CHAPTER V
There were huge piles of luggage all round David, as he saw when the steam cleared away a little. There were trunks, portmanteaux, dress-baskets, lunch-baskets, tea-baskets, gun-cases, golf-clubs, gladstone-bags, carpet-bags, despatch-cases, hat-boxes, collection-boxes, band-boxes, hampers, milk-cans, hold-alls, fish-baskets, safes, unsafes (the sort that fly open as you are getting into the train), Christmas boxes, rug-straps, and a sort of palisade of umbrellas and sticks on the top. All of them had green printed labels on, and wherever he turned, he saw that the labels were
David Blaize, Esq.,
Passenger to Anywhere.
‘That’s no earthly use at all,’ thought David. ‘It doesn’t tell me where I’m going. And how did I get so much luggage?’
David and the cow porter on the pile of luggage
He began climbing up the wall of luggage that was made of the more solid pieces, when he heard somebody climbing up the other side.
‘Hurrah, it’s probably a porter,’ he said to himself. ‘Hi, porter!’
‘I’m coming,’ said a slow, placid voice. ‘Moo! I’m coming.’
The first thing that came over the edge of the wall of luggage was the cap of a flying man, then two broken horns, then a mild hairy sort of face, the mouth of which went round and round.
‘Oh, are you the cow and the other pilot?’ asked David.
‘Hush,’ said the cow. ‘I’m incognito, disguised as a porter, and collecting evidence.’
‘What about?’ asked David.
‘Anything, as long as it’s evidence. Don’t give me away, and I’ll help you. Is this all you’ve got? That’s nothing to what people travel with now.’
‘Yes, that’s all,’ said David. ‘At least I suppose that’s all.’
‘You mayn’t have less than a hundred pieces, and they must all weigh a hundred pounds each,’ said the cow, referring to a blue paper of regulation which she carried. ‘But I won’t take no notice if you’re a bit under weight.’
The cow had climbed up a little higher, and David could see she had a dark blue coat, with a red tie like the people at Waterloo.
‘Perhaps I’d better get you out first,’ said the cow. ‘You seem sort of hemmed in. If you’ll stop just where you are, I’ll butt my way somewhere. Steady now, stop just where you are.’
David clung to the portmanteau which was on the top of the pile, and heard the cow retreat a few steps, and breathe heavily.
‘Now, I’m coming,’ she said, and next moment she charged through a weak part of the wall, which consisted only of lighter articles like dressing-cases and gun-cases and bags of golf-clubs. A lunch-basket had stuck on her horns, and she shook her head till it fell off with a great clatter of tin-plates and knives and forks.
‘That was a good bit of evidence,’ she said panting. ‘What train are you going by?’
‘The 11.29 I think,’ said David.
The cow looked at the labels.
‘That’s all right then,’ she said. ‘That’s the one that goes Anywhere. It’s whistling loud still, so you’ve got heaps of time. There’s more time than luggage.’
‘But doesn’t its whistling mean that it’s just going off?’ asked David. He had a firm idea in his mind that he must catch the 11.29, or the whole plan would go wrong.
‘Not a bit of it, dearie,’ said the cow. ‘It whistles loudest when it’s going to stop longest, and whistles faintest when it’s going to stop shortest. Now if it was whistling soft, we should have to hurry. The moment it stops whistling altogether, then it’s off, and you have to wait for the next. Usually there isn’t a next, and then the trouble begins.’
‘Then do they whistle all the time they stand still?’ asked David.
‘Naturally. When they go, there’s something else to think about.’
She looked at him with a mild milky sort of eye. She was dressed in a large jacket, and a pair of trousers which covered her completely all but her face and her tail.
‘And to think that I ever thought of tossing you,’ she said. ‘Well, bye-gones are gone-byes, and now I feel like a mother to you. Let’s get going with your bits of luggage, or the train you’re going to get will get gone.’
She took up four or five bags on her horns, put some of the lighter stuff like gun-cases and golf-clubs over her ears, and then turned her back to David.
‘Just sling the rest on my tail,’ she said. ‘Stick it through the cords or through the handles. You just put it on.’
She moved backwards and forwards in the most obliging manner, while David put her tail through the handles of boxes and portmanteaux, just as you would string beads on to a thread. Her tail had a surprising sort of spring in it, and when he had put it through a cord or a handle, she gave it a little jerk, and the box hopped along it. Very soon all the heavy stuff was neatly strung on her tail, and she took up the sticks and umbrellas that lay about on the platform, in her mouth.
