In A Waiting-Room

On a morning sick as the day of doom      With the drizzling gray      Of an English May,     There were few in the railway waiting-room.     About its walls were framed and varnished     Pictures of liners, fly-blown, tarnished.     The table bore a Testament     For travellers' reading, if suchwise bent.      I read it on and on,      And, thronging the Gospel of Saint John,      Were figures - additions, multiplications -     By some one scrawled, with sundry emendations;      Not scoffingly designed,      But with an absent mind, -      Plainly a bagman's counts of cost,      What he had profited, what lost;     And whilst I wondered if there could have been      Any particle of a soul      In that poor man at all,      To cypher rates of wage      Upon that printed page,      There joined in the charmless scene     And stood over me and the scribbled book      (To lend the hour's mean hue      A smear of tragedy too)     A soldier and wife, with haggard look     Subdued to stone by strong endeavour;      And then I heard      From a casual word     They were parting as they believed for ever.      But next there came      Like the eastern flame     Of some high altar, children - a pair -     Who laughed at the fly-blown pictures there.     "Here are the lovely ships that we,     Mother, are by and by going to see!     When we get there it's 'most sure to be fine,     And the band will play, and the sun will shine!"     It rained on the skylight with a din     As we waited and still no train came in;     But the words of the child in the squalid room     Had spread a glory through the gloom.