The Railway Children
“It would be horrid to marry a man with a smashed nose, all the same,”
went on Bobbie. “He wouldn't be able to smell the flowers at the
wedding. Wouldn't that be awful!”
“Bother the flowers at the wedding!” cried Peter. “Look! the signal's
down. We must run!”
They ran. And once more they waved their handkerchiefs, without at all
minding whether the handkerchiefs were clean or not, to the 9.15.
“Take our love to Father!” cried Bobbie. And the others, too, shouted:--
“Take our love to Father!”
The old gentleman waved from his first-class carriage window. Quite
violently he waved. And there was nothing odd in that, for he always
had waved. But what was really remarkable was that from every window
handkerchiefs fluttered, newspapers signalled, hands waved wildly. The
train swept by with a rustle and roar, the little pebbles jumped and
danced under it as it passed, and the children were left looking at each
other.
“Well!” said Peter.
“WELL!” said Bobbie.
“_WELL!_” said Phyllis.
“Whatever on earth does that mean?” asked Peter, but he did not expect
any answer.
“_I_ don't know,” said Bobbie. “Perhaps the old gentleman told the
people at his station to look out for us and wave. He knew we should
like it!”
Now, curiously enough, this was just what had happened. The old
gentleman, who was very well known and respected at his particular
station, had got there early that morning, and he had waited at the door
where the young man stands holding the interesting machine that clips
the tickets, and he had said something to every single passenger who
passed through that door. And after nodding to what the old gentleman
had said--and the nods expressed every shade of surprise, interest,
doubt, cheerful pleasure, and grumpy agreement--each passenger had gone
on to the platform and read one certain part of his newspaper. And when
the passengers got into the train, they had told the other passengers
who were already there what the old gentleman had said, and then the
other passengers had also looked at their newspapers and seemed very
astonished and, mostly, pleased. Then, when the train passed the fence
where the three children were, newspapers and hands and handkerchiefs
were waved madly, till all that side of the train was fluttery with
white like the pictures of the King's Coronation in the biograph at
Maskelyne and Cook's. To the children it almost seemed as though the
train itself was alive, and was at last responding to the love that they
had given it so freely and so long.
“It is most extraordinarily rum!” said Peter.
“Most stronery!” echoed Phyllis.
But Bobbie said, “Don't you think the old gentleman's waves seemed more
significating than usual?”
“No,” said the others.
“I do,” said Bobbie. “I thought he was trying to explain something to us
with his newspaper.”
“Explain what?” asked Peter, not unnaturally.
“_I_ don't know,” Bobbie answered, “but I do feel most awfully funny. I
feel just exactly as if something was going to happen.”
“What is going to happen,” said Peter, “is that Phyllis's stocking is
going to come down.”
This was but too true. The suspender had given way in the agitation of
the waves to the 9.15. Bobbie's handkerchief served as first aid to the
injured, and they all went home.
Lessons were more than usually difficult to Bobbie that day. Indeed, she
disgraced herself so deeply over a quite simple sum about the division
of 48 pounds of meat and 36 pounds of bread among 144 hungry children
that Mother looked at her anxiously.
“Don't you feel quite well, dear?” she asked.
“I don't know,” was Bobbie's unexpected answer. “I don't know how
I feel. It isn't that I'm lazy. Mother, will you let me off lessons
to-day? I feel as if I wanted to be quite alone by myself.”
“Yes, of course I'll let you off,” said Mother; “but--”
Bobbie dropped her slate. It cracked just across the little green mark
that is so useful for drawing patterns round, and it was never the same
slate again. Without waiting to pick it up she bolted. Mother caught her
in the hall feeling blindly among the waterproofs and umbrellas for her
garden hat.
“What is it, my sweetheart?” said Mother. “You don't feel ill, do you?”
“I DON'T know,” Bobbie answered, a little breathlessly, “but I want to
be by myself and see if my head really IS all silly and my inside all
squirmy-twisty.”
“Hadn't you better lie down?” Mother said, stroking her hair back from
her forehead.
“I'd be more alive in the garden, I think,” said Bobbie.
But she could not stay in the garden. The hollyhocks and the asters and
the late roses all seemed to be waiting for something to happen. It was
one of those still, shiny autumn days, when everything does seem to be
waiting.
Bobbie could not wait.
“I'll go down to the station,” she said, “and talk to Perks and ask
about the signalman's little boy.”
So she went down. On the way she passed the old lady from the
Post-office, who gave her a kiss and a hug, but, rather to Bobbie's
surprise, no words except:--
“God bless you, love--” and, after a pause, “run along--do.”
The draper's boy, who had sometimes been a little less than civil and
a little more than contemptuous, now touched his cap, and uttered the
remarkable words:--
“'Morning, Miss, I'm sure--”
The blacksmith, coming along with an open newspaper in his hand, was
even more strange in his manner. He grinned broadly, though, as a rule,
he was a man not given to smiles, and waved the newspaper long before
he came up to her. And as he passed her, he said, in answer to her “Good
morning”:--
“Good morning to you, Missie, and many of them! I wish you joy, that I
do!”
