Page 580 - women-in-love

sometimes out of the window, sometimes closed his eyes.
Then his eyes opened again, dark as the darkness outside.
A flash of a few lights on the darkness—Ghent station!
A few more spectres moving outside on the platform—then
the bell—then motion again through the level darkness. Ur-
sula saw a man with a lantern come out of a farm by the
railway, and cross to the dark farm-buildings. She thought
of the Marsh, the old, intimate farm-life at Cossethay. My
God, how far was she projected from her childhood, how far
was she still to go! In one life-time one travelled through ae-
ons. The great chasm of memory from her childhood in the
intimate country surroundings of Cossethay and the Marsh
Farm—she remembered the servant Tilly, who used to give
her bread and butter sprinkled with brown sugar, in the old
living-room where the grandfather clock had two pink ros-
es in a basket painted above the figures on the face—and
now when she was travelling into the unknown with Birkin,
an utter stranger—was so great, that it seemed she had no
identity, that the child she had been, playing in Cossethay
churchyard, was a little creature of history, not really her-
self.
They were at Brussels—half an hour for breakfast. They
got down. On the great station clock it said six o’clock. They
had coffee and rolls and honey in the vast desert refresh-
ment room, so dreary, always so dreary, dirty, so spacious,
such desolation of space. But she washed her face and hands
in hot water, and combed her hair—that was a blessing.
Soon they were in the train again and moving on. The
greyness of dawn began. There were several people in the

580 Women in Love