Yet in spite of this I am no extremist in
the matter of warm carriages. There comes a point when even I feel that the train is overheated, when even I begin to gasp for air. I recall a January journey from New Orleans when the train sizzled with steam-heating and the illustrated folders upon the little tables actually coclded in the drought. I recall journeys in Russia when the sight of a samovar seemed to add untouchable heat to a heat which was already unendurable. This point in my low-grade thermometer was reached this week in travelling through the Midlands on a morning on which April had decided to fling full summer upon the carriage windows, whereas the railway company had decided that we were still deep in the winter of our discontent. We had opened the sliding doors upon the corridor and through them came a great breath of fields. But at Kettering a man dressed in an ulster entered the carriage and asked us, with some petulance, tg "close the door." It was a thick, green ulster, and its lapels were of the type which, when turned upwards, ' envelop not the ears only, but the entire head and hair. As the temperature within the compartment rose by leaps and bounds, he snuggled tight into his corner, wrapped his ulster closer around him, shivered slightly and then opened his book. I gazed at him in some distaste, wondering whether he was very selfish or just very ill. It is always difficult to distinguish the egoist from the hypochondriac, since they both develop the same puckers around the mouth and chin. But as I shifted my gaze from the lower to the upper part of his face, I was conscious of some stirring of memory within me.
From the faded, crumpled, brown and petulant photograph before me there emerged the features of a man whom I had not seen for more than thirty years. It might be Pocklington—it might be
C J. Pocklington, the Rugger blue, the man at B.N.C., the chair- man of Vincent's Club. It must be Pocklington ; it was Pocklington.
I had the impulse to address him, but there were other people in the carriage, and my shyness as always, rose up to entangle me. But when tie left his place for a few moments (pausing at the door
so that some other hand might slide it open for him), I leant for- ward and looked at the book he had been reading. It was Salve, by George Moore. The train hummed onwards' in the April sunshine and the water pipes hummed with it. The other passengers stirred easily, loosening the ties or fichus round their throats. And I back gazing out of the steaming window and thinking how etui it was that, in 1942, C. J. Pocklington should be sitting there green ulster reading Salve, by George Moore. I thought interested Moore would have been could I have told him of incident. He would have pretended to be interested in the ca of my hesitation to address Pocklington ; but he would not in have been interested in that aspect of the story ; what would I have interested him was to know what Pocklington had said a Salve. I should have been unable to tell him of that, since train slid into St. Pancras, and Pocklington, without a word to one other than the porter, slipped Salve into a neat case labe "C. J. P." But I felt grateful to Pocklington and forgave him selfishness about the sliding door, since between Bedford London I had been thinking about George Moore for the first f since the war. I had been recalling his voice, the motions of white hands, his astonished eyes. He had -a creamy Irish voice, the cream which it suggested was not the cream of a Co. Wield dairy, but the more artificial creams of the Rue de la Paix. It a gentle voice in its way, and it had its affable accents, but be it one had the sense of something querulous, something alm quarreltome ; one had the sense that the a earn might easily bee' curdled. And, indeed, Moore was apt ter indulge in sudden s tiffs. I remembered how he had broken (or almost broken) a fr ship with a lady, of whom he had been fond for many y because she gave him a bedroom near the place where the pig cooed. He had left the next morning without a word. He h written a fierce letter on the subject of pigeons, and much tact a needed before the breach was healed. Moore, in every fibre of being, was an artist, and he claimed (excessively perhaps) the pr leges to which an artist is entitled. He gave one the impress] of being a difficult, but not unendurably selfish, man.
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