book to read. He had lived his life at one remove from the world around him, and now he was paying the price in madness.
CHAPTER
FIVE
In the days that followed, Mr. Berger subsisted largely on newspapers and magazines of an improving nature. He had almost convinced himself that what he had seen on the tracks employed by the locomotives of the London and South Western Railway was a psychological anomaly, some form of delayed reaction to the grief he had experienced at his mother’s death. He noticed that he was the object of peculiar looks, both poorly concealed and unashamedly open, as he went about his business in the town, but that was to be expected. He did hope that the town’s memory of the unproductive police search might fade eventually. He had no desire to be elevated to the role of local eccentric.
But as time wore on, something odd happened. It is usually in the manner of experiences such as Mr. Berger’s that, as distance grows from the event in question, so too the memory of it becomes foggier. Mr. Berger should, if the ordinary rules of behavior were being obeyed, have become ever more certain of the psychologically troubling nature of his encounter with the young woman reminiscent of Anna Karenina. But Mr. Berger found himself believing with greater and greater conviction that the opposite was true. He had seen the woman, and she was real, admittedly allowing for a certain latitude in one’s definition of reality.
He began reading again, tentatively at first, but soon with his previous immersion. He also returned to walking the path that wound down to the railway line and sitting on his stile to watch the trains go by. Each evening, with the approach of the train from Exeter to Plymouth, he would set aside his book and watch the rougher trail to the south. It was darker now, and the trail was harder to see, but Mr. Berger’s eyes were still keen, and through habit he grew practiced at picking out the difference in the density of the bushes.
But the trail remained undisturbed until February came, and the woman returned.
CHAPTER
SIX
It was a cold but bracing evening. There was no damp in the air, and Mr. Berger enjoyed the sight of his breath pluming as he took his evening constitutional. There was music in the Spotted Frog that evening: some form of folk revivalism, for which Mr. Berger had a sneaking fondness. He intended to drop in for an hour or two once he had watched the train go by. His vigil at the stile had become something of a ritual, and although he told himself that it was no longer connected to the business of the woman with the red bag, he secretly knew that it was. He was haunted by the image of her.