The train stopped at every single station, and sometimes
in between; we were five mortal hours on the road, and more than
once I thought Derrick would have fainted. However, he was not of
the fainting order, he only grew more and more ghastly in colour and
rigid in expression.
I felt very anxious about him, for the shock and the sudden anger
following on the trouble about Freda seemed to me enough to unhinge
even a less sensitive nature. 'At Strife' was the novel which had,
I firmly believe, kept him alive through that awful time at Ben
Rhydding, and I began to fear that the Major's fit of drunken malice
might prove the destruction of the author as well as of the book.
Everything had, as it were, come at once on poor Derrick; yet I
don't know that he fared worse than other people in this respect.
Life, unfortunately, is for most of us no well-arranged story with a
happy termination; it is a chequered affair of shade and sun, and
for one beam of light there come very often wide patches of shadow.
Men seem to have known this so far back as Shakespeare's time, and
to have observed that one woe trod on another's heels, to have
battled not with a single wave, but with a 'sea of troubles,' and to
have remarked that 'sorrows come not singly, but in battalions.
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