Three Hundred Miles in the Train
They filled a whole compartment--at least there was one seat vacant,
but people seemed shy of taking it after a rapid survey of them all.
The whole seven of them, and only Esther as bodyguard--Esther--in
a pink blouse an sailor hat, with a face as bright and mischievous
as Pip's own.
The Captain had come to see them off, with Pat to look after the
luggage. He had bought the tickets--two whole ones for Esther and
Meg, and four halves for the others. Baby was not provided with even
a half, much to her private indignation--it was an insult to her four
years and a half, she considered, to go free like the General.
But the cost of those scraps of pasteboard had made the Captain look
unhappy: he only received eighteenpence change out of the ten pounds
he had tendered; for Yarrahappini was on the borders of the Never-Never
Land.
He spent the eighteenpence on illustrated papers--Scraps, Ally
Sloper's Half-Holiday, Comic Cuts, Funny Folks, and the like,
evidently having no very exalted opinion of the literary tastes
of his family; and he provided Esther with a yellow-back--on
which was depicted a lady in a green dress fainting in the arms
of a gentleman attired in purple, and Meg with Mark Twain's "Jumping
Frog", because he had noticed a certain air of melancholy in her eyes
lately.
Then bells clanged and a whistle shrieked, porters flew wildly about,
and farewells were said, sadly or gaily as the case might be.
There was a woman crying: in a hopeless little way on the platform,
and a girl with sorrowful, loving eyes leaning out of a second-class
window towards her; there was a brown-faced squatter, in a tweed cap
and slippers, to whom the three-hundred-mile journey was little more
of an event than dining; and there was the young man going selecting,
and thinking England was little farther, seeing his wife and child
were waving a year's good-bye from the platform. There were sportsmen
going two hundred miles after quail and wallaby; and cars full of
ladies returning to the wilds after their yearly or half-yearly tilt
with society and fashion in Sydney; and there were the eight we are
interested in, clustering around the door and two windows, smiling
and waving cheerful good-byes to the Captain.
He did not look at all cast down as the train steamed fussily
away--indeed, he walked down the platform with almost a jaunty air as if
the prospect of two months bachelordom was not without its redeeming
points.
It was half-past six in the afternoon when they started, and they would
reach Curlewis, which was the nearest railway station to Yarrahappini,
about five the next morning. The expense of sleeping-berths had been
out of the question with so many of them; but in the rack with the bags
were several rolls of rugs and two or three air-pillows against the
weary hours. The idea of so many hours in the train had been delightful
to all the young ones; none of them but Judy had been a greater distance
than forty or fifty miles before, and it seemed perfectly fascinating
to think of rushing on and on through the blackness as well as the
daylight.
But long before ten o'clock a change came o'er the spirit of their
dreams. Nell and Baby had had a quarrel over the puffing out of the
air-cushions, and were too tired and cross to make it up again; Pip
had hit Bunty over the head for no ostensible reason, and received
two kicks in return; Judy's head ached, and the noise, was not calculated
to cure it; Meg had grown weary of staring out into the moving darkness,
and wondering whether Alan would notice she was never on the river-boat
now; and the poor little General was filling the hot air with
expostulations, in the shape of loud roars, at the irregularities of
the treatment he was undergoing.
Esther had taken his day clothes off, and made a picture of him in
a cream flannel nightgown and a pink wool jacket. And for half an
hour, he had submitted good-temperedly to being handed about and
tickled and half-smothered with kisses. He had eyen permitted Nell to
bite his little pink toes severally, and say a surprising amount of
nonsense about little pigs that went to market and did similarly
absurd things.
He had hardly remonstrated when there had been a dispute about the
possession of his person, and Bunty had clung to his head and body
while Nell pulled vigorously at his legs.
But after a time, when Esther made him a little bed on one of the
seats and tried to lay him down upon it, a sense of his grievances
came over him.
He had a swinging cot at home; with little gold bars at the foot to
blink at--he could not see why he should be mulcted of it, and made to
put up with a rug three times doubled. He was accustomed, too, to a
shaded light, a quiet room, and a warning H'sh! h'sh! whenever
people forgot themselves sufficiently to make the slightest noise.
Here the great yellow light flared all the time, and every one of the
noisy creatures at whose hands he endured so much was within a few
feet of him.
So he lifted up his voice and wept. And when he found weeping did not
produce his gold-barred cot, and the little dangling tassels on the
mosquito nets, he raised his voice two notes, and when even there
Esther only went on patting his shoulder in a soothing way he burst
into roars absolutely deafening.
Nellie dangled all her long curls in his face to engage his
attention, but he clutched them viciously and pulled till the tears
came into her eyes. Esther and Meg sang lullabies till their tongues
ached, Judy tried walking him up and down the narrow space, but he
stiffened himself in her arms, and she was not strong enough to hold
him. Finally he dropped off into an exhausted sleep, drawing deep,
sobbing breaths and little hiccoughs of sorrow.
Then Bunty was discovered asleep on the floor with his head under a seat,
and had to be lifted into an easier position; and Baby, bolt upright
in a corner, was nodding like a little pink-and-white daisy the sun has
been too much for.
One by one the long hours dragged away; farther and farther through
the silent, sleeping country flew the red-eyed train, swerving round
zigzag curves, slackening up steeper places, flashing across the
endless stretching plains.
The blackness grew grey and paler grey, and miles and miles of
monotonous gum saplings lay between the train and sky. Up burst
the sun, and the world grew soft and rosy like a baby waked from
sleep. Then the grey gathered again, the pink, quivering lights
faded out, and the rain came down--torrents of it, beating against
the shaking window-glass, whirled wildly ahead by a rough morning
wind, flying down from the mountains. Such a crushed, dull-eyed,
subdued-looking eight they were as they tumbled out on the Curlewis
platform when five o'clock came. Judy coughed at the wet, early,
air, and was hurried into the waiting-room and wrapped in a rug.