‘Now, all you’ve got to do is to hold on to the end of my tail,’ she said, ‘and off we go to the 11.29. There’s no more evidence about here.’
They threaded their way down miles of crowded platforms past train after train that was puffing and whistling to show that it wasn’t going yet. Occasionally one stopped whistling, on which all the doors slammed, and next moment there wasn’t any train there at all. There were a tremendous lot of people travelling; now and then in the crowd he got a glimpse of some one he knew like Miss Muffet, or the shoemaker, or members of the happy families, but for the most part they were all strangers. The cow’s head, wreathed in luggage, seemed miles away, but very soon David found there was a sort of telephone in her tail, and he talked to the end of it, asking whatever he wanted to know, and then put it to his ear. When she wished to speak to him a bell rang at the end of it.
David uses the telephone
in the cow porter’s tail
‘I haven’t got my ticket yet,’ said David.
‘Of course not. You don’t know where you’re going yet,’ said she. ‘Travellers by the Anywhere Express take their tickets when they’ve got there. Otherwise you might take a ticket say for France, and find yourself at Fiji, and the ticket wouldn’t be any use.’
‘Is the Anywhere Express likely to go abroad this time?’ asked David, who would have enjoyed that.
‘Nothing’s likely with the Anywhere Express. It never goes where you expect it to. It’s the unlikeliest thing that ever happened. But it always goes to lots of somewheres, which is why it’s the Anywhere. You see it takes hundreds of somewheres to make an Anywhere.’
‘Does it go every night?’ asked David.
‘It goes every day and every night,’ said the cow. ‘But it only goes from here when it has got here. I should think it was five or six years since it was here last. I saw it once when I was a calf.’
‘Then shan’t I get back here for five or six years?’ asked he.
‘Round about that, I should say. Here we are. It’s begun to whistle softly. You’ll take all your bits of things in the carriage with you, I suppose, and then you’ll have them handy, in case of being hungry or if it rains, or there’s a cricket match. Which glass do you go, dearie?’
‘Which glass?’ asked David.
‘Yes; there’s first glass, where you can see out of the windows, and second, where you can’t, and third, where there aren’t any windows at all, and very few doors. I always go second, because it’s ugly country hereabouts.’
‘But it might be pretty farther on,’ said David.
‘Please yourself, dearie,’ said the cow. ‘Here’s a beautiful carriage now. That’ll make a sweet home for you for five or six years.’
David followed the cow, when she had finished sticking in the door into the carriage. It was a large bare room with a quantity of hooks on the walls, and a small three-legged stool standing in the middle of it.
‘Now I’ll get rid of your luggage,’ said the cow.
She began tossing the pieces on her horns in the neatest manner on to the hooks. Then she switched her tail, and the portmanteaux and dress baskets and wine-cases and all the heavier things flew this way and that on to their hooks, or piled themselves in the corners.
David looked round his sweet little house with some dismay.
‘But if I get very sleepy, can’t I go to bed?’ he asked.
‘Why, of course you can,’ said the cow. ‘You can go to bed anywhere you like all over the floor, or you can hang yourself up to a hook, or get inside a portmanteau. And the motion will never disturb you, as it’s an empty-speed express.’
‘What’s that?’ asked David.
‘Why, a full-speed express goes as fast as it can, doesn’t it? And an empty-speed express goes as slow as it can. Hullo! It’s stopped whistling.’
The cow jumped out of the door, which immediately slammed to after her, and disappeared among the crowd on the platform. The train started at a great speed, so it seemed to David, but as it got going, it went slower and slower, until he could scarcely believe that it was moving at all. He felt rather lonely at the idea of spending five or six years in the train, but after all, if it moved so slowly, it would not be difficult to jump out. Unless he found another cow-porter, which didn’t seem likely, he would have to leave his luggage behind, but he would not really miss it much, since he had never had it before, and had not the slightest idea what it contained.
A pecking noise at the window attracted his attention, and he saw a crow sitting on the ledge outside.
‘Let me in,’ it said. ‘It’s time to rest. I shall stop flying for the present.’
David let down the window, and the crow fluttered on to the floor.
‘But if you stop flying, shall I become invisible?’ he asked.
‘Yes, of course. You’re getting dim now. Pop! Now you’ve gone.’
