Free The Spring Madness of Mr Sermon by R. F. Delderfield

least idea where he was, or how he had arrived there, sprawled full-length on three cushions that felt and smelled as though they had been stuffed with wire and dipped in a solution of creosote and tobacco juice. The stale odour in the carriage half-stupefied him and presently, because of it, he swung his feet to the floor and groped for the leather strap to adjust the window. Then, peering timidly into the thinning mist and down the line as far as the signal box, he suddenly remembered how he came to be the sole occupant of a third-class compartment on a stationary train in a deserted siding. He remembered this particular carriage first of all and used it as a guide rope leading to other discoveries. There had been the walrus-moustached guard who had piloted him to this carriage about 2.30 a.m. and before that . . . ? Ah, the change at Templecombe and the short journey on to
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    Westport-Revel! Further back along the line was the wait at Waterloo for the 11.3^ to the West and before that the silent bus flight from home. At this point the fog in his brain cleared and events stormed down on him in a body, his ludicrous wrestle with Sybil, his unsuccessful overtures to son and daughter, the two phone-calls, one of them certainly from Lane-Perkins' father, the trouncing of Lane-Perkins himself, all the seemingly unrelated events that had brought him here to this stuffy, evil-smelling railway carriage in the middle of nowhere.
    For a moment his brain reeled under the impact of this improbable avalanche and then, as the cool morning air began to enter the carriage, he sat up, put on his spectacles and stared at himself in the misted mirror slotted between fly-blown views of Ramsgate and Penzance on the opposite wall of the carriage.
    "By George!" he exclaimed aloud, "it really happened. It happened exactly as I'm remembering it," and he pranced to his feet and pulled his huge rucksack from the luggage rack, fumbling in one of the pockets for a packet of Players' he had put there when he left the train at Templecombe four hours previously.
    Mr. Sermon was not a smoker. He had given up cigarette-smoking more than three years ago, when he had developed a smog cough that threatened to revive his youthful asthma. He had never missed that habit until last night when they told him that he had more than an hour to wait for the 11.35. Then, unaccountably, he had succumbed to an irresistible longing to smoke and as a gesture of defiance he had bought a packet of twenty at the buffet. On the journey down he had smoked four and this, no doubt, accounted for the dryness in his mouth and the slight ache in his head, but neither worried him much so he lit another and inhaled deeply. In the old days he had tried not to inhale but now inhaling seemed to him a devil-may-care habit, thoroughly characteristic of a man who struck out at everyone who crossed him and then ran away from home in corduroys and a grubby sweater. He leaned far out of the window, alternately gulping down air and smoke and he thought what manly comfort there was in a cigarette and what a milksop he must have been to let a suburban chemist talk him into denying himself such pleasure. For Sebastian Sermon, adrift in the world,.
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    discovered that he was no longer a prey to innumerable abstract fears, like the fear of infected lungs. In the space of fifteen hours, a mere nine hundred minutes since he had thumped Lane-Perkins on the head, he had sloughed off layer after layer of inhibitions and was still shedding them, a craven host of prejudices and fads and whims and caprices that had been leeching him since he was a boy and their flight gave him a buoyancy and self-confidence that sent his spirit soaring over the bluish tract of moorland beyond the silent siding. In the whole of his life he could never recall an awakening such as this, or a time when he had felt more like exchanging banter with the first stranger he met and it piqued him to notice that the little train was