THE SUFFERER.
Having engaged a sleeping-berth I naturally hurried, coin in hand, to the conductor, as all wise travellers do (usually to their discomfiture), to see if I could be accommodated with a compartment to myself and be guaranteed against invasion.
The carriage was full.
I then sought my compartment, to learn the worst as to my position, whether above or below the necessarily offensive person who was to be my companion.
He was already there, and we exchanged the hard implacable glare that is reserved among the English for the other fellow in a wagon-lit compartment.
When I discovered that to him had fallen the dreaded upper berth I relaxed a little, and later we were full of courtesies to each other—renunciations of hat-pegs, racks and so forth, and charming mutual concessions as to the light, which I controlled from below—so that by morning we were so friendly that he deemed me a fit recipient of his Great Paris Grievance.
This grievance, which he considered that everyone should know about, bears upon the prevalence of spurious coins in the so-called Gay City and the tendency of Parisians to work them off on foreigners. As he says, a more inhospitable course one cannot conceive. Foreigners in Paris should be treated as guests, and just now, with all this Entente talk, the English especially. But no. It is the English who are the first victims of the possessor of obsolete francs, two-franc and five-franc pieces guiltless of their country's silver and ten-franc pieces into whose composition no gold has entered.
He had been in Paris but an hour or so when—but let me tell the story as my travelling companion told it to me.
"I don't know what your experience in Paris has been," he said, "but I have been victimised right and left."
He was now getting up while I lay at comparative ease in my berth and watched his difficulties in the congested room and thought what horrid vests he wore.
"I had been in Paris but a few hours," he continued, "when it was necessary to pay a cabman. I handed him a franc. He examined it, laughed and returned it. I handed him another. He went through the same performance. Having found some good money to get rid of him, I sat down outside a café to try and remember where I had received the change in which these useless coins had been inserted. During a week in Paris much of my time was spent in that way."
He sighed and drew on his trousers. His braces were red.
"I showed the bad francs to a waiter," he went on, "and he, like the cabman, laughed. In fact, next to an undressed woman, there is no stroke of wit so certain of Parisian mirth as a bad coin. The first thought of everyone to whom I showed my collection was to be amused." His face blackened with rage. "This cheerful callousness in a matter involving a total want of principle and straight-dealing as between man and man," he said, "denotes to what a point of cynicism the Parisians have attained."
I agreed with him.
"The waiter," he continued, "went through my money and pointed out what was good and what either bad or out of currency. He called other waiters to enjoy the joke. It seemed that in about four hours I had acquired three bad francs, one bad two-franc piece and two bad five-franc pieces. I put them away in another pocket and got fresh change from him, which, as I subsequently discovered, contained one obsolete five-franc piece and two discredited francs. And so it went on. I was a continual target for them."
Here he began to wash, and the story was interrupted.
When he re-emerged I asked him why he didn't always examine his change.
"It's very difficult to remember to do so," he said, "and, besides, I am not an expert. Anyway, it got worse and worse, and when a bad gold piece came along I realised that I must do something so I wrote to the Chief of the Police."
"In French?" I asked.
"No, in English—the language of honesty. I told him my own experiences. I said that other English people whom I had met had testified to similar trouble; and I put it to him that as a matter of civic pride—esprit de pays—he should do his utmost to cleanse Paris of this evil. I added that in my opinion the waiters were the worst offenders."
"Have you had a reply?" I asked.
"Not yet," he said, and having completed his toilet he made room for me.
I thought about him a good deal and sympathised not a little, for he seemed a good sort of fellow and might possibly have had his calculations as to expenditure considerably upset by his adventures. It certainly was a shame!
Later, meeting him in the restaurant-car I asked him to show me his store of bad money. I wanted to see for myself what those coins were like.
"I haven't got them," he said.
"You sent them to the Chief of the Police with your letter, I suppose?" I said.
"No, I didn't," he replied. "The fact is—well—as a matter of fact I managed to work them all off again."
"At the beginning of the season good bowling performances are not unusual—batsmen get themselves out so easily—but Barratt's bowling yesterday was better than his figures.... Five times yesterday he broke right across the wicket from leg, but none of those magnificent balls got wickets, perhaps because it was too early in the season."—Times.
The beginning of the season seems rather a tricky time.
"Death of Collar: Cobham Stud's severe loss."—Yorkshire Post.
The converse of this accident occurred to us the other day, when our Whitefriars collar lost its stud.
"Richard I.... at once began to prepare the third crusade. In 1190 he started, and reached Acre in June, 1911."
"Everyman" Encyclopædia.
Thus missing King George Vth's Coronation.
Customer. "This is a beautiful chop, waiter, the best you've ever—— "
Waiter. "Yes, an' I won't 'arf cop nothing. That was the boss's chop what I've giv you in mistake."