In a few moments, from the open cutting at the opposite end of the platform, where lay the shunting tracks, a bright light and metallic clattering heralded the strange-looking chimneyless locomotive. Behind it came five attractive-looking cars joined together, and gleaming with light. At their point of junction were telescopic gates, flung open as soon as the train stopped, and Mrs. Rosamond, who had just time to observe that there were not two rails only on the track, but a third in the middle, hurried into the first car she could find, and the earliest train on the Tube glided into the tunnel en route for the Bank.
Lilian Rosamond at once discovered that the cars just fitted the Tube. She would like to have touched the sides, but as the windows were sealed up this was impossible.
Everything looked delightfully clean, and, considering the crowd, she was lucky to find a seat next to an intelligent and quiet-looking, middle-aged man, who turned out to be a foreman engaged upon great building works proceeding in the City. The speed increased, and the noise and the rattling of the cars increased in proportion—a condition of things she had not expected, and it was a relief when the train slowed down and made its first pause at Holland Park. Here a few workmen got in, but not a soul got out! Mrs. Rosamond, looking about her, noticed that her companions de voyage were not in appearance such as she had expected at so early an hour. It is true they nearly all smoked—cigarettes mostly—some sticking to the old-fashioned short clay pipe charged with most pungent tobacco; but they did not swear or use strong language, they were not all dressed in corduroy, nor were their clothes dirty, neither did they universally carry huge “bass-bags” containing saws, and other sharp and nasty tools. Her neighbour, the foreman, with whom she soon got into a lively conversation, told her that most of the men (masons chiefly) were employed on a “big job” at Finsbury, and would travel to the Bank. He also volunteered the information that he lived in Caxton Road, close to the Shepherd’s Bush Station of the Tube; that he had to get his own breakfast at 4.30 or thereabouts, or wait until he got to the City, when he had it at a snug little coffee-shop in Moorfields; that he had used the Tube ever since its opening in 1900 day after day, starting by the first train in the morning, and returning, as his place and work suited, along the route at all hours, from five o’clock to eight, and sometimes (though seldom) by the last train from the Bank at 12.30 p.m.; and that the cars between the former hours—when people were leaving the City for the day—were more crowded than in the early morning, in fact crammed, with not even standing room.
At Notting Hill Gate there was a rush of operatives. By this time the cars were packed, and the little woman perceived the uses of the sliding leather straps suspended overhead, to which the unlucky seatless ones, who filled up the whole of the gangway, held on like grim death, to avoid tumbling about as the train oscillated.
At the Marble Arch some few persons, a dozen or so, tried to push in, but the five cars were complet, and so they continued, until, at the British Museum Station, a section of the passengers alighted, as also at Chancery Lane and the General Post Office. Then, after a run of 6½ miles from Shepherd’s Bush in twenty-four minutes, the Central “early workmen” pulled up at the Bank terminus at a platform resembling the others all along the line.
Mrs. Rosamond went up in a big lift, not to the surface as she expected, but found herself landed in a broad asphalted, bewildering subway lined with white bricks. Brilliantly lighted white passages seemed to stretch away in all directions, full of people tearing about here, there, and everywhere in the utmost confusion, some ascending steps that appeared to lead to the daylight, others descending slopes that ended in more brick-lined passages. At once she recalled her host’s injunction “to hit the right subway” for the Islington Tube Line, but becoming a trifle excited and confused, she went up the staircase that looked the shortest, and found herself in Cornhill, along which she strayed a short distance, and came to St. Michael’s, when she thought she had reached the station, because she had been told it was underneath a church. But there was no City and South London Railway, and her host had omitted to say that the subway between it and the Bank was contemplated only. So Lilian asked her way, and quickly found what she was seeking close by at the corner of Lombard Street and King William Street. And now, growing confident by experience, and perceiving that the booking-office and general arrangements resembled those of the Two-penny Tube, though on a smaller scale, she went to the booking-office window and tendered twopence. The clerk politely inquired, “All the way, miss?” and on her replying in the affirmative, demanded, and received, fourpence, giving her an ordinary ticket in return. She thought this strange, being different from the Tube system, the more so when she saw no glass box wherein to drop it. But there was the lift, and so she descended. Alas! when she got to the bottom, she forgot to make inquiries, being absorbed in meditation about her husband. “What was he doing at that particular hour?” she wondered. “Had he gone out fishing? Was he making the rounds of his farm, and looking after his pet livestock, the pigs?” A train came up, and without giving the matter a second thought, she got into it, and found the cars pretty nearly empty. They were narrow and low, and the atmosphere was close.
Away they sped, by London Bridge, the Borough, the “Elephant and Castle,” Kennington Park Road, the Oval, and Stockwell, but the guard did not call out the names of these stations, and only when the terminus was reached did Lilian rouse herself from her reverie, and stepping out of the station after giving up her ticket, gazed aghast, not at the “Angel,” Islington, which she knew was a locality nearly all bricks and mortar, but upon a large open space—Clapham Common! In fact, the poor voyageuse had gone down the wrong lift at the Bank Station, and had failed to notice the names of the stations as she came along.
To recover her equanimity, Mrs. Rosamond thought she would stroll about a little before going back to Islington, which, it was explained to her, was at the other extremity of the line. Much refreshed by an hour’s walk and the novelty of the terra incognita, she booked again, and resumed her pilgrimage, determined that this time there should be no mistake.
What was it? Was it fatality? or was it some mischievous whispering spirit that caused her to keep mentally repeating the words, “Bank Station”? An echo, perhaps, of the instructions received the evening before. Anyhow, she did not go straight on, but as soon as the train reached the City, she alighted at the Bank, and found herself once more in the maze of subways branching off from the Central’s booking-office. The little woman was in despair. What must she do? It was no use asking her way, everybody seemed in too violent a hurry to attend to other people; so she walked mechanically down a disagreeably steep asphalted incline and along a wood-paved, white-tiled tunnel, and saw at the end an electric Tube station. There was the usual narrow platform, the glazed tunnel, the electric light, and the four-car train, but no queer-shaped engine, and the carriages looked smaller than those of the Central and of a different build, the glazed sides sloping inwards towards the low roof. There was no booking-office, so she stepped into the train, where, as in an omnibus, tickets were issued and punched for the sum of two-pence. The cars were narrow and stuffy, and she did not like them, but looking up, she caught sight of a brass plate giving the name of the engineers at Preston, Lancashire, and this quite cheered her.
In about five minutes the train stopped, and everybody got out and streamed up stairways and along passages into what proved to be a vast railway terminus—Waterloo; and she realised the dismal fact that by inadvertence she had taken the Waterloo and City Railway, instead of the City and South London! It was the word “City” running in her head that had done the mischief.