Emmeline had childlike lapses; she rejoiced greatly, for instance, at
seeing a Strasbourg stork. She confessed, when she saw it, to having
read Hans Andersen when she was a little girl, and was happy in the
resemblance of the tall chimneys he stood on, and the high-pitched red
roofs he surveyed, to the pictures she remembered. But, for that matter,
so were we all. We had an hour and a half at Strasbourg, and we drove,
of course, to the Cathedral; but it was the stork that we saw, and that
each of us privately considered the really valuable impression. He stood
beside his nest with his chin sunk in his neck, looking immensely lucky
and wise, and one quite agreed with Emmeline that it must be lovely to
live under him.
We lunched at the station, and, as the meal progressed, saw again how
widespread and sincere is the German sentiment to which I alluded,
perhaps too lightly, in the last chapter. Our waitresses were all that
could be desired, until there came between us and them a youth from
parts without. He was sallow, and the waitresses were buxom; he might
have been a student of law or medicine, they were naturally of much
lower degree. But they frankly forsook us and sat down beside him in
terms of devotion and an open aspect of radiant happiness. When one went
to draw his lager beer he put an unrepelled arm round the waist of the
other, and when the first came back he chucked her under the chin with
undisguised affection, the while we looked on and starved, none knowing
the language except Isabel, who thought of nothing but blushing. As Mr.
Malt said, if the young man could only have made up his mind, we might
have been able to get along with the rejected one; but, apparently, he
was not in the least embarrassed by numbers, sending a large and
beguiling smile to yet a further hand-maiden, who passed enviously
through the _speise-salle_ with a basin of soup. It was only when Dicky
stalked across to the old woman who sold sausages and biscuits behind a
counter, and pointed indignantly to the person who held all the
available table service of the Strasbourg railway station on his knees,
that we obtained redress. The old woman laughed as if it were amusing,
and called the maidens shrilly; but even then they came with reluctance,
as if we had been mere schnapps instead of ten complete luncheons, one
soup, and a bread and cheese, as Dicky said. The bread and cheese was
the Count, and one gathered from it that the improvement in his
immediate prospects was not yet assured, that the arrangimento was still
in futuro.
We had become such a large party, that it is impossible to relate the
whole of our experiences even in the half hour during which we dawdled
round the Strasbourg waiting-room until the train should start. I know
it was then, for instance, that Mrs. Portheris took Dicky aside and told
him how deeply she sympathised with him in his trying position, and bade
him only be faithful to the dictates of his own heart and all would come
right in time. I know Dicky promised faithfully to do so, but I must not
dwell upon it. Nor is the opportunity adequate to express the
indignation we all felt, and not Mr. Mafferton merely, at the
insufficient personal impression we made upon the German railway
officials. They were so completely preoccupied with their magnificent
selves and their vast business that they were unable even to look at us
when we asked them questions, and their sole conception of a reply was
an order, in terms that sounded brutal to a degree. They were
objectionably burly and red in the face; they wore an offensive number
of buttons and straps upon their uniforms. As Mr. Mafferton said, they
utterly misconceived their position in life, attempting to Kaiser the
travelling public by Divine right instead of recognising themselves as
humble servants, buttoned only to be made more agreeable to the eye.
One such person trampled upon us to such an extent that I have never
been able to satisfy myself that the Senator was sincere in making his
little mistake. We were sitting in dejected rows, with a number of other
foreigners who had been similarly reduced, when this official entered
the waiting-room, advanced to the middle of it, posed with great
majesty, and emitted several bars of a kind of chant or chime. It was
delivered with too much vigour, and it stopped too abruptly, to be
entirely enjoyable; but there was no doubt about the musical intention.
It was not even intoning; it was singing, beginning with moderation,
going on stronger with indignation, and ending suddenly in a crescendo
of denunciation.
We smiled in difficult self-restraint as he went away, and Dicky
remarked that he supposed we were in their hands, we couldn't object to
anything they did to us. In five minutes he came back to exactly the
same spot and sang again the same words, in the same key, with the same
unction. "Encore!" exclaimed Mr. Malt boldly, but cowered under the
glare that was turned upon him, and utterly fell away when we reminded
him of the punishments attached in Germany to the charge of _lèse
majesté_. Precisely five minutes more passed away, and Bawlinbuttons, as
Miss Callis called him, entered again. Then occurred the Senator's
little mistake. In the midst of the second bar, the indignant one,
Bawlinbuttons stopped short, petrified by poppa, who had advanced and
was holding out copper coins whose usefulness we had left behind us, to
the value of about fifteen cents.
"Here's the collection," said poppa benevolently--for an instant or two
he was quite audible--"but unless you know some other tune the company
wish me to say that they won't trouble you any further."
There are misunderstandings that are never rectified, sometimes because
a train draws up at the platform as in this case, and sometimes for
other reasons, and it was natural enough that poppa should fail to
comprehend Bawlinbuttons' indignant shouts to the effect that a Kaiser
should never be mistaken for an organ-grinder, merely because his tastes
are musical. Neither is it likely that the various Teutons who were
waiting for the information will ever understand why the announcement
that the train for Saarburg, Nancy, Frankfort, and Mayence would leave
at ten o'clock precisely was never completed for the third time,
according to the regulation. But we have often wondered since what
Bawlinbuttons did with the coppers.