David held up his hand in front of him, but he could see nothing at all of it. It must have been there, because when he touched the end of his nose with it, it felt quite solid. But he had certainly vanished for the present, for there was nothing whatever of him to be seen.
‘I wish you wouldn’t interfere with me like that,’ he said. ‘You wouldn’t like it if I made you invisible.’
The crow had put its head under its wing, and tucked up one leg, and its voice sounded muffled.
‘You seem to think,’ it said, ‘that everything is to be managed as you want it. But if you imagine I’m going to go on flying all night, without a rest, just in order to keep you visible, you make a mistake. You aren’t so pretty as all that, my young fellah.’
‘But you’ll fly again before long, won’t you?’ asked David.
All the answer he got was:
‘Haugh! Rumph, haugh! Rumph! Rumph!’ for the crow had gone fast asleep, and was snoring.
David poked it with the place where his fingers usually were, to wake it, but it only snored louder and louder. Then he picked it up and shook it, but the only result was that its snoring became perfectly deafening.
‘I’ll drop it out of the window,’ he said to himself,’ and then it must fly.’
But this was no good, for the crow didn’t even take its head from under its wing, or put its leg down, but fell quietly on to the ground below the window, without waking. Just then there came a bend in the line, and though the train was scarcely moving at all, it was soon out of sight.
‘Well, there’s no help for it,’ thought David, ‘and so I may as well go to sleep too. It seems to make one sleepy to be invisible.’
Then, so he supposed, he must have gone completely to sleep, for when the next thing happened, it was quite light. As he had been travelling since 11.29 P.M., it was perfectly obvious that it was now morning. For some reason he felt inclined to lick his hand and rub it behind his ears, but he remembered that only cats did that, and instead he drew his three-legged stool to the window and looked out. He found he was visible again, and supposed the crow must have begun flying.
The train seemed to be running very slowly round and round a field. Occasionally it stopped dead, and began to whistle, but usually it splashed quietly along, into puddles and out of puddles, without any lines in front of it. Sometimes they curved a little to avoid a tree, but they crushed their way through an ordinary hedge, and birds flew out scolding them and saying, ‘I wish you would look where you are going.’ Then a voice from the engine said, ‘Sorry you have been troubled,’ just like a young lady in the telephone exchange.
But the country seemed familiar to David, and presently he saw that the train was in a field just beyond the High Street of the village he had left at 11.29. It was slowly going back to it again, to a spot some fifty yards away from the place they had started from. Then it began to make a very sharp curve, in order to avoid a horse that was lying down in the field, and the engine came just opposite his window.
‘A rare good run, David,’ shouted the engine-driver. ‘We shall stop at the hairdresser’s in a minute now, if you want to have anything done.’
David had not had his hair cut lately, so this seemed rather a good opportunity.
‘How long do we stop there?’ he shouted.
‘Two or three weeks. You’ll just have time.’
In spite of the slowness with which they were moving, there was a tremendous rattle of wheels somewhere, and the noise seemed to come from overhead. Then looking up, he saw that there were hundreds of wheels all turning round. There were long bands hanging from them, and just then the engine began whistling to show it had stopped. Clouds of steam poured in through the carriage window and, as that cleared away, David saw that he was standing in the hairdresser’s shop, and that underneath the wheels was sitting a row of old gentlemen having their heads brushed with circular brushes. Others were being shampooed, others were apparently having their heads painted, others were having breakfast, but they were all, without exception, absolutely bald.
There was a looking-glass in front of each of them, and David saw the face of a kind old gentleman in it. The looking-glasses were of the sort that stood on his mother’s dressing-table, which showed your left-hand side where the bruise was, which came when you fell out of a tree, and your right-hand side, where a tooth had been taken out, and full face where both these things happened. And in each looking-glass was the reflection of a bald old gentleman, nodding and smiling at him.
After his solitary night in the train, David longed for a little conversation again, and he went to the nearest old gentleman, who was eating eggs and bacon, while the hairdresser scrubbed his head with the circular brush.
‘Good morning, David,’ said he. ‘Have you had a good journey? The hard brush, please,’ he added to the hairdresser. ‘That doesn’t do me any good. Aha, aha, that’s better. And now I’ll have a shampoo.’
David thought this rather an odd way of doing things, since you usually had your shampoo first, and your brushing afterwards, but the hairdresser didn’t seem to mind. The old gentleman bent over the basin, with his eggs and bacon on his knee, and continued breakfasting.
