Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry [129]
ón!--the Station Master had said would be her train? What had the porter said? Could she be on this train? Who was she? It was impossible that Lee Maitland could be on any such train. And besides, all these trains were expresses. The railway lines went into the far distance uphill. A lone bird flapped across the lines far away. To the right of the level-crossing, at a little distance, stood a tree like a green exploding sea-mine, frozen. The dehydrated onion factory by the sidings awoke, then the coal companies. It's a black business but we use you white: Daemon's Coal... A delicious smell of onion soup in side-streets of Vavin impregnated the early morning. Grimed sweeps at hand trundled barrows, or were screening coal. Rows of dead lamps like erect snakes poised to strike along the platform. On the other side were cornflowers, dandelions, a garbage-can like a brazier blazing furiously all by itself among meadowsweet. The morning grew hot. And now, one after one, the terrible trains appeared on top of the raised horizon, shimmering now, in mirage: first the distant wail, then, the frightful spouting and spindling of black smoke, a sourceless towering pillar, motionless, then a round hull, as if not on the lines, as if going the other way, or as if stopping, as if not stopping, or as if slipping away over the fields, as if stopping; oh God, not stopping; downhill: clipperty-one clipperty-one: clipperty-two- clipperty-two: clipperty-three clipperty-three: clipperty-four clipperty-four: alas, thank God, not stopping, and the lines shaking, the station flying, the coal dust, black bituminous: lickety-cut lickety-cut lickety-cut: and then another train, clipperty-one clipperty-one coming in the other direction, swaying, whizzing, two feet above the lines, flying, clipperty-two, with one light burning against the morning, clipperty-three clipperty-three, a single useless strange eye, red-gold: trains, trains, trains, each driven by a banshee playing a shrieking nose-organ in D minor; lickety-cut lickety-cut lickety-cut. But not his train; and not her train. Still, the train would come doubtless--had the Station Master said the third or fourth train from which way? Which was north, west? And anyhow, whose north, whose west?... And he must pick flowers to greet the angel, the fair Virginian descending from the train. But the embankment flowers would not pick, spurting sap, sticky, the flowers were on the wrong end of the stalks (and he on the wrong side of the tracks), he nearly fell into the brazier, the cornflowers grew in the middle of their stalks, the stalks of meadowsweet--or was it queen's lace?--were too long, his bouquet was a failure. And how to get back across the tracks--here was a train now coming in the wrong direction again, clipperty-one clipperty-one, the lines unreal, not there, walking on air; or rails that did lead somewhere, to unreal life, or, perhaps, Hamilton, Ontario.--Fool, he was trying to walk along a single line, like a boy on the kerb: clipperty-two clipperty-two: clipperty-three clipperty-three: clipperty-four clipperty-four: clipperty-five clipperty-five: clipperty-six clipperty-six: clipperty-seven; clipperty seven--trains, trains, trains, trains, converging upon him from all sides of the horizon, each wailing for its demon lover. Life had no time to waste. Why, then, should it waste so much of everything else? With the dead cornflowers before him, at evening--the next moment--the Consul sat in the station tavern with, a man who'd just tried to sell him three loose teeth. Was it tomorrow he was supposed to meet the train? What had the Station Master said? Had that been Lee Maitland herself waving at him frantically from the express? And who had flung the soiled bundle of tissue papers out of the window? What had he lost? Why was that idiot sitting there, in a dirty grey suit, and trousers baggy at the knees, with one bicycle clip, in his long, long baggy grey jacket, and grey cloth cap, and brown boots, with his thick fleshy grey face, from which three upper teeth, perhaps the very three teeth, were missing, all on one side, and thick neck, saying, every few minutes to anyone who came in: "I'm watching you." "I can see you..." "You won't escape me."--"If you only kept quiet, Claus, no one'd know you were crazy..".. That was the time too, in the storm country, when "the lightning is peeling the poles, Mr Firmin, and biting the wires, sir--you can taste it afterwards too, in the water, pure sulphur,"--that at four o'clock each afternoon, preceded, out of the adjacent cemetery, by the gravedigger--sweating, heavy-footed, bowed, long-jawed and trembling, and carrying his special tools of death--he would come to this same tavern to meet Mr Quattras, the Negro bookie from Codrington, in the Barbados. "I'm a race-track man and I was brought up with whites, so the blacks don't like me." Mr. Quattras, grinning and sad, feared deportation... But that battle against death had been won. And he had saved Mr Quattras. That very night, had it been?--with a heart like a cold brazier standing by a railway platform among meadowsweet wet with dew: they are beautiful and terrifying, these shadows of cars that sweep down fences, and sweep zebra-like across the grass path in the avenue of dark oaks under the moon: a single shadow, like an umbrella on rails, travelling down a picket fence; portents of doom, of the heart failing... Gone. Eaten up in reverse by night. And the moon gone. C'