When, five minutes later, I walked back along the first platform at the Necropolis station, I was amazed to see, beyond Thirty-One, the Bug sailing away from the station, with White-Chester leaning out from one side, holding onto his topper and looking back towards the Necropolis station, and Rowland Smith doing the same from the other side. Smith wore no hat, and his curly hair was flying.
On Thirty-One, Barney Rose and Mike were waiting with steam up. They were not talking and Rose, I fancied, looked pinker and more crumpled than usual, perhaps because he was sitting on the sandbox and staring silently into the fire. 'Saw you talking to your Mr Smith, there,' he said, looking up at me. 'Most amiable, he seemed to be.' He was smiling, but more from habit than happiness, I thought. 'He works here, now,' he continued, "but he's still great mates with White-Chester.' "The two of them have just gone off in the Bug,' I said.
Rose nodded, then he looked up and grinned. 'Dapper gentleman, ain't he?' he said, as some of his former cheeriness seemed to return. 'Yes, I'll say that for him, quite the masher, is that young chap.'
Rose was suddenly speaking to me as a man and I made an effort to answer in kind: 'Quite the ladies' man, too, I should guess' I said.
'Oh, well,' he said, looking back up at me, 'I don't know about that, but I'll tell you this: he's tough as a bulldog under all those fine coats of his, a very good fellow to have batting on your side.' He nodded at me as if to say 'congratulations on that, at any rate', before slowly standing up and walking back over to the regulator.
As we pulled away, I leant out of the cab and watched the Bug disappearing into the complications of the down-main with a great sense of desolation in me; of being a very small person in a very great city, where everything hurtled at too great a rate, and people moved from station to station, life to death, all in the blinking of an eye, with nobody to notice or care, or say that the world had been lost to madness, because the madness had by degrees become the normal thing. And nor could you step aside from it. You kept up with the game or you got flattened, as surely as if you'd stood on the tracks before one of Mr Ivatt's mighty Atlantics. And so I would try to keep up with the game.
Chapter Ten
Saturday 28 November
On the Saturday following – by which time I had recorded all the strange events in my Lett's diary, with notes as to possible meanings in the many spare pages at the back – I walked through the door of my lodge after a long and lonely day of cleaning at Nine Elms to find my landlady in the kitchen. She was about her Saturday clothes-washing, stirring the boiler with a black wooden stick, and very prettily too, with her head turned away from the rising steam, which had somehow unloosed her curls. 'Mr Stringer,' she said, nodding slowly.
I nodded back, and she gave me a glance which I took to mean there was something a little too forward in the way I had looked at her, so there was nothing for it but to leave the kitchen.
A few minutes later, however, when I was lying on my bed listening to the rumbling of the trains and looking once again at the notes in my diary (which had quite replaced The Railway Magazine for me), there came a knock on my door. 'Come in,' I said, standing up, but she would not.
She had put her hair to rights; the style was complicated but most effective. 'You forgot to put out your washing again,' she said. 'I'm sorry,' I said. 'Would it be too late to do it now?' 'I'm just about to drain the boiler.' 'Oh.'
She was looking all around the room, as if she had never set eyes on it before, but I was interested to see that she did not once look at the water on the floor. Should I say that it was a little hard to be paying six shillings a week, with a pound down, for a place with a puddle next to the bed? I was struggling for the right words here when she thrust a piece of paper at me, saying, 'Mr Stringer, would you be so kind as to post this somewhere about the premises of your railway company? It is an advertisement.'
'Yes,' I said, 'I would be very pleased to. Do you mind if I read it?' She shook her head.
'Unusually excellent furnished bed and sitting room with garden view offered to respectable person,' I read aloud. 'One minute from Waterloo Station. No servants kept, every comfort and convenience. Very moderate terms.' 'Well?' she said. 'What room is this concerning?' I said. "The one alongside this one, of course,' she said. "The one with the looking glass?' I said.
'It has a very pretty looking glass,' she said. 'Ought I to mention that?' 'You've put down "No servants kept",' I said, 'but -' 'I am not a servant,' she said, most indignantly.
'No,' I said, 'of course not. I only meant that your terms do include laundry.' 'I will wash clothes,' she said, 'if they are put out.'
'I think it's an excellent notice,' I said, handing back the paper, 'unusually excellent, in fact, and I know just the spot for it at Nine Elms.' I had in mind the noticeboard in the timekeeper's office. I put the notice into my waistcoat pocket, and my eyes drifted once again to the water on the floor. I noticed that my landlady's had done the same. 'I wonder what causes the water on the floor?' I said. 'A broken roof,' she said.
She was certainly very direct. She walked into the room and put the toe of her boot into the puddle in a very hypnotising way. She looked up at me and her face was caught mysteriously between smiling and not. 'It's the trains have loosened the tiles on the roof,' she said. 'What I call the dray-horse engines do it – those fearful draggers that bring the heavy waggons over the arches and set every house in the district shaking.' 'You mean the slow-goods?' I said. She did not seem very sure of that.
I somehow took her to mean that she fancied the expresses at any rate, and I asked if that was true.
'Well,' she said, 'I suppose I do. If I have to go to Bournemouth then I wish to go in a hurry.' 'You've been there?' I said, 'On excursions?' She nodded. "The Greyhounds can do it in two hours,' I said.
'Well, ours took four on the last occasion,' she said, walking rapidly towards the door as though I personally had been responsible for the slowness of her journey to the sea.
'High speed is my passion,' I said, to try and stop her going. 'But you are presently retained… not as a driver?'
'As a cleaner,' I said eagerly, 'but cleaning is the way to driving, did I not tell you that when I arrived at this lodge?'
She nodded quickly, and said, "The subject of trains is of great interest to some people – or so I would imagine.'
And then she was gone, but the puddle was still there on the floor.
Chapter Eleven
Monday 30 November
For the following week I had the worst turn of the lot: the five o'clock in the morning go-on. On my first day of early turns, which was Monday 30 November, there was more coming and going in the shed than I had seen at any later hour, with 200 locomotives under the roof, and the fires were being started on all sides. The men were stoking up the whole of London, setting the world turning for another day, and by their looks they seemed to say they could manage the job quite well without me.
I went in to see the Governor first thing. As Nolan scribbled away, the Governor said he was giving me a rest from Twenty-Nine and Thirty-One for a while, for there weren't enough funerals. This was no great shock: those two only went out three or four times a week in any case. He put me on to general tidying and making straight, and as I was leaving he called out, 'Watch yourself off-shed today. It's thick as a bag out there.'
I walked back to the mouth of the shed, and saw that the dawn had come but it had been one of those frauds, where too much blackness makes way for too much whiteness. I couldn't even make out the turntables. A bell was being rung behind me, echoing in the shed. A couple of engines were coming off-shed, rolling out on the tracks to either side of me, big as black clanking houses on the move and giving me a sheer blank fright as they swept strangely past, proving the power of the fog, which swallowed them in an instant. A minute after, I heard an explosion.