The Weekly Machen
More poet than journalist, Arthur Machen crafted the following mise-en-scène worthy of a gripping short story rather than a mere report from his beat on the home-front. He expertly accomplished this with narrative magic by balancing the intimate and the cosmic. Still effective more than a century later, it leaves me desiring to know the fate of certain unnamed characters caught in a titanic struggle beyond their control.
Waiting for the Boat Train:
A New Sense of Brotherhood
by
Arthur Machen
January 5, 1915
They were very busy in the Station Superintendent’s office. People were in and out all the while, asking questions, getting platform passes, gazing about them with a sort of helpless, distracted air.
Amongst these was an elderly man with a grave beard just beginning to grizzle. He was well-dressed and had somewhat that was quiet and reserved in his manner; one might almost say, were it not fanciful, that he was a man largely given to solitude and silence.
It was, therefore, strange and pathetic to note that a customary reserve that may have lasted for many years was broken by a very evident perturbation in his manner. He began with an awkward hurry of speech, as a man who has fared slowly for twenty years will be awkward if forced on a sudden necessity to break into a run. The elderly gentleman’s words stumbled, then, as he said to the clerk:—
“My son was not in that train. When is the next?”
I am certain that in common times he would not have spoken to a strange official of his son. He would have said, “The gentleman whom I expected to meet.”
The Sense of Brotherhood
And, then, on the other side: officials, hard-worked and hurried and addressed by half a dozen fussy, helpless people at once, have been known to answer, not tartly, perhaps, but with the utmost degree of official brevity, with no simulation of any personal interest in the enquirer’s perplexities. But the official of Victoria answered the perturbed gentleman with a fashion of kind and soothing considerateness that was very pleasant to hear. He spoke of the various portions into which the boat-train was divided, of a second part still to come, and his manner more than his words made it evident that he hoped that father and son might safely meet in half an hour or so. The father was anxious and a little reproachful.
“You didn’t tell me it was in two portions,” he said, and he made a pathetic gesture with raised, extended hands.
These questions, answers, confidences, and appealing gestures do not represent by any means the traffic of a station office in ordinary times; the dialogue, was only one out of many signs showing how we have changed in all our ways since these last things have come upon us. The war has been a crucible of transmutation; the shy man speaks of his son to strangers, because he hopes to see his son restored to him out of the fire, and the strangers answer gently because life and death, joy and sorrow, once obscured by conventions of silence, have now been made clear and evident to every man. The horrors of war are indeed horrible beyond words or tears; but perhaps they are worth enduring if they bring back for men the almost lost sense of brotherhood, so that strangers are no longer strangers, but friends.
The Woman with Longing Eyes
There were other signs of the change of time at Victoria. A ringing bugle was calling from some distant platform of the London and Brighton station, and along the subway leading to the Underground feet went tramp, tramp, tramp in step, and a roaring chorus resounded: “Here we are, here we are, here we are again.” There were restless anxieties and fears and expectations in the faces of the people who were gathering about the barriers at the head of platform No. 2, where the second section of the boat train was to come in. Fathers and mothers, middle-aged and elderly people, walked nervously arm-in-arm, trying hard to look cheerful and confident. Indeed, they may have had every reason to feel confidence; a letter may have come to them from their son, safe in a safe place; and yet if this were confidence, it could not conceal the past torments of hope and fear. So might father and mother await a son restored to them from some drowned ship, from earthquake, or from fire. A woman dressed in a rich cloak stood alone with set lips and longing eyes, governing herself as she waited for her husband.
The barriers were all lined now as the time drew on to eight. The people with passes were allowed to go on to the platform, and here again was unaccustomed furniture. A rough buffet had been set up on it, and the buffet held an array of tin mugs, certain steaming pitchers, fragrant of coffee, and piles of bread and butter and sandwiches. In Victoria, as everywhere else, the lamps are darkened and decreased in number, and the damp mist of the evening, mingling with the steam of engines that went in, went out, or were at rest by the platforms, was a luminous haze in the uncertain lamplight.
Then the shriek of a whistle and the boat express (or a part of it) came clanking into the station; its windows curtained with blinds green and grey and red.
The expectant people on the platform rushed up and down. There were meetings, there were disappointments. The woman who had stood alone met her husband; I am afraid the perturbed old gentleman of the superintendent’s office did not meet his son.
Still Looking Out
Then appeared the use of the buffet. There were refugees in the train; some two dozen of them, perhaps, and they crowded towards the army of mugs and coffee jugs and sandwiches, where ladies of the Red Cross were awaiting them. They looked worn and harried and dismayed, these poor Belgians, and the bite and the sup comforted them a little. A forlorn young man. shivering in the raw mist, drank his coffee eagerly, and a very old woman, exiled almost at life’s end from the homely Flemish farmstead where she had spent her lifetime, dipped a morsel of bread into the hot drink and munched gratefully, in spite of her sadness and amazement.
After a few minutes a motor-‘bus drew up near the coffee-stall. The refugees climbed on it and into it, and waited for it to take them to some temporary haven. The other passengers, reunited to their sons and their friends and their lovers, had all gone away, but there were still people on the platform looking out for yet another portion, the third portion, of the boat express.
But after half an hour or so someone came up and said that the third section of the express had drawn up at platform nine and we all hurried across the station; amongst us the elderly gentleman who was looking for his son.
Previous: The Critics and Mr. Henry James’s Style
Next: The Death of Thomas Hardy’s Old Fiddler
darklybrightpress.com 
How touching and sweet. It makes me cry.
LikeLiked by 1 person