CHAPTER XVII
DISCURSIONS
Speaking generally, I have no doubt that it is true that an experienced traveller is far less liable to get into trouble on his journeys than a novice. But that any experience, no matter how great and varied, can render a traveller immune from the troubles of travel is a fond and vain superstition, only believed in by those who have had no experience. Take a recent experience of my own, for instance, and with it comfort, ye who have hitherto blamed your own inexperience for trouble into which you have fallen on some journeys. I am a Londoner, and I lived in London at the time of which I speak. I may say that although my experience of travelling in London and elsewhere was extensive and peculiar, I was handicapped by a great difficulty in breathing which made it hard for me to get about in this rapid age.
It chanced that I was due to lecture at Charterhouse one Saturday evening, and had, as usual, planned to return home after the lecture. It had been foggy the previous day, and the South-Western system, according to its wont in fog, had gone all to pieces, but twelve hours of perfectly clear weather had been experienced since, and I trusted therefore that my late afternoon train would be running as usual. But when I arrived at Waterloo I was met by the all too frequent experience of travellers whom a cruel fate condemns to use that most labyrinthine of stations, viz. an utter ignorance on the part of the officials as to when my train would start or which platform it would start from. Crowds of bewildered passengers hurried from one gate to another, badgering and exasperating the helpless officials with utterly futile questions, until, I suppose in desperation, a whole lot of them were embarked upon a train bound somewhere. How gladly they passed in through the barriers, had their tickets clipped and took their seats. And how wretched was their condition when, the train being full, an official arrived from somewhere, took down the direction board, and replaced it with a totally different one, resulting in the whole of them being turned out and cast adrift again.
But that such things happen continually at Waterloo I might endeavour to emphasise them, in order to be believed, but we all accept the South-Western as we do any other affliction which we are powerless to avoid, cease to wonder at its vagaries, and resign ourselves to them with what philosophy we may. I shall only, therefore, add that I did get a train to Godalming, starting only an hour late, but I learned that it was a train which should have started an hour earlier than the one I had intended to go by. However, I arrived at Charterhouse in time for a little dinner and my lecture, and was hospitably offered a bed by Mrs. Fletcher, as the running of the trains was so capricious. But I had said that I would return that night, and there was, very wisely, no ’phone at the school. However, it was arranged that the motor should run me down to the station, where, if I found the time-table to be still out of action, I was to ’phone home and return.
But when I arrived there I found the night beautifully clear, and an official emphatically assured me that the 9.33 to Waterloo would run on time, so I dismissed the car, and in due time, punctual to the minute, caught my train. In hallowed phrase all went well until we reached Woking, where a large number of passengers joined the train for Waterloo. But it did not leave, and to all questions the officials replied that they knew no more than their questioners the reason for the delay. Suddenly the fatal cry resounded from end to end of the train, “All change.” That packed train-load of people crowded the platform again, and the train we had left was shunted into the middle line of rails, where it remained to tantalise us by its ineptitude.
In cold and misery and apprehension we all waited on that platform until at last a train came in which landed us at Waterloo at 11.45. The tube served me well, but I was nearly exhausted after changing at Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square, and there I found the Highgate Tube in an awful muddle. Platform and trains were alike jammed with people, and the train men could not work. We were pulled out of the trouble by the energy of the driver, who came to the rescue of the guards, until at Mornington Crescent our load lightened a bit. Eventually I arrived at Highgate at 12.25, in one of the densest fogs of my recollection. All traffic was stopped, I was two miles from home, all uphill, and hardly able to stand from pain and racking cough. And it was bitterly cold. I battered at the door and rang the bell of the Archway Tavern, but it had only recently closed, and my summons was reasonably treated as that of some drunken wanderer.
I was very near collapse, and began to think of the immediate possibility of this being my end, for every breath I painfully drew was laden with death. Then a policeman hove in sight, to whom I addressed an appeal to get me in somewhere, weighted with half a crown. But he said there was nothing nearer than Finsbury Park, well over a mile away, except a doss-house, to which he dared not send me. And then he suddenly remembered having seen not far away a hansom cab with a poor old driver who had made practically nothing all the week. So he left me, and went in search of the cab, and in a very few minutes I had offered that poor old cabman half a sovereign to get me home. To say that we were both overjoyed is to put it very mildly. After seeing me safe inside, and the front let down, he started his old horse on a walk through the dense hedge of fog, but there was nothing in the way, and between us we found my home in half an hour. And when I sank upon a chair exhausted in my own room it was 2.20 a.m. But I was saved. I am thus prolix only to show how all my experience and local knowledge could not help me in these circumstances from having one of the very worst times of my life, and it was a wonder that I was not found dead upon the Highgate pavement.
