It was done. Birkin snapped the hand bags, off they went, the porter
coming behind. They were through a great doorway, and in the open night
again--ah, a railway platform! Voices were still calling in inhuman
agitation through the dark-grey air, spectres were running along the
darkness between the train.
'Koln--Berlin--' Ursula made out on the boards hung on the high train
on one side.
'Here we are,' said Birkin. And on her side she saw:
'Elsass--Lothringen--Luxembourg, Metz--Basle.' 'That was it, Basle!' The porter came up.
'A Bale--deuxieme classe?--Voila!' And he clambered into the high
train. They followed. The compartments were already some of them taken.
But many were dim and empty. The luggage was stowed, the porter was
tipped.
'Nous avons encore--?' said Birkin, looking at his watch and at the
porter.
'Encore une demi-heure.' With which, in his blue blouse, he
disappeared. He was ugly and insolent.
'Come,' said Birkin. 'It is cold. Let us eat.' There was a coffee-wagon on the platform. They drank hot, watery
coffee, and ate the long rolls, split, with ham between, which were
such a wide bite that it almost dislocated Ursula's jaw; and they
walked beside the high trains. It was all so strange, so extremely
desolate, like the underworld, grey, grey, dirt grey, desolate,
forlorn, nowhere--grey, dreary nowhere.
At last they were moving through the night. In the darkness Ursula made
out the flat fields, the wet flat dreary darkness of the Continent.
They pulled up surprisingly soon--Bruges! Then on through the level
darkness, with glimpses of sleeping farms and thin poplar trees and
deserted high-roads. She sat dismayed, hand in hand with Birkin. He
pale, immobile like a REVENANT himself, looked sometimes out of the
window, sometimes closed his eyes. Then his eyes opened again, dark as
the darkness outside.
A flash of a few lights on the darkness--Ghent station! A few more
spectres moving outside on the platform--then the bell--then motion
again through the level darkness. Ursula saw a man with a lantern come
out of a farm by the railway, and cross to the dark farm-buildings. She
thought of the Marsh, the old, intimate farm-life at Cossethay. My God,
how far was she projected from her childhood, how far was she still to
go! In one life-time one travelled through aeons. The great chasm of
memory from her childhood in the intimate country surroundings of
Cossethay and the Marsh Farm--she remembered the servant Tilly, who
used to give her bread and butter sprinkled with brown sugar, in the
old living-room where the grandfather clock had two pink roses in a
basket painted above the figures on the face--and now when she was
travelling into the unknown with Birkin, an utter stranger--was so
great, that it seemed she had no identity, that the child she had been,
playing in Cossethay churchyard, was a little creature of history, not
really herself.