and Domini ceased from walking up and down.  Several of the recruits came in hastily, accompanied by two Zouaves.  They were wet, and looked dazed and tired out.  Grasping their bags and bundles they went towards the platform.  A train glided slowly in, gleaming faintly with lights.  Domini’s trunks were slammed down on the weighing machine, and Suzanne, drawing out her purse, took her stand before the shining hole of the ticket-office.

In the wet darkness there rose up a sound like a child calling out an insulting remark.  This was followed immediately by the piping of a horn.  With a jerk the train started, passed one by one the station lamps, and, with a steady jangling and rattling, drew out into the shrouded country.  Domini was in a wretchedly-lit carriage with three Frenchmen, facing the door which opened on to the platform.  The man opposite to her was enormously fat, with a coal-black beard growing up to his eyes.  He wore black gloves and trousers, a huge black cloth hat, and a thick black cloak with a black buckle near the throat.  His eyes were shut, and his large, heavy head drooped forward.  Domini wondered if he was travelling to the funeral of some relative.  The two other men, one of whom looked like a commercial traveller, kept shifting their feet upon the hot-water tins that lay on the floor, clearing their throats and sighing loudly.  One of them coughed, let down the window, spat, drew the window up, sat sideways, put his legs suddenly up on the seat and groaned.  The train rattled more harshly, and shook from side to side as it got up speed.  Rain streamed down the window-panes, through which it was impossible to see anything.

Domini still felt alert, but an overpowering sensation of dreariness had come to her.  She did not attribute this sensation to fatigue.  She did not try to analyse it.  She only felt as if she had never seen or heard anything that was not cheerless, as if she had never known anything that was not either sad, or odd, or inexplicable.  What did she remember?  A train of trifles that seemed to have been enough to fill all her life; the arrival of the nervous and badly-dressed recruits at the wharf, their embarkation, their last staring and pathetic look at France, the stormy voyage, the sordid illness of almost everyone on board, the approach long after sundown to the small and unknown town, of which it was impossible to see anything clearly, the marshalling of the recruits pale with sickness, their pitiful attempt at cheerful singing, angrily checked by the Zouaves in charge of them, their departure up the hill carrying their poor belongings, the sleepless night, the sound of the rain falling, the scents rising from the unseen earth.  The tap of the Italian waiter at the door, the damp drive to the station, the long wait there, the sneering signal, followed by the piping horn, the jerking and rattling of the carriage, the dim light within it falling upon the stout Frenchman in his mourning, the streaming water upon the window-panes.  These few sights, sounds, sensations were like the story of a life to Domini just then, were more, were like the whole of life; always dull noise, strange, flitting, pale faces, and an unknown region that remained perpeturally invisible, and that must surely be ugly or terrible.