Train Tales

early evening train backed carefully into the City station as one conscious of having important passengers to carry; the doors of first-class carriages were opened and mat-baskets placed on the racks by attentive porters who could see the tipping season ahead. The stout florid old gentle man with a huge white dahlia in his coat flopped down into the corner of the compartment, puffed very hard at his cigar, pressed against the glass his patent candle, lighted it, and glowered resentfully at the other passengers. He fixed a long lad opposite with a definite eye, and when the long lad opposite lighted a cigarette the stout florid City man growled.

“Did you say you wanted the window down?” asked the long lad.

“No, sir, I did not say anything of the sort. I don’t want my head blown off, and I’ve had quite enough worry in the City to-day without having half a ton of coal-dust in my eye. I’m not a polar bear, sir.”

The long youth asked “Why not?” but the florid gentleman fortunately did not hear the question.

“There is a class of people in this world,” he said, flicking the ash from his cigar to his bulgy capacious waistcoat, “who must always be interfering with everything. If they see a window up they want it down; if they see a door shut they want it open; if they see the gas low they want it up. Always restless, always pottering about. Great heavens, man! why can’t people keep still? It’s the great curse of this present so-called generation of ours that everyone must be continually on the go. Why in the world don’t people keep quiet and mind their own business, eh?”

The long youth had found an enchanting inquest in his evening paper and did not answer.

“What I can’t stand, what I never could stand, and what I never will stand,” he went on oratorically, “is the man who forces his conversation on other people and bothers them when they want to be quiet. It’s one of those foolish, stupid blunders that youth commits simply and wholly and entirely from the want of experience, and the worst of it is they won’t be told. Oh dear no! You mustn’t attempt to teach them anything.” (With much bitterness.) “Tell them they’re wrong, tell them they’re making a mistake, tell them they’re making a blunder, and bless my soul, they’re ready to bite your head off before you can say ‘knife!’ No, in the present day it is only the very young who are rich in experience. There’s a set of half-baked young fools looking like dough who are going about this London of ours, sir, at the present day who, lumped all together, have got just about the intellect of a hen.”

He chuckled a little with satisfaction at having found this simile, and said it thrice over for luck. The long youth nodded.

“After all,” went on the stout gentleman softened by success, “after all I suppose it’s what one might venture to call the spirit of the age. I look at girls nowadays, and what do I find? What do I find, sir, eh?”

The long youth, slightly interested, looked up.

“I find a desire to reverse their sex and to upset the arrangements of—er—Providence in every shape and form. In fact,” he smiled, “I—I made rather a good sort of joke—you might call it a pun perhaps—the other evening after dinner. We were talking on this very subject and I happened to remark quite casually—I didn’t think over the joke at all, it came out just as naturally as I’m giving it to you at the present moment—I said that whereas in the old days girls wanted to get married and cried ‘Altar, altar,’ now their cry is ‘Alter, alter.’”

The stout gentleman laughed very much at this, and when he had wiped his eyes and relighted his. cigar he spelt the joke carefully, and laughed again. The long youth muttered some suggestion, about sending it to the Rock, and turned to the racing results.

“Take my two girls at home now.”

The youth shook his head and said he wasn’t having any.

“If I didn’t keep them well in hand and put a stopper on every little—what shall I say?—tendency that way, why I’ve no doubt they too would want to smoke their cigarettes and ride their bicycles, and play the cornet, and carry on like one o’clock. Fortunately for them, sir, I say fortunately for them, they have a parent.”

The long youth said that he knew lots of girls who had parents.

“In the case of my daughters it’s an uncommonly good thing for them. Un-commonly good, sir. Why, you see girls in other families go and blunder into marriage before they’ve finished cutting their teeth almost. You don’t find my girls like that. I don’t mind telling you—you seem a fairly intelligent young man.”

He laid an emphasis on the word “seem” in order to prevent any idea that he was assuming responsibility.

“I don’t mind telling you in confidence that the plan I have is this. It’s a very simple one. Say that I find some young fellow walking home with them from church, or sending them books from Mudie’s, or lifting hats a little too much to them when they pass them. What do I do?”

The youth opposite said he didn’t know.

