At High Street, Kensington, where the engine was changed, the guard looked in, admired the sleeping beauty, and discreetly withdrew in silence.
In the middle of the tunnel between Sloane Square and Victoria, the train pulled up with a jerk, the signal having been suddenly put against it. Mrs. Rosamond woke, and looking at her watch, found that she must have been slumbering nearly an hour, and a fellow-passenger told her that by the time the train reached the Mansion House Station she would have completely traversed the circle of the Underground! “Well, I will see this matter through,” she said to herself, “and I will not go again into that horrid Bank Subway. After all, I shall soon be at Bishopsgate Street.” So she went on.
How, on her arrival there, she escaped having to pay the full fare, no one knows. She kept her own counsel; but the ticket collector and the guard probably thought she was too nice to be worried with interrogations.
Her brief impressions of the Underground were that only in a few respects was the Tube an improvement upon it. The Inner Circle Trains, she thought, ran more smoothly; there was less rocking of the carriages, and less rattling noise; but they were badly lighted; the banging of doors was awful; the atmosphere sulphurous and stifling; and carriages, stations, staircases, and tunnels looked as if they had not been cleaned for months. Worse than all was the mode of pulling up the train with a jerk, which, at each stopping-place, almost invariably threw the alighting passengers into their fellow-travellers’ laps.
Resolved now to ask her way at every step, she contrived, by minutely following directions, to find and to cross Finsbury Circus, whence she was quickly in Moorgate Street, and at once discovered the City and South London Railway Station. Continuing to seek information for the Islington lift, the Islington platform, and the Islington train, she would not budge an inch until she had been thoroughly posted up. Once more in a Tube car, and by way of Old Street, and the City Road, she at last arrived at the “Angel,” and felt as if she had indeed reached the gates of heaven!
Milner Street was close by, and she was soon at her aunt’s house, but, alas! not to breakfast, for it was nearing twelve o’clock. That relation, an impatient woman, tired of waiting, had gone out for the day, and had left no message! This was too much for the little woman, it was the last straw, and flinging herself on the sofa, she thought sympathetically of how in the past
“A north-country maid up to London had strayed,
Although with her nature it did not agree;
She wept and she sighed, and she bitterly cried,
I wish once again in the north I could be.”
Quickly she returned to Shepherd’s Bush, viâ the Bank and the Twopenny Tube, in the latter finding a totally different class of people from those she had travelled with in the morning, and plenty of room for everybody. She went back home the next day, sacrificing her seat for the Coronation procession; and she registered a vow that if ever she came to London again she would study closely the route for any proposed expedition as carefully as if she were on an “unaccompanied” Continental tour.
She kept her vow; and, I believe, eventually, her “bump of locality” became considerably developed.
The moral of this practically true sketch is, that in view of the complicated system of metropolitan Tubes and Undergrounds, no one without an experienced escort, unless endowed with a talent for locality, can hope to get about London without trouble and difficulty. In fact, a Metropolitan Bradshaw, or Metropolitan Guide to Underground London is urgently needed.