“Oh!” said Bobbie to herself, and her heart quickened its beats,
“something IS going to happen! I know it is--everyone is so odd, like
people are in dreams.”
The Station Master wrung her hand warmly. In fact he worked it up and
down like a pump-handle. But he gave her no reason for this unusually
enthusiastic greeting. He only said:--
“The 11.54's a bit late, Miss--the extra luggage this holiday time,”
and went away very quickly into that inner Temple of his into which even
Bobbie dared not follow him.
Perks was not to be seen, and Bobbie shared the solitude of the platform
with the Station Cat. This tortoiseshell lady, usually of a retiring
disposition, came to-day to rub herself against the brown stockings of
Bobbie with arched back, waving tail, and reverberating purrs.
“Dear me!” said Bobbie, stooping to stroke her, “how very kind everybody
is to-day--even you, Pussy!”
Perks did not appear until the 11.54 was signalled, and then he, like
everybody else that morning, had a newspaper in his hand.
“Hullo!” he said, “'ere you are. Well, if THIS is the train, it'll be
smart work! Well, God bless you, my dear! I see it in the paper, and
I don't think I was ever so glad of anything in all my born days!” He
looked at Bobbie a moment, then said, “One I must have, Miss, and no
offence, I know, on a day like this 'ere!” and with that he kissed her,
first on one cheek and then on the other.
“You ain't offended, are you?” he asked anxiously. “I ain't took too
great a liberty? On a day like this, you know--”
“No, no,” said Bobbie, “of course it's not a liberty, dear Mr. Perks;
we love you quite as much as if you were an uncle of ours--but--on a day
like WHAT?”
“Like this 'ere!” said Perks. “Don't I tell you I see it in the paper?”
“Saw WHAT in the paper?” asked Bobbie, but already the 11.54 was
steaming into the station and the Station Master was looking at all the
places where Perks was not and ought to have been.
Bobbie was left standing alone, the Station Cat watching her from under
the bench with friendly golden eyes.
Of course you know already exactly what was going to happen. Bobbie was
not so clever. She had the vague, confused, expectant feeling that comes
to one's heart in dreams. What her heart expected I can't tell--perhaps
the very thing that you and I know was going to happen--but her mind
expected nothing; it was almost blank, and felt nothing but tiredness
and stupidness and an empty feeling, like your body has when you have
been a long walk and it is very far indeed past your proper dinner-time.
Only three people got out of the 11.54. The first was a countryman with
two baskety boxes full of live chickens who stuck their russet heads
out anxiously through the wicker bars; the second was Miss Peckitt, the
grocer's wife's cousin, with a tin box and three brown-paper parcels;
and the third--
“Oh! my Daddy, my Daddy!” That scream went like a knife into the heart
of everyone in the train, and people put their heads out of the windows
to see a tall pale man with lips set in a thin close line, and a little
girl clinging to him with arms and legs, while his arms went tightly
round her.
* * * * * *
“I knew something wonderful was going to happen,” said Bobbie, as they
went up the road, “but I didn't think it was going to be this. Oh, my
Daddy, my Daddy!”
“Then didn't Mother get my letter?” Father asked.
“There weren't any letters this morning. Oh! Daddy! it IS really you,
isn't it?”
The clasp of a hand she had not forgotten assured her that it was. “You
must go in by yourself, Bobbie, and tell Mother quite quietly that it's
all right. They've caught the man who did it. Everyone knows now that it
wasn't your Daddy.”
“_I_ always knew it wasn't,” said Bobbie. “Me and Mother and our old
gentleman.”
“Yes,” he said, “it's all his doing. Mother wrote and told me you had
found out. And she told me what you'd been to her. My own little girl!”
They stopped a minute then.
And now I see them crossing the field. Bobbie goes into the house,
trying to keep her eyes from speaking before her lips have found the
right words to “tell Mother quite quietly” that the sorrow and the
struggle and the parting are over and done, and that Father has come
home.
I see Father walking in the garden, waiting--waiting. He is looking at
the flowers, and each flower is a miracle to eyes that all these months
of Spring and Summer have seen only flagstones and gravel and a little
grudging grass. But his eyes keep turning towards the house. And
presently he leaves the garden and goes to stand outside the nearest
door. It is the back door, and across the yard the swallows are
circling. They are getting ready to fly away from cold winds and keen
frost to the land where it is always summer. They are the same swallows
that the children built the little clay nests for.
Now the house door opens. Bobbie's voice calls:--
“Come in, Daddy; come in!”
He goes in and the door is shut. I think we will not open the door or
follow him. I think that just now we are not wanted there. I think it
will be best for us to go quickly and quietly away. At the end of the
field, among the thin gold spikes of grass and the harebells and Gipsy
roses and St. John's Wort, we may just take one last look, over our
shoulders, at the white house where neither we nor anyone else is wanted
now.