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By Root 6302 0

There were groans from below as she stepped on sleepers, there were exclamations of indignation as her elbows came in contact with faces. At each step she cried: “Pardon! Pardon!” She had got herself wedged into a corner at the end of the car. Now all she needed was to get to the door. Barring her way was a wild-faced man holding a severed sheep’s head, its eyes like agate marbles staring from their sockets. “Oh!” she moaned. The man looked at her stolidly, making no movement to let her by. Using all her strength, she fought her way around him, rubbing her skirt against the bloody neck as she squeezed past. With relief she saw that the door onto the platform was open; she would have only to get by those who filled the entrance. She began her cries of “Pardon!” once more, and charged through. The platform itself was less crowded because the cold rain was sweeping across it. Those sitting there had their heads covered with the hoods of their burnouses. Turning her back to the rain she gripped the iron railing and looked directly into the most hideous human face she had ever seen. The tall man wore cast-off European clothes, and a burlap bag over his head like a haik. But where his nose should have been was a dark triangular abyss, and the strange flat lips were white. For no reason at all she thought of a lion’s muzzle; she could not take her eyes away from it. The man seemed neither to see her nor to feel the rain; he merely stood there. As she stared she found herself wondering why it was that a diseased face, which basically means nothing, should be so much more horrible to look at than a face whose tissues are healthy but whose expression reveals an interior corruption. Port would say that in a non-materialistic age it would not be thus. And probably he would be right.

She was drenched through and shivering, but she still held on to the cold metal railing and looked straight ahead of her-sometimes into the face, and sometimes to one side into the gray, rain-filled air of the night behind it. It was a tete-a-tete which would last until they came to a station. The train was laboring slowly, noisily, up a steep grade. From time to time, in the middle of the shaking and racket, there was a hollow sound for a few seconds as it crossed a short bridge or a trestle. At such moments it seemed to her that she was moving high in the air and that far below there was water rushing between the rocky walls of the chasms. The driving rain continued. She had the impression of living a dream of terror which refused to come to a finish. She was not conscious of time passing; on the contrary, she felt that it had stopped, that she had become a static thing suspended in a vacuum. Yet underneath was the certainty that at a given moment it would no longer be this way-but she did not want to think of that, for fear that she should become alive once more, that time should begin to move again and that she should be aware of the endless seconds as they passed.

And so she stood unmoving, always shivering, holding herself very erect. When the train slowed down and came to a stop, the lion-faced man was gone. She got off and hurried through the rain, back toward the end of the train. As she climbed into the second-class carriage, she remembered that he had stepped aside like any normal man, to let her pass. She began to laugh to herself, quietly. Then she stood still. There were people in the corridor, talking. She turned and went back to the toilet, locked herself in, and began to make up by the flickering lantern overhead, look ing into the small oval mirror above the washstand. She was still trembling with cold, and water ran down her legs onto the floor. When she felt she could face Tunner again, she went out, down the corridor, and crossed over into the first-class coach. The door of their compartment was open. Tunner was staring moodily out the window. He turned as she went in, and jumped up.

“My God, Kit! Where have you been?”

“In the fourth-class carriage?” She was shaking violently, so that it was impossible for her to sound nonchalant,