Free Selected Stories (9781440673832) by Mark (EDT) E.; Mitchell Forster Page A

(available one day only), which may be obtained of the driver. Passengers are again reminded that no tickets are issued at the other end, and that no complaints in this connexion will receive consideration from the Company. Nor will the Company be responsible for any negligence or stupidity on the part of Passengers, nor for Hail-storms, Lightning, Loss of Tickets, nor for any Act of God.
    â€™ Sunrise and Sunset Omnibuses,
    Â 
    Return Tickets!
    Â 
    For the Direction.
    Â 
    Now, he had never seen this notice before, nor could he imagine where the omnibus went to. S. of course was for Surbiton, and R.C.C. meant Road Car Company. But what was the meaning of the other C.? Coombe and Maiden, perhaps, or possibly ‘City’. Yet it could not hope to compete with the South-Western. The whole thing, the boy reflected, was run on hopelessly unbusinesslike lines. Why no tickets from the other end? And what an hour to start! Then he realized that unless the notice was a hoax, an omnibus must have been starting just as he was wishing the Bonses good-bye. He peered at the ground through the gathering dusk, and there he saw what might or might not be the marks of wheels. Yet nothing had come out of the alley. And he had never seen an omnibus at any time in the Buckingham Park Road. No: it must be a hoax, like the signposts, like the fairy-tales, like the dreams upon which he would wake suddenly in the night. And with a sigh he stepped from the alley—right into the arms of his father.
    Oh, how his father laughed! ‘Poor, poor Popsey!’ he cried. ‘Diddums! Diddums! Diddums think he’d walky-palky up to Ewink!’ and his mother, also convulsed with laughter, appeared on the steps of Agathox Lodge. ‘Don’t, Bob!’ she gasped. ‘Don’t be so naughty! Oh, you’ll kill me! Oh, leave the boy alone!’
    But all that evening the joke was kept up. The father implored to be taken too. Was it a very tiring walk? Need one wipe one’s shoes on the door-mat? And the boy went to bed feeling faint and sore, and thankful for only one thing—that he had not said a word about the omnibus. It was a hoax, yet through his dreams it grew more and more real, and the streets of Surbiton, through which he saw it driving, seemed instead to become hoaxes and shadows. And very early in the morning he woke with a cry, for he had had a glimpse of its destination.
    He struck a match, and its light fell not only on his watch but also on his calendar, so that he knew it to be half an hour to sunrise. It was pitch dark, for the fog had come down from London in the night, and all Surbiton was wrapped in its embraces. Yet he sprang out and dressed himself, for he was determined to settle once for all which was real: the omnibus or the streets. ‘I shall be a fool one way or the other,’ he thought, ‘until I know.’ Soon he was shivering in the road under the gas lamp that guarded the entrance to the alley.
    To enter the alley itself required some courage. Not only was it horribly dark, but he now realized that it was an impossible terminus for an omnibus. If it had not been for a policeman, whom he heard approaching through the fog, he would never have made the attempt. The next moment he had made the attempt and failed. Nothing. Nothing but a blank alley and a very silly boy gaping at its dirty floor. It was a hoax. ‘I’ll tell papa and mamma,’ he decided. ‘I deserve it. I deserve that they should know. I am too silly to be alive.’ And he went back to the gate of Agathox Lodge.
    There he remembered that his watch was fast. The sun was not risen; it would not rise for two minutes. ‘Give the bus every chance,’ he thought cynically, and returned into the alley.
    But the omnibus was there.

II
    It had two horses, whose sides were still smoking from their journey, and its two great lamps shone through the fog against the alley’s walls, changing their