He paid a waitress for his supper, and then went into the dark little
lavatory behind the room and put on his canvas suit. Coming out into
the room again, he intended to say something about having slipped on
his overalls for a night job; but nothing of the kind was necessary.
Nobody cared, nobody noticed. His difficulty was to make the counter
girl attend to him at all. He spoke to her bruskly at last; and then
she sold him slices of cold meat, cheese, biscuits, a lot of chocolate
and some nuts, with which he filled those two inner pockets of his
jacket. They had become his larders now.
There were not more than a dozen passengers in the whole train, and no
one on the platform at Waterloo took the faintest notice of him.
No one noticed him three hours later when he left the train at a
station short of Manninglea Cross; and soon he was far from other men,
striking across the dark country, with the stars high over his head,
and his native air blowing into his lungs. He came down over the heath
on the Abbey side of the Cross Roads, and reached Hadleigh Wood just
before dawn.
He felt at home now, alone with the wild animals, on ground that he
had learned the tricks of when he was like a wild animal himself.
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