We divided up on the way to Mayence, and Mr. and Mrs. Malt came into
the compartment with the Senator, momma, and me. Mr. Malt was
unsatisfied with poppa's revenge on Bawlinbuttons, and proposed to make
things awkward further for the guard. He said it could be done very
simply, by a disagreement between himself and the Senator as to whether
the windows should be open or shut. He said he had heard of a German
guard put to the most enjoyable misery by such a dispute, not knowing
the language of the disputants and being forced to arbitrate upon their
respective demands. Mr. Malt had laughed at the Senator's joke, so the
Senator, of course, had to assist at Mr. Malt's, and they began to work
themselves up, as Mr. Malt said, into the spirit of it. Mr. Malt was to
insist that the windows should be shut, he said he _had_ got a trifling
cold, and the Senator was to require them open in the interests of
ventilation. They rehearsed their arguments, and momma putting her head
out of the window at the first small station cried, "Be quick and change
your expressions--he's coming!"
In the presence of the guard Mr. Malt rose with dignity and closed the
windows. The Senator, with a well-simulated scowl, at once opened them
both.
"Stranger!" said Mr. Malt, while momma fumbled for her ticket, "I shut
those windows."
"Sir," responded poppa, "if you had not done so I shouldn't have been
obliged to open them."
"I can't die of pneumonia, sir," said Mr. Malt, again closing the
window, "to oblige _you_."
"Nor do I feel compelled," returned the Senator furiously, "to
asphyxiate my family to make it comfortable for you!" and the window
fell with a bang.
The guard, holding out a massive hand for my ticket, took no notice
whatever.
"Put it up again," said Mrs. Malt, who was more anxious than any of us
to avenge herself upon the German railway system, "and try to break the
glass."
"Attract his attention, Alexander," said momma. "Pull one of his silly
buttons off."
The guard gave no sign--he was replacing the elastic round my book of
coupons after detaching the green one on which was printed, "Strasburg
nach Mainz."
Poppa and Mr. Malt were sitting opposite each other in the middle of
the carriage.
"I tell you I've got bronchial trouble, and I won't be manslaughtered,"
cried Mr. Malt, hurling himself upon the strap, while poppa seized the
guard by the arm and pointed to the closed window. The only foreign
language with which poppa is acquainted is that used by the Indians on
the banks of the Saguenay river, a few words of which he acquired while
salmon fishing there two years ago. These he poured forth upon the
guard--they were the only ones that occurred to him, he said--at the
same time threatening with his disengaged fist bodily assault upon Mr.
Malt.
"That ought to draw him," said Mrs. Malt.
It did draw him.
"Leave go!" he said to poppa, and his air of authority was such that
poppa left go. "Is this here a lunatic party, or a young menagerie, or
what? Now look here," he continued, taking Mr. Malt by the elbow and
seating him with some violence in a corner seat and shutting the window.
"If you've got eight tickets for yourself say so, if you haven't that's
as much an' more than you are entitled to. The other gentleman----" But
the Senator had already collapsed into the furthest corner and was
looking fixedly through the closed glass. "Well, all I've got to say
is," he went on, lowering that window with decision, "that you can't go
kickin' up rows in this country same as you do at home, an' if you can't
get along more satisfactory together I'll----" here something interrupted
him, requiring to be transferred from the Senator's hand to the nearest
convenient pocket. "As I was goin' to say, gentlemen, there isn't any what
you might call strict rule about the windows, an' as far as I'm concerned,
you can settle it for yourselves."
Whereupon he swung along to the next carriage, the train having started,
and left us to reflect on the incongruity of an English railway guard in
Germany.
It was curious, but the incident left behind it a certain coolness, so
well defined that when momma suggested that the Malts' window should be
lowered as it was before to give us a current of air, Mrs. Malt said she
thought it would be better to abide by the decision of the guard, now
that we had referred it to him, and momma said, "Oh dear me, yes," if
she preferred to do so, and everybody established the most aggressively
private relations with books and newspapers. It was quite a relief when
Mrs. Portheris came at the next station to inquire whether, if we had no
married Germans in our compartment, we could possibly make room for
Isabel. Mrs. Portheris had married Germans in her compartment, two pairs
of them, and she could no longer permit her daughter to observe their
behaviour. "They obtrude their domestic relations," said Mrs. Portheris,
"in the most disgusting way. They are continually patting each other.
Quite middle-aged, too! And calling each other 'Leibchen,' and other
things which may be worse. My poor Isabel is dreadfully embarrassed,
for, of course, she can't always look out of the window. And as she
understands the language, I can't possibly tell _what_ she may
overhear!"
We made room for Isabel, but the train to Mayence was crowded that day,
and before we arrived we had ample reason to believe that conjugal
affection is not only at home but abroad in Germany. The Senator, at one
point, threatened to travel on the engine to avoid it. He used, I think
the language of exaggeration about it. He said it was the most
objectionable article made in Germany. But I did not notice that Isabel
devoted herself at all seriously to looking out of the window.