They stood up and looked ahead. Low lights were seen down the darkness. This was the world again. It was not the bliss of her heart, nor the peace of his. It was the superficial unreal world of fact. Yet not quite the old world. For the peace and the bliss in their hearts was enduring.
Strange, and desolate above all things, like disembarking from the Styx into the desolated underworld, was this landing at night. There was the raw, half–lighted, covered–in vastness of the dark place, boarded and hollow underfoot, with only desolation everywhere. Ursula had caught sight of the big, pallid, mystic letters 'ostend,' standing in the darkness. Everybody was hurrying with a blind, insect–like intentness through the dark grey air, porters were calling in un–English English, then trotting with heavy bags, their colourless blouses looking ghostly as they disappeared; Ursula stood at a long, low, zinc–covered barrier, along with hundreds of other spectral people, and all the way down the vast, raw darkness was this low stretch of open bags and spectral people, whilst, on the other side of the barrier, pallid officials in peaked caps and moustaches were turning the underclothing in the bags, then scrawling a chalk–mark.
It was done. Birkin snapped the hand bags, off they went, the porter coming behind. They were through a great doorway, and in the open night again—ah, a railway platform! Voices were still calling in inhuman agitation through the dark–grey air, spectres were running along the darkness between the train.
'Koln—Berlin—' Ursula made out on the boards hung on the high train on one side.
'Here we are,' said Birkin. And on her side she saw: 'Elsass—Lothringen—Luxembourg, Metz—Basle.'
'That was it, Basle!'
The porter came up.
'A Bale—deuxieme classe?—Voila!' And he clambered into the high train. They followed. The compartments were already some of them taken. But many were dim and empty. The luggage was stowed, the porter was tipped.
'Nous avons encore—?' said Birkin, looking at his watch and at the porter.
'Encore une demi–heure.' With which, in his blue blouse, he disappeared. He was ugly and insolent.
'Come,' said Birkin. 'It is cold. Let us eat.'
There was a coffee–wagon on the platform. They drank hot, watery coffee, and ate the long rolls, split, with ham between, which were such a wide bite that it almost dislocated Ursula’s jaw; and they walked beside the high trains. It was all so strange, so extremely desolate, like the underworld, grey, grey, dirt grey, desolate, forlorn, nowhere—grey, dreary nowhere.
At last they were moving through the night. In the darkness Ursula made out the flat fields, the wet flat dreary darkness of the Continent. They pulled up surprisingly soon—Bruges! Then on through the level darkness, with glimpses of sleeping farms and thin poplar trees and deserted high–roads. She sat dismayed, hand in hand with Birkin. He pale, immobile like a revenant himself, looked 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. Ursula 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 aeons. 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 roses 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 herself.
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 refreshment 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.