Then the train tossed out their trunks and portmanteaux and rushed on
again, leaving them desolate and miserable, looking after it, for it
seemed no one had come to meet them.
The sound of wet wheels slushing through puddles, the crack of a whip,
the even falling of horses' feet, and they were all outside again,
looking beyond the white railway palings to the road.
There were a big, covered waggonette driven by a wide yellow oil-skin
with a man somewhere in its interior, and a high buggy, from which an
immensely tall man was climbing.
"Father!"
Esther rushed out into the rain. She put her arms round the dripping
mackintosh and clung fast to it for a minute or two. Perhaps that is
what made her cheeks and eyes so wet and shining.
"Little girl--little Esther child!" he said, and almost lifted her
off the ground as he kissed her, tall though Meg considered her.
Then he hurried them all off into the buggies, five in one and three
in the other. There was a twenty-five-mile drive before them yet.
"When did you have anything to eat last?" he asked; the depressed
looks of the children were making him quite unhappy. "Mother has
sent you biscuits and sandwiches, but we, can't get coffee or
anything hot till we get home."
Nine o'clock, Esther told him, at Newcastle, but it was so boiling
hot they had had to leave most of it in their cups and scramble into
the train again. The horses were whipped up; and flew over the
muddy roads at a pace that Pip, despite his weariness, could not but
admire.
But it was a very damp, miserable drive, and the General wept with
hardly a break from start to finish, greatly to Esther's vexation,
for it was his first introduction to his grandfather.
At last, when everyone was beginning to feel the very end of patience
had come, a high white gate broke the monotony of dripping wet
fences.
"Home!" Esther said joyfully. She jumped the General up and down on
her knee.
"Little Boy Blue, Mum fell off that gate when she was three," said she,
looking at it affectionately as Pip swung it open.
Splash through the rain again; the wheels went softly now, for the
way was covered with wet fallen leaves.
"Oh, where IS the house?" Bunty said, peeping through Pip's arm
on the box seat, and seeing still nothing but an endless vista of
gum trees. "I thought, you said we were there, Esther."
"Oh, the front door is not quite so near the gate as at Misrule,"
she said. And indeed it was not.
It was fifteen minutes before they even saw the chimneys, then there
was another gate to be opened. A gravel drive now trimly kept,
high box round the flower-beds, a wilderness of rose bushes that
pleased Meg's eye, two chip tennis-courts under water.
Then the house.
The veranda was all they noticed; such a wide one it was, as wide as
an ordinary room, and there were lounges and chairs and tables
scattered about, hammocks swung from the corners, and a green thick
creeper with rain-blown wisteria for an outer wall.
"O--o--oh," said Pip; "o--oh! I AM stiff--o--oh, I say, what are you
doing?"
For Esther had deposited her infant on his knee, and leapt out of
the waggonette and up the veranda steps.
There was a tiny old lady there, with a great housekeeping apron
on. Esther gathered her right up in her arms, and they kissed and
clung to each other till they were both crying.
"My little girl!" sobbed the little old lady, stroking, with eager
hands, Esther's wet hair and wetter cheeks.
And Bunty, who had followed close behind, looked from the tall figure
of his stepmother to the very small one of her mother and laughed.
Esther darted back to the buggy, took the General from Pip, and,
springing up the steps again, placed him in her mother's arms.
"Isn't he a fat 'un!" Bunty said, sharing in her pride; "just you
look at his legs."
The old lady sat down for one minute in the wettest chair she could
find, and cuddled him close up to her.
But he doubled his little cold fists, fought himself free, and
yelled for Esther.
Mr. Hassal had emptied the buggies by now, and came up the steps
himself.
"Aren't you going to give them some breakfast, little mother?" he
said, and the old lady nearly dropped her grandson in her distress.
"Dear, dear!" she said. "Well, well! Just to think of it! But it
makes one forget."
In ten minutes they were all in dry things, sitting in the warm
dining-room and making prodigious breakfasts.
"WASN'T I hungry!" Bunty said. His mouth was full of toast, and he
was slicing the top off his fourth egg and keeping an eye on a dish
that held honey in one compartment and clotted cream in another.
"The dear old plates!" Esther picked hers up after she had emptied it
and looked lovingly at the blue roses depicted upon it. "And to think
last time l ate off one I--"
"Was a little bride with the veil pushed back from your face," the old
lady said, "and everyone watching you cut the cake. Only two have broken
since--oh yes, Hannah, the girl who came after Emily, chipped off the
handle of the sugar-basin and broke a bit out of the slop-bowl."
"Where did Father stand?" Meg asked. She was peopling the room with
wedding guests; the ham and the chops, the toast and eggs and dishes
of fruit, had turned to a great white towered cake with silver
leaves.
"Just up there where Pip is sitting," Mrs. Hassal said, "and he
was helping Esther with the cake, because she was cutting it
with his sword. Such a hole you made in the table-cloth, Esther, my
very best damask one with the convolvulus leaves, but, of course,
I've darned it--dear, dear!"
Baby had upset her coffee all over herself and her plate and Bunty,
who was next door.
She burst into tears of weariness and nervousness at the new people,
and slipped off her chair under the table. Meg picked her up.
"May I put her to bed?" she said; "she is about worn out."
"Me, too," Nellie said, laying down her half-eaten scone and pushing
back her chair. "Oh, I am so tired!"
"So'm I." Bunty finished up everything on his plate in choking
haste and stood up. "And that horrid coffee's running into my
boots."
So just as the sun began to smile and chase away the sky's heavy
tears, they all went to bed again to make up for the broken night,
and it was: six o'clock and tea-time before any of them opened their
eyes again.