I.
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.