“Why I take the first opportunity of having five minutes’ talk with that young gentleman. I take him by the coat button in a friendly way, a perfectly friendly way, and I say, ‘Look here, sir, what the deuce is the idea of all this nonsense? What does it mean, eh? What are you driving, at, eh? Do you mean straightforward, prompt, and manly business, or do you mean only tomfoolery.’ That’s the way I talk to them. I’m a blunt outspoken man, mind you, and I don’t mince my words. What’s the result? Why simply this, that having adopted that policy for a certain number of years my girls are at the present moment as single as they were when—when they were born. One’s thirty-two and the other’s thirty-four, and in a few years’ time they’ll be old enough to select husbands for themselves, and then”—he fluttered his newspaper—“and then I shall wash my hands of all the responsibility. All the responsibility, sir.”

The stout, florid gentleman sat back and frowned at the long youth. The long youth shifted uneasily but said nothing. Being pressed however for an opinion he submitted respectfully that it was a bit rough on the girls.

“I knew you’d say that, declared the florid gentleman triumphantly; “I could have sworn those were the very words that you were going to use. I could see them coming. It’s just what I should have expected from a young man with absolutely no experience of the world.”

The youth said, with some show of spirit, that he’d knocked about as much as most chaps of his age.

“Yes yes, yes,” said the stout gentleman testily, “I dare say you have, but that’s not the point. Don’t let us get away from the main argument or else we shan’t know what we are talking about. The whole gist of the matter is this. A young chit of a girl, of say twenty-eight, somebody she likes, and there”  (with sarcasm) “there she is in love as she calls it. But my good sir, she doesn’t know when she’s in love and when she isn’t, unless she’s got some one close at hand to give her advice in the matter. For instance, what they call falling in love, I might call an accident that has to be prevented just like any other catastrophe. You see the great thing about me this. I’ve argued all these matters out with myself and thought them-over and settled them. They haven’t. And that’s why I think that a good many of these affairs ought to be submitted to those of us who know instead of”

The train slackened and the florid gentleman collected his mat-basket and his newspapers and his patent reading candle.

“Here I am,” he said, craning himself into position  “here I am, at what I may perhaps venture to call my—er—destination. It any words of mine have been of use to you, my dear young sir, why all I can say is that you are as welcome to them as though they were your own. Above all let me counsel you to avoid any tendency to forcing yourself on”

“Nah then, sir,” said the porter at the door, “we can’t keep this trine here all night while you argue. In or out, one or the other.”

girl in the green hat was hurled breathless into the crowded carriage as the train started, and her companion stumbled after her. She sat on an arm-rest and he stood up at the door holding the hat-rack. She fanned herself with her theatre programme, pulled off her puce-coloured gloves and set her green hat straight with the aid of the slip of mirror opposite.

“Well, ’Erbert,” she gasped contented, “I’m glad we caught this trine. Had a rare old run for it, ’aven’t we? I suppose if we’d missed this we should ’ave had to wait for the next?”

He did not answer.

“I say, dear, I suppose if we’d missed this we should ’ave had to wait for the next?”

Herbert said that of course they would.

“And aren’t these first-class carriages nice too? What I mean to say is, nicely fitted up with cushions and arm-rests and what not. I don’t know that I ’ve ever been in a first-class carriage before, unless it was that time we came back from Chingford, one Sunday night three or four summers ago, before we were engaged.” She looked round the compartment again, and clicked her tongue amazedly. “My word,” she said, “I wonder what ever these rileway companies will go and think of next! For the matter of that though it’s much the same everywhere you look. Fancy those girls on the stage to-night ’Erbert! I am sure I should never have believed it possible if I hadn’t seen it done with me own eyes. Dance? I never in all my born days dreamt of any dancing approaching it. And you made it worse too.”

She looked at him reproachfully.

“You and your giggling,” she said severely. “I think the least you can do when you’re out is to behave. And then when the best part of it came on, with the comic man in his shirt sleeves up in the branches of a tree and listening to what they were saying about him, why you couldn’t keep your eyes open.”

Herbert remarked with an injured air that he was up and about that morning before some people were a-bed. Herbert also added that he had to work for his living. He didn’t belong to the landed gentry, he said, and he didn’t see no chance of belonging to them either. The girl in the green hat glanced at her programme.

“But wasn’t that a treat where the old chap comes on and sings a song about when he was a boy and fell in love, and then about being a grown man and falling in love, and then about being old and falling in love? Let’s see, how did it go? I had the tune at the time, but it’s gone now. A lot of these things go in one ear and out at the other with me. Once they get on the piano organ I’m safe, but without that I’m—well, I’m a perfect silly. I am reely.”

Herbert, shifting his hold to the opposite rack, remarked with some austerity that she needn’t make a hymn of it if she was.

“Oh”—frankly—“I never mind acknowledging the truth, bless you! There’s no ’umbug about me. I’m a regular Polly Blunt, mother always used to say, and I glory in it too.”

