Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 28, 2025
I stood outside in the meteor's livid light, hating them and cursing them for having delayed me so long. I stood until it was evident they remarked me, a black shape of envy, silhouetted against the glare. That finished Shaphambury. The question I now had to debate was which of the remaining couples I had to pursue.
The porters I asked were not very clear about Shaphambury, but the booking-office clerk was helpful, and we puzzled out all I wanted to know. Then I came out into the coaly street again. At the least I ought to have two pounds. I went back to the Public Library and into the newspaper room to think over this problem. A fact intruded itself upon me.
I slept at a small public-house in a Shaphambury back street on Sunday night. I did not get on to Shaphambury from Wyvern until two in the afternoon, because of the infrequency of Sunday trains, and I got no clue whatever until late in the afternoon of Monday.
Then there are a dozen roads and even railways out of the Clayton region, how is he to know which I have taken? Suppose he goes straight at once to the right station, they will not remember my departure for the simple reason that I didn't depart. But they may remember about Shaphambury? It was unlikely.
The nights had become very warm, and when next day I had ranged Shaphambury in vain, I was greatly tormented, as that unparalleled glory of the night returned, to think that under its splendid benediction young Verrall and Nettie made love to one another.
This young man, while he answered me, kept his eye on my collar and tie and I knew that they were abominable. "I want to find a lady and gentleman who came to Shaphambury on Tuesday," I said. "Friends of yours?" he asked with a terrible fineness of irony. I made out at last that here at any rate the young people had not been. They might have lunched there, but they had had no room.
But so far as I was concerned this odd settlement of pleasure-squatters was a mystery as well as a surprise, enhanced rather than mitigated by an imaginative suggestion or so I had received from the wooden-legged man at Shaphambury. I saw the thing as no gathering of light hearts and gay idleness, but grimly after the manner of poor men poisoned by the suppression of all their cravings after joy.
The impact in this particular case had been light or made without sufficient ink, and half the letters of the name had left no impression. I could distinguish and very faintly below D.S.O. I guessed the name in an instant flash of intuition. It was Shaphambury. The very gaps shaped that to my mind. Perhaps in a sort of semi-visibility other letters were there, at least hinting themselves.
I dressed methodically, choosing the least frayed of my collars, and shaving much more carefully than was my wont; then I went down to the Public Library to consult a map. Shaphambury was on the coast of Essex, a long and complicated journey from Clayton. I went to the railway-station and made some memoranda from the time-tables.
With the dawn that awakening went about the earth. I have told how it came to me, and how I walked in wonder through the transfigured cornfields of Shaphambury. It came to every one. Near me, and for the time, clear forgotten by me, Verrall and Nettie woke woke near one another, each heard before all other sounds the other's voice amidst the stillness, and the light.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking