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their way to . . . Anthony refused to say the words; words would make it all so clear, and he didn’t want to know too clearly. Reading
The Times
might be shameful; but the other thing was terrible, too terrible to bear thinking about, and yet so terrible that you couldn’t help thinking about it.
    Anthony looked out of the window again, through tears. The green and golden brightness of St Martin’s summer swam in an obscuring iridescence. And suddenly the wheels of the train began to chant articulately. ‘Dead-a-dead-a-dead,’ they shouted, ‘dead-a-dead-a-dead . . .’ For ever. The tears overflowed, were warm for an instant on his cheeks, then icy cold. He pulled out his handkerchief and wiped them away, wipedthe fog out of his eyes. Luminous under the sun, the world before him was like one vast and intricate jewel. The elms had withered to a pale gold. Huge above the fields, and motionless, they seemed to be meditating in the crystal light of the morning, seemed to be remembering, seemed, for the very brink of dissolution, to be looking back and in a last ecstasy of recollection living over again, concentrated in this shining moment of autumnal time, all the long-drawn triumph of spring and summer.
    â€˜DEAD-A-DEAD,’ in a sudden frenzy yelled the wheels, as the train crossed a bridge, ‘A-DEAD-A-DEAD !’
    Anthony tried not to listen – vainly; then tried to make the wheels say something else. Why shouldn’t they say,
To stop the train pull down the chain?
That was what they usually said. With a great effort of concentration he forced them to change their refrain.
    â€˜To stop the train pull down the chain, to stop the train pull down a-dead-a-dead-a-dead . . .’ It was no good.
    Mr Beavis uncovered his eyes for a moment and looked out of the window. How bright, the autumnal trees! Cruelly bright they would have seemed, insultingly, except for something desperate in their stillness, a certain glassy fragility that, oh! invited disaster, that prophetically announced the coming darkness and the black branches moving in torture among stars, the sleet like arrows along the screaming wind.
    Uncle James turned the page of his
Times.
The Ritualists and the Kensitites were at it again, he saw; and was delighted. Let dog eat dog. ‘MR CHAMBERLAIN AT UNIVERSITY COLLEGE SCHOOL .’ What was the old devil up to now? Unveiling a tablet to the Old Boys who had been killed in the war. ‘Over one hundred young men went to the front, and twelve of them laid down their lives for the country in South Africa (cheers).’ Deluded idiots, thought Uncle James, who had always been passionately a pro-Boer.
    Painted, among the real cows in their pasture, the enormous horns, the triangular auburn frizz, the enquiring nostrils, the tea-cup. Anthony shut his eyes against the vision.
    â€˜No, I won’t,’ he said with all the determination he had previously used against the wheels. He refused to know the horror; he refused to know the ox. But what was the good of refusing? The wheels were still shouting away. And how could he suppress the fact that this ox was the thirty-fourth, on the right, from Clapham Junction? A number is always a number, even on the way to . . . But counting was shameful, counting was like Uncle James’s
Times
. Counting was shirking, was betraying. And yet the other thing, the thing they ought to be thinking about, was really too terrible. Too
unnatural
, somehow.
    â€˜Whatever we may have thought, or still think, as to the causes, the necessity, the justice of the war which is now happily at an end, I think that we must all have a feeling of profound satisfaction that when the country called its children to arms, the manhood of the nation leaped to it in response . . .’ His face twitching with exasperation, Uncle James put down
The Times
and looked at his watch.
    â€˜Two and a half minutes