Before I committed Lex and Sandorski, I decided to reconnoiter the route. The road appeared to be empty. I climbed onto the parapet, and let myself silently down to the roof of the platform, which was only some six feet below. I had just started to crawl cautiously along the roof, when a voice from the parapet called:
” ‘Ere you! Wotcher doin’ of?”
I shall never know how he managed to interrupt me. I think he must have been riding a bicycle without a light, or else had been watching me for some time from the shadows, as fascinated as any curious dog.
What to do? Take him into my confidence? Bluff? Climb back to the road and knock him out? I remember that all these alternatives went through my head, but I cannot have had time to formulate even mental words. How is it possible to think, I wonder, without the use of at least a few key-words in the brain? And yet, in an emergency, it is.
“Only getting a spot of free travel, mate,” I said.
“Doin’ the railways company, eh?” he asked with an aggressive sense of duty.
“It ain’t the company any longer,” I replied indignantly. “It’s the state.”
He thought that over.
“Ah, so it is,” he said. “Well, good night!”
He removed his head, and vanished as silently as he had appeared.
After all this interference by the citizenry, my nerves were shattered. I crawled along that roof, trying hard to persuade myself that it was safer than any other place I had been in for the last six hours–which, oddly enough, and at a distance of twenty feet from the bridge, was true. When I came abreast of the rear end of the restaurant-car, I saw that there would be no difficulty in dropping on to its roof, so long as feet didn’t slip on its sloping edge. There was a risk, of course, that the lower half of anyone walking along the top of the car would be noticed from the platform, but it had to be taken.
I returned to the bridge, crossed the road and the fence beyond, and disappeared into the waste ground. Lex and Sandorski were waiting where I had left them in the darkness of the coal trucks. The general didn’t much care for my route when I explained it, and asked whether I thought that Lex was a bloody circus performer. Lex, however, had cheered up a little. He insisted that if all he had to do was drop, the law of gravity would take care of him. It certainly would. What worried us was where he would land and how much noise he would make.
We passed Lex over the fence, and made a wide circuit away from the railway so that our clumsy progress wouldn’t be heard by anyone on the line. That journey was a violent strain on patience. The darkness was absolute–probably because there were so many lights in the distance to catch our eyes–and the surface was abominable. Holes, bricks, strands of wire, rusty cans and drums, all camouflaged by tall dead weeds, tripped us while we supported the stumbling Lex. It seemed all of a mile before we came to the road.
I went first to show them where to cross the parapet of the bridge. A minute afterwards Lex sprawled over the edge into sight, with the general hanging onto his hands. I grabbed and landed him, and Sandorski followed. Once Lex had got his breath back, it seemed the right moment to stimulate him; so we had a stiff tot of rum all round.
Our crawl in single file along the roof was easy enough. We halted above the black whale-back of the restaurant car. I asked Lex if he thought that–with help–he could drop to it and keep his footing, and then quickly climb down to the couplings by the rungs at the rear of the car.
The rum worked.
“I have militär training,” he said proudly.We couldn’t let him make an enthusiastic job of it then and there, because we did not know what was going on beneath us. The platform might be empty, or there might be a whole group of railwaymen discussing the next day’s football. I leaned over the edge of the concrete while Sandorski sat on my legs. With the top half of my body upside down, I surveyed the station. On our own platform no one was in sight; on the far platform there was some activity around the baggage office–not very strenuous, but sufficient to keep eyes from straying where they had no business.
“All clear for you, General,” I reported, wriggling back to the horizontal.
He dropped onto the roof of the car, and was off it again with first bounce. He could now keep watch on the platforms for us, and signal to me from the narrow space between the back of the car and the buffers at the end of the bay.
When he beckoned, I too dropped and told Lex to follow. Strength or nerve failed him at the last moment, and he stuck with his chest on the edge of the concrete and his legs kicking wildly in air–just where I couldn’t grab them without risk of falling off the top of the car myself. At that moment a porter chose to walk, whistling, round the corner of the station buildings. I caught Lex’s legs as they lashed back, and prayed that he wouldn’t let go his hold on the roof and that the porter wouldn’t look up. For long seconds we formed a leaning, living bridge between restaurant-car and roof until it was safe for me to whisper to him what to do and where to put his feet.
We dived under the van with, at last, no interested public but the station cat. She seemed to think that she could learn a thing or two from our movements, or perhaps considered us as promising kittens and was showing us how an experienced adult would have done the job. At any rate, she put up such a dance of misplaced enthusiasm between station roof and car and buffers that the porter at the far end of the platform was interested and came back and started to call for puss. Thank God cats don’t bark!
We didn’t have a long wait. The second train in was for London–one of those slow and weightily important trains, usually empty, which stop everywhere to pick up the mails. I poked up a very cautious head. The platform was sparsely populated by porters and post-office employees, and there was no convenient crowd of passengers alighting or boarding the train; it couldn’t have been worse. And then a light engine came along, banged into the restaurant-car, was coupled on, and prepared to draw our cover from over our heads.
It was a moment of hopeless, helpless disappointment. We stood up in my lookout post–between the back of the van and the buffers–and waited to be revealed in all our guilty nakedness to the shunter and assistant stationmaster as soon as the dining car drew out. I don’t know who first saw the way of escape. Even Lex didn’t miss it, for he was trying to scramble up before I shoved him from behind. On the far side of the bay was a ledge, hardly wide enough to be called a platform. We had only to walk along that as the car pulled out, and nobody–provided neither driver nor fireman looked to their right–could see us.
It worked. We trotted along by the flank of that friendly restaurant car, and when we were clear of the bay we saw salvation. There was a goods train standing on the far side of the London train, which we couldn’t get a glimpse of from where we had been. We had only to walk up the permanent way between the two trains and get in from the wrong side.
The doors were already shut, and the night mail might start at any moment. We were weary of precautions. We crossed the rails in a bunch. I don’t know if anyone saw us. If he did, he must have been too tired to bother with trespassing passengers. Once between the two trains, the rest was simple. We settled Lex in a steaming hot empty compartment, put his overcoat under his head, and went into another ourselves to breathe freely. Two minutes later the train left.
“Now,” said Sandorski, “where’s that needle and thread?”