‘Boiling or freezing, sir?’ asked the hairdresser.
‘Boiling first and then freezing,’ said the old gentleman, with his mouth full. ‘No, freezing first and boiling afterwards. And where did you come from?’ he asked David.
‘From the house next the Bank, I think,’ said David. ‘I came by the 11.29.’
‘A fine train,’ said he, ‘a very fine train. There’s nothing slower anywhere.’
The hairdresser wrapped a towel round his head, and began drying it.
‘And what will you have on, sir?’ he asked.
The old gentleman considered a little.
‘I think a map of south-west London would be best,’ he said. ‘I’m going up there next week, and I don’t know my way about. It would be very tiresome to get lost. But if you give me a nice map of south-west London, with 25 Brompton Square marked in red, why, all I shall have to do, if I get lost, is to ring the nearest bell of the nearest house, and ask for a couple of looking-glasses.’
‘What for?’ asked David.
‘Why, I shall sit in front of one, and reflect the top of my head in the other. Then I shall see where I am, and where I want to go to. Send the geographer and the painter at once.’
This old gentleman got so interested in his map that he did not talk to David any more, and so he strolled on to the next one, who, so he learned, was going to Egypt, and was having a spider’s web painted on his head to keep the flies off. He, too, seemed to know David, which made it very pleasant.
‘And so you’ve come by the 11.29,’ he said. ‘A dangerous trip, because you go so slow that it’s almost impossible to stop in case of an accident. I leave for Egypt by the same train. I wonder if it would be wiser to have some fly papers as well. Or a picture of a mummy or two, to give me local colour.’
‘Whatever you please, sir,’ said the hairdresser.
‘Well, we can’t go wrong with a mummy. I think a mummy and a spider’s web, and leave out the fly-papers.’
The next old gentleman was having his own face painted in oils on the back of his head, and he put his finger on his lip, and beckoned with the other hand to David.
‘Is it like me?’ he whispered. ‘Give me your candid opinion. Don’t mind the artist.’
He nodded his head up and down, so that David should see his real face and his painted face.
‘Very like indeed,’ said David. ‘But what’s it for?’
He assumed an air of great secrecy.
‘You mustn’t tell anybody,’ he said. ‘Do you promise?’
‘Yes,’ said David.
‘Well, if I have my own face at the back of my head, it will be such a puzzle. People in the street will see me looking at them, as if I was coming towards them, and all the time I shall be going away. What do you think of that?’
‘It’s—it’s certainly very puzzling,’ said David.
‘Isn’t it? And then when I’m tired of going that way, I shall begin to walk backwards, and all the people the other side of me will think the same thing. In quite a short time nobody will know where I am. I shall always be going away when they think I’m coming, and when they think I’m coming I shall always be going away!’
‘But that’s the same thing, isn’t it?’ asked David.
He took no notice of this, and called out to the painter, who had R.A. embroidered on his collar.
‘Mind you put a cigarette in my mouth. And then this side will smoke a pipe. That’ll puzzle them worse than ever. It will, it will—won’t it?’ he said to David triumphantly.
The bald-headed men in the hairdresser’s
get up to catch the train
David could not understand what it was all about, but at that moment the door opened, and the cow looked in.
‘Passengers by the Bald Express to take their seats,’ she called. ‘All others to remain standing.’
Instantly there was a scene of the utmost confusion, and all the old gentlemen began running into each other. The worst of them was the one who had had his face painted on the back of his head, because nobody could possibly guess which way he was coming. But by degrees the room cleared, as the whistling of the engine, which had gone on all the time, grew fainter, and finally, when it stopped, David found himself quite alone. The sound of wheels going round overhead ceased, and its place was taken by a rumble that gradually got less. He ran out on to the platform, and there was the empty-speed express crawling out of the station, carrying the kind old gentlemen to Egypt and London S.W., and wherever the backward-forward one meant to puzzle people. He felt that it must be quite easy to catch it up, but the faster he ran the farther he got away from it. At last, perfectly breathless, he stopped, not quite certain whether he really wanted to catch it or not. He longed to know if the spider’s web would keep off the flies, or the map of London S.W. show the other old gentleman where he was, but, after all, there were so many different things to explore.
He began to run again, after he had got his breath, not after the train any more, but Anywhere. He felt that with every step he took he was getting lighter, and in a minute he was running on the very tips of his toes. Then his left foot didn’t touch the ground at all, and then his right foot. He simply found himself running in the air.