I have come to the conclusion that the railway train exercises a
sinister influence upon the human race. Persons who are tolerable--or
even welcome--in ordinary daily life, become peculiarly obnoxious so
soon as they enter the compartment of a train. No fairy prince ever
stepped into a railway train--assuming he favoured that means of
locomotion--without being transformed straightway into a Beast, and even
Beauty herself could not be distinguished from her disagreeable
sisters--in a train.
Speaking for myself, railway travelling invariably brings to the surface
all my worst qualities.
My neighbour opposite hazards some remark. I feel immediately a fit of
taciturnity coming over me, and an overpowering inclination to retreat
behind a fortification of journals and magazines. On the other hand, say
that I have exhausted my stock of railway literature--or, no remote
possibility, that the literature has exhausted me--then I make a casual
remark about the weather. The weather is not usually considered a
controversial topic: in railway trains, however, it becomes so.
"Rain! not a bit," says a passenger in the far corner, evidently
meditating a walking tour, and he views me suspiciously as if I were a
rain-producer.
"And a good thing too," remarks the man opposite. "It's wanted badly, I
tell you, sir--very badly. It's all very well for you holiday folk,"
&c., &c.
And all this bad feeling because of my harmless well-intentioned remark.
The window is up. "Phew!... stuffy," says the man opposite. "You don't
mind, I hope, the window--eh?" "Not in the least," I say, and conceive a
deadly hatred for him. I know from experience that directly that window
is down all the winds of heaven will conspire to rush through, bearing
upon them a smoky pall. I resign myself, therefore, to possible
bronchitis and inflammation of the eye. Schoolboys, I may remark by the
way, are the worst window offenders, owing to their diabolical practice
of looking out of window in a tunnel--and, of course, _nothing_ ever
happens to them. What's the use of expostulating after the compartment
is full of yellow, choking vapour. These boys should be leashed together
like dogs and conveyed in the luggage-van.
The window is down. "W-h-oop," coughs an elderly man. "Do you mind, sir,
that window being closed?" Polite mendacity and inward bitterness on my
part towards the individual who has converted the compartment into an
oven.
But there are worse companions even than these, of whom I must speak
another time.