The green hat shivered with a sense of its owner’s rectitude and had to be set straight with the aid of the slip of mirror opposite. Herbert, feeling that he had lost ground, mentioned that the comic duet sort of thing between the three old men wasn’t, he considered, so dusty.

“Oh, I thought it was capital!” she said with much enthusiasm. “I sat back in my seat and I simply roared! What the people round me must have thought I don’t know; what’s more I don’t care. One or two of ’em said ‘’ush,’ but as I said, I hadn’t paid—or rather, dear, you hadn’t paid—your shilling to come there and ’ush. Of course, though, it’s impossible to argue with some people. You might talk to them for a whole year and not knock any sense into them. Wouldn’t you like to sit here, dear, and let me stand up for a bit?”

Herbert said blushing that he was right enough as he was. It wouldn’t be long before they were home now.

“Ah,” she said sighing, “that’s the worst part of it. Coming ’ome I mean. I firmly believe that those are ’appiest who never stir out at all.”

Herbert asked how she made that out.

“Why can’t you see? I should ’ave thought anybody could ’ave reelised that. You go out, say, to a theatre and you get excited over the piece—at least I do—and you forget all about your little worries and about the few words you had with your Aunt Ann Eliza and, so to speak, you’re in quite another world. Follow me, ’Erbert?”

Herbert said humorously that he could follow her anywhere if she didn’t go too quick.

“Don’t be silly. I mean follow me argument.”

Herbert said he knew what she meant. He was only having a bit of a joke with her, he said.

“Well,” she said tartly, “this is no joking matter at all. I’m as fond of a joke as here and there a one, but this what I’m saying now is sense. There’s a time for jokes and a time for sense, and when anybody’s talking sense isn’t the time for working in silly jokes.” She screwed the programme and her puce gloves tightly in her hands and looked very hard away from Herbert at a white-haired old lady in the corner. “They’re two entirely different things, and it is only right that they should be kept apart.”

Herbert recalled her to the topic under discussion.

“Well as I was saying when you must needs put your oar in, that you go to a play and you seem to be carried away with it, in a manner of speaking, and then when it’s all over and the curtain comes down and you’re out in the Strand, the effect gradually begins to work off and off, and presently you find yourself in quite a fit of the miserables. Anyhow that’s the way with me. Of course I don’t pretend to speak for other people; I only speak for meself. I’m sure the day after I’ve been out to a party or what not I am as cross and low spirited as I can possibly be. I am reely. My young sister doesn’t dare so much as to open her mouth to me. Not, mind you, that I haven’t got in a general way as good a temper as anybody living at the present moment; but it’s the getting light-headed first, and then the kind of a relapse, if you know what I mean, afterwards. It’s no use people telling me to fight against it because I simply can’t, and there’s an end of the matter. And that’s why sometimes—you may have noticed it, ’Erbert—sometimes when we’re out at any place wherever everything’s lively and bright and jolly and so forth, suddenly, all at once”

She looked impressively round the crowded compartment with the manner of one approaching a dramatic situation.

“All at once you’ll see me go off into a kind of fit of thoughtfulness. Of course people think it means I’m not enjoying meself, and they come up and jolly me about it. But it isn’t that exactly; it’s more the kind of—well, looking forward to the next day sort of thing. After all it’s a world of ups and downs and”—vaguely—“it would never do for us all to be alike.”

Herbert, agreeing, said it would get pretty blooming menotinous if we were.

“I’ve often had other girls envy me my good spirits though,” she said, with a more self-appreciative air—“of’en and of’en. Some girls are too quiet, you know, jest the same as some are too noisy. I like the ’appy mejium meself; then you please all parties. I’ve seen girls who sit in a corner and if a young fellow says anything to them in the way of chaff they haven’t a single word to answer back for themselves. They haven’t reely. Might as well be made of wood for all they say for themselves. But I don’t know as I don’t prefer that class of young girls to the class that has got too much to say, mind you. Them I can't stand at any price. Jaw, jaw, jaw from morning, noon to night, and never give anyone else a chance to get a word in edgeways. A great deal depends of course on the way a girl’s been brought up, because if she’s never been told she can’t expect to know how to behave, but”

The train slackened. Herbert released his hold of the rack and took from his pocket the fag end of a cigar.

“I say,” she remarked suddenly as she stepped down to the platform, “while I think of it, mind we say good-bye to-night before we reach the corner of our road. I don’t trust the neighbours round our way. For one thing they can’t keep their mouths shut.”