He had come a long way to get here, but having arrived, he found he had lost his sense of purpose. It was as though the journey itself had become his object.

He ordered a large pear-brandy and waited for an idea to return.  Dense amber cigar smoke circled him and fogged his view of the noisy barroom. It even seemed to muffle the voices of the drinkers who were happy to amuse themselves and ignore him as he sat, and drank, and retraced his journey. The voices welded to the rhythm of the wheels on the tracks that had brought him here, and he half-dreamed of the family who had shared the carriage with him.

They had spoken a language he was unfamiliar with. It sounded eastern to him, but it could have been anything. The children wept in their universal language but the words they spoke were lost on him.  The boy must have been a couple of years older than the girl who was little more than a baby. Nevertheless it was the little girl who did most of the talking, and he was astonished at how such a tiny thing could be so fluent in so strange and difficult a language.

They were beautiful.  Despite the urgent peril of his journey and the threat of its purpose, he was enchanted by the two little children. The father was sad. Distressed by the children’s tears, he was barely happier when they laughed. If anything, the father’s sadness grew stronger when the children played happily and innocently. He spoke very little and when he did, it was softly. He stared out of the carriage window for most of the journey, yet he was sure he saw nothing of the farms and villages, fields and rivers, that flashed by.

But the mother; neither as beautiful as the children nor as sad as the father, now grew in his memory more beautiful and sadder than any of them.

At one point she had taken a couple of small oranges from her basket and handed one to the little boy who, in his excitement, dropped it onto the floor of the carriage. It rolled to his foot and rested there. Before he had found the presence of mind to bend down and hand it back to the child, the mother had leaned forward and picked it up. 

He knew he would never forget the wordless apology in her face. No, it was not intimate. Neither was it in the least flirtatious or ostentatious. It was simply a sincere, fleeting little apology for the accidental intrusion into his privacy. It was, he soon enough started to understand, an instinctive act, the purity of which was made all the more potent by being entirely impersonal, and almost entirely unnecessary.

The cigar smoke coalesced around his heavy head, and he no longer heard the swirling voices of his drinking comrades.

The Captain of his regiment would be  expecting him to report for active duty first thing in the morning.

He clung to his last apology.