The express ran us down in smooth, stuffy comfort, and reached Newton Abbot dead on time at 9:15. I cannot say—though I have tried—that I remembered any particular incident on the way down. I hate talking on railway journeys, anyway, and Lathom did not seem very conversational. I read—it was Hughes’ High Wind in Jamaica —an overrated book, I think, considered as a whole, but memorable for that strange and convincing description of the earthquake. The thick heat and silence, and then the quick, noiseless shift of sea and shore, like the tilting of a saucer. Good, that. And the ghastly wind afterwards. And the child, not realising that anything out of the way had happened, because nobody gave the thing its proper terrifying name. That is very natural. I do not care for the part about the pirates. It is an anticlimax.
I know we dined on the train, but railway meals are seldom memorable. Lathom grumbled, and left his portion half-eaten, and I said something about his acquiring a taste for hedgehog-broth and stewed toadstools—some silly remark which he took as a deadly insult.
At Newton Abbot we changed into the local, and dawdled through Teigngrace, Heathfield and Brimley Halt, taking over half an hour about it, till we were turned out, twenty minutes late, on the platform at Bovey Tracey. It was a quarter-past ten and dark, but the smell of the earth came up pleasantly, with a welcome suggestion of rain in the air. I stood on the platform, clutching an attaché case in one hand and the bag with the beef and sausages in the other, while Lathom transacted some occult business with a man outside. Then he came back, saying briefly, “I’ve got a man to take us,” and we stumbled out to where an aged taxi thrummed mournfully in the gloom. Lathom bundled in, and I parked my bags at his feet.
“What the devil’s that?” he said crossly.
“The grub, fathead,” said I, following him in.