A delightful recollection of mine is of an experience at the faithful city of Londonderry, an experience which I can afford to laugh at and enjoy now, but which at one time certainly began to look sinister. I arrived at the Great Northern Hotel in excellent time, for my lecture was not until eight, as usual, and my train was in about six. The secretary being very hard driven did not meet me, there was no need, for all was plain and straightforward. I had a chop, and while consuming it enquired of the waiter the way to the Y.M.C.A. Hall, where the lecture was given on my previous visit, but the way to which I did not remember because I had been taken there by the secretary. The waiter pointed to the old wall opposite to the hotel, showed me how to get to the top of it, and assured me that if I followed it round for about ten minutes I should arrive at my destination, for it was on the wall.
So I set out, not without some misgivings, for the night was very dark, and there was a high wind with driving rain. My breathing made the going in that exposed position very difficult, and I did not meet a single person of whom I could enquire, though I was certainly following my instructions. At last, after I had walked for twenty minutes, I felt sure I must be wrong, and looking over the wall into the street below, I spied a man, of whom I enquired if I was going right for the Y.M.C.A. Hall. He looked round him with that vacant air that in a citizen so annoys the strange enquirer of his way, and was about to direct me downhill or back again whence I had come. So I hastily said:
“All right, if you don’t know, never mind; but don’t you direct me back down that hill, for I won’t go. If I do I can’t climb it again.”
“All right, sir,” he replied cheerfully. “I was only getting my bearings. Ye’ll go this way.” And he pointed up a side street, giving me a mass of intricate instructions, during which I noticed that he was comfortably drunk. However, I had got halfway down the steps towards him by this time, and I felt disinclined to ascend, so I thanked him and followed the first part of his directions up the side street. It led me to an open space—a kind of market-place, I think, where I found two of those splendid fellows, the R.I.C., who speedily directed me right. But even then I made a mistake, for of two large buildings opposite each other I chose the one that was lit up, and into which many people were going. As I mounted the steps I was assailed by a host of ragged children, crying, “Taksinwiye, Taksinwiye,” so loudly as almost to deafen me. I passed steadily on, saying, “I don’t understand,” although it was gradually borne in upon my consciousness that they meant, “Take us in with you.”
And then I found that it was not the hall at all, and that a concert was about to commence! So I went, dubiously enough, to the dark, unlighted building opposite, and entered the open door, to find it deserted. And the clock struck eight! Utterly bewildered I stood in the flagged corridor and consulted my form of instructions, but here, at any rate, I could find no fault. Yet something was woefully wrong. As I stood wondering a young man came in, who, though a member, knew nothing about the lecture, and with that innate courtesy which is so pleasant a trait of Irish character, immediately devoted himself to my service. He bounded upstairs to the hall, to find it in darkness, and then offered to take me to the secretary’s house, that being the only thing he could think of doing.
By this time I was resigned to the thought that I had come from London to the extreme north-west coast of Ireland to lecture, and by some fiendish complication had missed it, so I walked down the street by his side and said nothing. Suddenly a small boy, in a very smart scout uniform, rushed up to me out of the darkness, saluted and asked:
“Please, sir, are you Mr. Bullen?”
“I am, my lad,” I replied wearily, almost too much spent to wonder at this strange thing. Again he saluted and said:
“Please, sir, the lecture’s in the Town Hall, and I’ve been sent to find you and show you the way there.”
“All right,” I answered. “Kindly hurry back and tell the Deputy-Lieutenant (my chairman) that I have been lost, but am now on my way, and will arrive shortly.”
And it was so. The lecture was the first to be held in the magnificent new building which the good citizens of Derry have erected, but when I arrived at its noble portals and found that it was practically next door to the hotel whence I had issued three-quarters of an hour before I felt confused in my mind. Fortunately, a most enthusiastic scout-master had offered the services of his troop to act as stewards, and when the lecturer did not turn up at the appointed time they were delighted to go in search of him, with the result as described. And we started the lecture only twenty-five minutes late after all. The secretary had done his part; he had written to the agency to warn them of the change of hall, but their letter had missed me, he had also mentioned it at the hotel, but it was an Irish hotel, and that is enough said upon the subject.
