John's Lily

"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting And cometh from afar; Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From GOD, Who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy!" --WORDSWORTH.

It was a sultry evening in summer, and John Randal was standing on the departure platform of a London railway station, looking at the train. He was a tall, fine-looking young fellow of three or four and twenty, brown and sunburnt, with dark stern eyes and an extremely grave expression. His clothes were good, though rustic-looking, and he carried a brown paper parcel in his hand. Any one who watched him might have thought there was something odd in the deep interest with which he gazed at the train, for his eyes were not attracted from it by the hurrying passengers, the porters with their loads of luggage, the ticket-collectors and guards in handsome uniform. It might have been thought that he was looking out for a friend; but no, it was the train itself which interested him. Except in one or two short trips that same week on the underground railway, John Randal had never seen a train before.

And yet his home was only thirty miles from London. But the small retired village where he had spent his whole life lay quite out of the world's track, in the quietest of valleys, sheltered among chalk hills and beech woods, ten miles at least from the nearest railway station. If the people in John's village wanted to go far from home they walked, or else they travelled in the carrier's cart which passed twice a week along the valley on its way to and from London. This state of things had lasted for many years, but its end was now drawing near. Already a new line of railway passed within four miles of John's home, and people thought that as soon as it was finished and opened, new times would dawn for that quiet country.

John did not care much about all this. He was an old-fashioned young man, and the life he knew was good enough for him--his cottage in the village street, his blacksmith's forge, his garden, where red roses and tall white lilies grew, his mother, with her gentle ways and slow movements. He did very well, it seemed to him, and he could not see that the railway would bring much good to a village like theirs. Noise, and smoke, and dirt; newspapers and bad characters. John thought and said that he and his neighbours could get on very well without the railway.

He was an ignorant fellow, you see. Till a week ago he had never left home for more than a day. Then his mother, who always thought that the world ought to know more of her John, persuaded him to go to London to see her brother, who was a printer. John tied up a change of clothes in a red handkerchief, and walked to London. His uncle and aunt were very kind to him, and took him about sight-seeing as far as they could. His aunt thought him a queer chap, for nothing seemed to surprise him much. Nothing tired him; he could walk for hours; but every day he grew more thoughtful and silent, as if his brain was oppressed by all he saw. When the day came for him to go home, his aunt packed his things, red handkerchief and all, with the presents he had bought for his mother, in a brown paper parcel, which she thought more respectable-looking than a bundle for a young man of her nephew's appearance; for no one would have taken John, by his looks, for a mere country lad. His uncle advised him to go home as far as he could by train, and John consented to this, as he would get home quicker. He came with him to the station, got his ticket for him, and left him on the platform to wait till the train started.

Here then John stood waiting, and all the fuss and noise and hurry of the station went crowding up and down without his taking much outward notice of it. Inwardly, he was rather nervous about the journey, wishing he had trusted to his own legs rather than to those carriages, solid as they looked, into which so many people seemed to be crowding.

Suddenly, in getting out of the way of a truck of luggage, a man and woman pushed up against him. The woman was holding a child by the hand, and as she pulled it hastily to one side, the little thing fell down on its face on the platform, catching its feet in the ends of a long shawl which was bundled round it. It cried, not loudly, but with low, frightened, broken-hearted sobs. The man spoke loudly and roughly--"What are you doing there?" and the woman dragged at the child's arm. John stooped and set her on her feet again; a fair little girl, not more than three years old, whose delicate prettiness struck him even at that first moment. She stretched out her arm and laid hold of his hand, lifting her face in the folds of the shawl and looking up with wet frightened eyes, sobbing low all the time. The man and woman were talking together, and took no notice of her. John caught a few words of their talk--"Take care what you're about--a big reward offered--a fine chance for us--keep your eyes open and mind what you're about--if anything happens you'll pay for it." Some scraps like these fell on his ears, for the man spoke loudly and desperately. The woman seemed half stupid, and her muttered answers were too low to be heard.

"Come, bring her along," said the man roughly.

The child's hand was snatched from John's, and her parents, or whatever they were, hurried her away to the train. They looked anything but respectable. The man, though his dress had an attempt at smartness, might have come out of the lowest slums, and the woman's dirty finery was even more repulsive. John remembered their faces afterwards: the man's white, with a pale moustache and a cunning expression; the woman's flushed, stupid, and sleepy. He watched them across the platform to the door of a carriage, into which the man hastily pushed the woman and child, turning round himself to look suspiciously up and down the train. Then the porters began to shut the doors, and one of them, passing John, looked up and asked if he was going by this train. "Then get in, and look sharp about it."

