A COACH-BREAKFAST. After J. Pollard.
Here at least—for there are twelve passengers present—the insides and the outsides have foregathered, and for once the gulf socially dividing them has been bridged. This generally impassable gulf was more marked in the case of the mails than in that of the stage-coaches. The very superior and exclusive travellers who went in their own chariots or by post-chaise resorted to well-known hotels and posting-houses on the roads, whose chaste halls were never profaned by coaches. Even the superior persons who travelled inside the mails could not hope to win to those expensive and select abiding-places; but they formed a caste by themselves, who never willingly sat at meat with the outsides. De Quincey, who often travelled outside, experienced something of this contempt, and the recollection seems to have lent eloquence to his remarks on the subject. It was, he tells us, “The fixed assumption of the four inside people that they, the illustrious quaternion, constituted a porcelain variety of the human race, whose dignity would have been compromised by exchanging one word of civility with the three miserable delf-ware outsides. Even to have kicked an outsider might have been held to attaint the foot concerned in that operation, so that perhaps it would have required an Act of Parliament to restore its purity of blood. What words, then, could express the horror and the sense of treason in that case, which had happened, where all three outsides (the trinity of Pariahs) made a vain attempt to sit down at the same breakfast-table or dinner-table with the consecrated four? I myself witnessed such an attempt; and on that occasion a benevolent old gentleman endeavoured to soothe his three holy associates by suggesting that if the outsides were indicted for this criminal attempt at the next assizes, the court would regard it as a case of lunacy or delirium tremens rather than that of treason. England owes much of her grandeur to the depth of the aristocratic element in her social composition when pulling against her own strong democracy. I am not the man to laugh at it. But sometimes, undoubtedly, it expressed itself in comic shapes. The course taken with the infatuated outsiders, in the particular attempt which I have noticed, was that the waiter, beckoning them away from the privileged salle-à-manger, sang out, ‘This way, my good men,’ and then enticed these good men away to the kitchen. But that plan had not always answered. Sometimes, though rarely, cases occurred where the intruders, being stronger than usual, or more vicious than usual, resolutely refused to budge, and so far carried their point as to have a separate table arranged for themselves in a corner of the general room. Yet, if an Indian screen could be found ample enough to plant them out from the very eyes of the high table or dais, it then became possible to assume as a fiction of law that the three delf fellows after all were not present. They could be ignored by the porcelain men, under the maxim that objects not appearing and not existing are governed by the same logical construction.”
Humour had a splendid field in coaching, and the literature of the road is gemmed with twice a hundred good stories and mirth-provoking scenes. Few things seem to have been more productive of funny stories than the undue tendency to fatness on the part of a passenger. There is, for example, the tale of the stupid servant who, having to book two seats inside a coach for his master, a man of prodigious bulk, to whom one seat would be useless, returned from the booking-office with the news that he had secured the only two places to be had—one inside and one out.
This bears comparison with that other story of the stout man’s revenge. He, too, was accustomed to book two seats. On one occasion this amiable eccentricity of his was observed overnight by two waggish fellows who thought they would play a trick on the fat man. They accordingly booked seats also, and took care to be seated in them before the man of much avoirdupois came. They sat facing one another, one back and the other in front, so that he had indeed two seats, but not, as they necessarily should have been, together. He asked them very politely to change their positions, but they refused, although he explained that he had booked two seats, and his reason for doing so. There the seats were, they said.
But the outraged man of flesh determined to be revenged, and, looking round at the next stage where the coach stopped, spied a chimney-sweep, he beckoned.
“Chimley, yer honour?” queried Chummy.
“No: come here. Have you any objection to a ride this morning? I’ll pay you for a day’s work, and your fare back again.”
“All right, yer honour; I’ll just run home and clean myself.”
“No, no! come as you are, and when in the coach give yourself a good shake every now and then, to make the soot fly.”