mediate answer.) I communed
secretly with my memory. Then the voice returned out of the darkness. It
startled me. "This corner," it remarked, "always reminds me of a bit of
Armentieres." The voice had answered my thought, and not my words.

The lorry stopped and I got down. I never saw the driver. I do not know
whose voice it was; if, indeed, there was with me in that lorry more than
a shadow and an impersonal voice.

Yet now the night could do its worst. I had the illusion that I had seen
through it. Were these bleak and obdurate circumstances an imposture?
They appeared to have me imprisoned helplessly in time and snow; yet I
had seen them shaken, and by a mere thought. Did their appearance depend
on the way we looked at them? Perhaps it was that. We are compelled by
outside things to their mould, and are mortified; but occasionally they
fail to hide the joke. The laugh becomes ours, and circumstance must
submit to the way we see it. If Time playfully imprisons us in a century
we would rather have missed, where only the stars are left undisturbed to
wink above the doings and noises of Bedlam, and where to miss the last
train--supposing it runs at all--is the right end to a perfect day of
blizzards and social squalls, what does it matter when we find that the
whole of it is shaken by a single idea? Might it not vanish altogether if
enough of us could be found to laugh at it? This dream assisted me to
some warmth of mind through the rest of the cold night till I arrived on
the station platform, after the train had left.

To help further in destroying my faith in the permanence of our affairs
and institutions, it then appeared the platform was vacant because my
train was not yet in. It was coming in at that moment--or so a porter
told me. Our protean enemy took his most fearful form in the War when he
became a Hidden Hand. Was this porter an agent of the gods for whose
eternal leisure our daily confusion and bad temper make an amusing
diversion? Was he one of the malicious familiars who are at work amongst
us, disguised, and who playfully set us by the ears with divine traps
for boobies? This porter was grinning. He went away with his hand over
his mouth, and at that moment a train stopped at the platform. The engine
was at the wrong end of it.

One official told me its proper locomotive was at East Grinstead, and
that we might not get it. Perhaps its home was there. And yet another
official whose face was as mysterio