Apropos of Irish hotels, I am pleasantly reminded of an experience at Cork. My dear old friend, Mr. Lane, wanted to put me up at Vernon Mount, but I had to leave Cork for Belfast by a train at something like 6 a.m., and so he took a room for me at the Station Hotel. Then he interviewed the boots or sub-deputy-boots, I should think, a wild kerne who looked as if he had never got over the shock of being born. To him Mr. Lane said, with tremendous mock severity:
“Now, look here, ye omadhaun, this gentleman must be called with a cup of tea at a quarter-past five to-morrow morning in order to catch his train at six. If you let him lose that train I’ll kill ye as dead as meat. D’ye mind me now?”
Trembling in every limb, and with his eyes fixed upon Mr. Lane’s benevolent countenance till they seemed as if they would start from their sockets, the poor wretch repeated several times:
“Yis, sorr, yis, sorr!”
Mr. Lane and I said farewell, and I turned in. Now I have always been able to wake at will, at least since I left the sea, and I have only to remember on going to bed at what hour I wish to rise and that time I wake. So I had no fear. And I awoke at five, rising and making a leisurely toilet. At 5.30, feeling that I should like that cup of tea very much, I opened my bedroom door to go in search of it, when at the first step I took in the dark corridor I fell headlong over the prostrate form of the sub-deputy-boots, who was solidly asleep upon the mat at my door. He had nothing to say that was intelligible, but listened, as I thought, to my request for a cup of tea. Then he fled, and I saw him no more, but happily I had only to cross the platform to my train which had a breakfast car attached, so all was well.
Yet another Irish experience. I was staying with some very dear friends at a delightful little town on the County Down Railway, and on a certain evening was due in Belfast to lecture at eight o’clock. My friend and his wife accompanied me, and very jolly we were. Suddenly the train drew up at a large station, and I said cheerily, “Here we are, then.”
“Oh, no,” chirruped my host, looking out of the window. “This is Holywood. Next stop’s Belfast.” So as I had not seen the name-board, and as my friend used that section of line twice nearly every day of his life, I did not bother, but resumed the pleasant conversation. After what I thought was a rather long wait, we began to move out of the station, but in the wrong direction! Upon my remarking the fact, my friend said airily:
“Oh, they’re only shunting. They often do that at Holywood, to get the train on to its right platform at Belfast.”
But the rate of the train accelerated until suddenly we rushed through Holywood, and my friend smote his knee forcibly, crying to his wife:
“That was Belfast, and this is the fast to Bangor! We’ll not stop till we get to Bangor!”
My thoughts flew to that great audience in the Grosvenor Hall awaiting me, but I realised that I was in Ireland, where things have a way of adjusting themselves, and nobody seems to mind. A great deal of the personal element was to the fore during the next hour, and eventually I turned up on the platform only half an hour late, to be uproariously welcomed by two thousand people, who took the whole affair as a huge joke.
With hardly an exception a lecturer is treated in this country with every kindness and consideration, and if there are occasionally some thorns in his lot, he has usually himself to blame. But, in spite of Grish Chunder’s saying that there are no exceptions to no rules, I do believe orthodoxly that every rule has its exception, and once in this country I had the misfortune to meet with such an exception. In accordance with my usual procedure I shall endeavour to veil the identity of the place, and I hope to succeed, but I think any unbiased person will agree with me that the treatment I experienced was most cruel and inexcusable.
I came to this lecture from across the Irish Sea, and put up at a town near, where there was a large hotel, capable of accommodating several hundred guests, but at the time of my visit quite empty. The weather was very bad, for it was blowing a gale of wind, with snow squalls, and I did not stir out of doors until it was time for me to go to my lecture. Of course I dressed first, I mean I got into evening dress with a fine warm overcoat over all, and paying my bill, I took my baggage with me, because places such as the one I was going to had invariably put me up—it was the rule. I boarded the electric car, and in due time was dropped, apparently, in the open country, everything being hidden under a foot of snow. But the conductor directed me which way I should go, and after a painful pilgrimage of a quarter of an hour, during which I got wet to the knees, I found the buildings of which I was in search. Even then I could not find my way in for some time, and when at last I did, it was time for me to begin my lecture.
The gentleman who received me offered me dinner, but the audience was waiting, and I declined, except for a hot whisky and water, for my feet and legs were saturated with snow water. But I was buoyed up during the lecture with the thought of a comfortable meal and a warm bed awaiting me, so I hardly heeded the wretched state of my feet. When, then, the lecture was over, and more refreshment was offered me, I replied gaily that I would go to my room and change first, if they didn’t mind. Then I was told that no provision had been made for me, and that I was expected to retrace my way through that wretched night to the hotel I had left several miles away. I was horror-struck. I protested that it was surely impossible that in an institution of that enormous size, where hundreds of people lived, room could not be found for one stranger on a night like that. But my interlocutor was obdurate, and I had to lug that great bag of mine back to the cross-roads through the snow, and there await the electric car.