John crossed the platform with his free country stride, and stepped in at the first open door. Rather to his surprise, for he was not aware of having followed them, he found himself in the same compartment with the woman and child. The man had moved a few steps away, but as soon as the door was shut, he came back to the window.

"None of your games, you know," he said to the woman. "Write to the old shop, and you'll hear from me. You understand?"

She nodded. The man glanced sharply at John in the further corner, and then looked at her with a grin. He evidently thought him a very harmless fellow-passenger.

In another minute the train steamed slowly out of the great station into the lingering daylight of June, where towers and spires and roofs and bridges all stood out clear against a rosy evening sky, and sweet breaths of fresh reviving air blew in at the window, becoming sweeter and fresher as the train's speed increased, and before very long John saw green fields that looked greener than ever in coming twilight, and dark trees in motionless peace as the train thundered past them, and quiet streams, near whose banks the cows were lying down to sleep.

He leaned out of the window, feeling as if he had been out of the country for a year instead of a week, saying to himself, "Well, I've seen London, and that will do for me. I don't want to leave Markwood again in a hurry. Still, I've seen it, and now I can feel for the poor folks that has to live there in that racket and mess all the days of their life. As for this here train----"

He leaned back in his corner, and looked round the comfortable carriage with a wonder and admiration that was not yet deadened by custom. Then his eyes lingered on his fellow-traveller. Almost immediately after leaving London she had fallen asleep, and her poor untidy head bobbed helplessly up and down on the cushion. At first she had stuffed the child, treating it like a bundle of shawls, into the corner between herself and the window, but presently it roused her by beginning to cry again with the same sad, frightened little moaning sound as before. She snatched it up, shook it, mumbled a few angry words, and laid it roughly at full length on the seat beside her. There it remained quite still, perhaps too much terrified to cry, while she settled herself in her corner and fell asleep once more.

John too, at the opposite end of the carriage, dozed off for a few minutes. He had had a tiring week, and it was the custom in his mother's house to go to bed early. When he awoke, suddenly startled by something that touched his knee, it was nearly dark outside, and the flickering lamp lighted the carriage dimly. On the floor stood a little figure all in white, with soft hair curling behind her ears, with one small hand outstretched, with a pale face, and large wistful eyes lifted towards John. The child had scrambled down from the seat, had struggled out of the shawl which was wrapped round her, and had crept along the floor with her little white feet, which John now saw were bare, to her friend of the platform.

She said nothing, she did not cry, though her eyelashes were wet with tears, but only stood with one hand on his knee, looking up expectantly. John looked at her, and then across the carriage at the woman--her mother, was she?--still in a heavy stupid sleep.

John was intelligent enough in some ways, but his wits were never quick, and his home at Markwood was not the place to sharpen them. He did not at that time make any guess about the child's story, though he thought the whole thing queer. The strangeness of the child's dress told him nothing. The shawl in which she had been huddled concealed nothing but a little white woollen garment, and her head had no covering but its own fair curls.

John stooped towards her; she held out both her arms, and he took her with his strong brown hands and lifted her to his knee. There she sat upright for a minute, looking at him with an odd mixture of confidence and curiosity. Still she did not speak, and he was afraid to ask her any question, not wishing to rouse the woman in the opposite corner.

Presently the child began to smile. John, gazing at her in the dim light, thought she really must be a little angel come straight from heaven, so full of peace and sweetness was her small face now. Then she nestled down in his arms, her soft cheek against his rough brown coat, her heavy eyelids sank suddenly, and she fell into a sweet and quiet sleep. John had nursed children before--all the village babies loved him--and he did not feel the awkwardness from which some young men would have suffered under the circumstances. He rocked the child very gently in his arms, and presently fearing that she would be chilled, reached across the carriage for the old shawl, and laid it over her.

Neither the child nor the woman woke till the train stopped at Moreton Road, the station where John was to get out. It was quite dark now. The woman looked round with a violent start, rubbed her eyes, and then burst out laughing. John, who did not feel at all inclined to be friendly with her, laid the child down on the seat with a very grave face, and without a word.