Peggy was opening the door of the taxi for him. His father shook him by the hand. His mother kissed him on the mouth.

“Goodbye, Mortimer Street,” he said, and the cab was off. “Goodbye, Stanley’s Grove.”

Through the back window he saw three strangers waving. He pulled down the blind.

3

Sitting with his bag in the lavatory of the moving train, for all the compartments were full, he read through his notebook and tore out the pages in order. He was dressed in a brand-new brown tweed overcoat, a brown townsuit, a white starched shirt with a woolen tie and a tiepin, and black, shining shoes. He had put his hard brown hat in the washbasin. Here was Mrs. Chapman’s address next to the telephone number of a Mr. Hewson who was going to introduce him to a man who worked on a newspaper; and under these the address of the Literary Institute that had once awarded him a guinea for a poem in a competition: “Will Shakespeare at the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior.” He tore the page out. Then the name and address, in red ink, of a collected poet who had written him a letter thanking him for a sonnet-sequence. And a page of names that might help.

The lavatory door half opened, and he shut it quickly with his foot.

“I beg your pardon.”

Hear her apologizing down the corridor, full as an egg. She could turn every handle the whole length of the train, and in every closet a fully-clothed man would be sitting with his foot against the door, lost and alone in the long, moving house on wheels, travelling in silence with no windows, at sixty miles an hour racing to another place that did not want him, never at home wherever the train stopped. The handle turned again, and Samuel coughed somebody away.

The last page of the notebook was the only one he kept. Under a drawing of a girl with long hair dancing into an address, he had written: Lucille Harris. A man he met on the Promenade had said as they sat on a bench, looking at the legs passing: “She’s okay. She’s a girl I know. She’s the best in the world, she’ll take care of you. Give her a call when you’re up. Tell her you’re Austin’s friend.” That page he placed in his wallet between two one-pound notes.

The rest of the pages he picked up from the floor, bunched together, and threw down between his legs into the bowl. Then he pulled the chain. Down went the helping names, the influential numbers, the addresses that could mean so much, into the round, roaring sea and onto the rails. Already they were lost a mile behind, blowing over the track now, over the glimpses of hedges into the lightning-passing fields.

Home and help were over. He had eight pounds ten and Lucille Harris’ address. “Many people have begun worse,” he said aloud. “I am ignorant, lazy, dishonest, and sentimental, I have the pull over nobody.”