I reached the hotel after eleven o’clock, pitifully cold, but not hungry. I was past that. And was shown at once to my room, where, for the first time in my life, I was unable to sleep in a fairly comfortable bedroom, on account of the cold. Indeed, after I had been in bed some time, I got up, and, walking briskly up and down, tried to restore my circulation. Yet I suffered no ill effects from the treatment I had received, except that I felt, and still feel, what I believe to be a righteous glow of indignation against the authorities of such a place who could treat any fellow-creature who was their guest in the way they treated me. But it was my first and last experience of the kind.
A delightful yet almost disconcerting experience befell me once in the early days of my lecturing, before I had learned not to be so lavish in giving my services, because of the harm I was doing those whose living it was to lecture. I was invited to give a lecture free to the members of the Pupil Teachers’ Association at Toynbee Hall, and asked to choose my own subject. I accepted, and chose the subject of “How Poetry has helped Me.” Now, being impressed by what I considered the educational importance of the occasion, I did what I have never done before or since—wrote out my lecture to the extent of twelve close-packed foolscap sheets. When I came to the time and place of meeting I was aghast to find that I was the only male person present, my audience consisting, with the exception of several High School mistresses, of blooming maidens between the ages of fifteen and twenty—some hundreds of them. My chairwoman was that excellent lady Mrs. Barnett, wife of the lamented Canon Barnett, then warden of Toynbee Hall.
Well, what with my unusual audience and the unusual experience of having a written lecture and no slides, I was rather ill at ease, the only time that I can ever recollect feeling so upon a public platform. After a few graceful words from Mrs. Barnett, I rose, amid gentle hand-clapping, and plunged into my subject, reading steadily down nearly to the bottom of the first page of my MS., and then a new thought struck me. I looked up from my MS. and went on, forgetting all about my written matter, until suddenly remembering it I was about to resume where I had left off, when I noticed that my time was up! So I wound up with a few sentences, in which I alluded pathetically to my poor MS., and sat down amid really loud applause.
Then my chairwoman, during an interval of tea and cake, informed me that my audience would now entertain me with a selection of old English dances, if I cared to witness them, and naturally I said I would be delighted. So after signing a few dozen autograph books, an arm-chair was placed upon the dais for me, and there I lolled at my ease, like any Eastern Khalif, watching those Houris threading the mazy convolutions of the dance. I have a keen sense of the incongruous, and I confess that never in my life have I felt it more strongly than then, for, in the first place, dancing has never appealed to me, especially ballet dancing, and in the next, I seemed to myself to be more utterly out of place than I ever imagined I could be. Yet I can have nothing but praise for the kindness, courtesy, and assiduity of all present—who could none of them have known how utterly awkward I felt. Indeed I was glad when the evening was over.
Only once more in my life have I had the same feeling, and that was at the splendid Girls’ School at Cheltenham. My hostess, who was an enthusiastic alumna of the school, told me that I must on no account miss the wonderful sight of Miss Beale reading prayers in the morning and the trooping in of the 1000 scholars more or less. By some means that I do not remember I was got into the school, and given a seat upon a small dais close to a reading desk, facing the great bare hall. At a given signal the huge crowd of young ladies trooped in, filling every available seat, and when they had all subsided, Miss Beale, a short, stout lady in black, with a dreadfully bruised face and a black eye, came in and stood at the desk.
She read the prayers and a chapter in a splendidly sonorous voice, during which the silence and attention was quite painful in its perfection. She ceased reading, and, turning sharply to me, whom to all appearance she had not noticed before, said, in a voice that rang deeply through that profound silence:
“You must go now.”
Ah, me! was ever worm so crushed. My face and neck burned. I wonder my clothes didn’t catch fire, as, muttering something unintelligible, but meant to be apologetic, I stumbled off the dais, and, pierced by those two thousand merry eyes, found my way out. Then the revulsion set in, and I felt hideously angry, because I felt sure I had been led into that false position for a joke, and that I had no business there at all. But I learned that the true reason was that the wonderful old lady had just sustained a bad fall from her tricycle. She had recovered with marvellous celerity, considering her age, but there could be no doubt that the occurrence had affected her temper, and who could wonder if it did? Still, I wished most sincerely that some other lightning-conductor might have been found than myself, or that one other man might have been there to lend me a little moral support. I felt just as if I had been caught in some prohibited meeting and was being led off to execution.