The Great Skene Mystery by Bernard Capes — Read

I wanted above all things to be alone; to re-order my disordered thoughts; to marshal into some sort of coherence the fantastic figures which ran riot in my brain. I felt like some stunned animal turning to creep away and bury itself in shadow and solitude. The clack of the train in my head was like the worry of a screw shaft to a sea-sick passenger. I had to adapt all my reflections to its mechanic monotony. I could not detach my thoughts from those regular beats. They even assumed to my mind presently a definite measurement. A thought was exactly three inches long, and the wheels tapped it out, tapped it out to one endlessly repeated pattern.

I was horribly, ungraciously apprehensive of running across Johnny Dando in Footover. The vision of his round beneficent face would rise like an obtrusive moon over the troubled waters of my soul. To gain time for self-communion before he learned of my return was my most feverish desire. I was even, truth to tell, wishing the poor dear boy out of my way altogether. There was no longer room in my philosophy for even this gentle _farceur_.