Of course, the object being to paint this trip in very strong colours, mischances early began; but the party need not have been quite such fools as they are described. Passing over the inevitable dispute with the cabman, we follow them on to the platform, where they saw a porter slip and nearly get killed, whereupon “a sickening horror came over them at the thought of the scene they might have witnessed.” As for that, if you are to speculate upon the grisly “might be,” the blood-boltered “if,” the catastrophic “may happen,” why then there is no peace of mind for you at all, week-day or Sunday.
Friends who were to have been met on the platform were all but missed, and when found insisted upon quarrelling with strangers and quizzing other members of the party, until at length the train “ceased to move, and we were at our journey’s end.” It did not just “stop,” as ordinarily it does.
See now our party at Hastings. The day was blazing hot, and no shelter was to be found. The glare off the sea seared their eyes, and they took refuge in the streets, with the bitter reflection that they need not have left their home in happy Islington to see pavements and closed shops. Dinner was suggested, and they resorted to a dining-room, rich in the mingled odours of sage and onions and tobacco-smoke, where they dined off what purported to be gosling, but was really an old and half-starved fowl. If the dishes were lukewarm, the room, on the other hand, was blazing hot. “Mr. Peters,” one of the party, called for “malt liquor”—could it by any chance have been “beer”?—and saw that somebody else paid for it; and, this princely and elegant meal over, the party dispersed in various directions.
Then the brilliant idea occurred to one who claimed to know Hastings that a breeze and shady trees would be found in the Castle gardens, on the cliff-top. They climbed that “terrible” road, only to find that the gardens were closed on Sundays, and that, even had they been open, no trees and no shade existed there. Finding at last some stunted, insufficient trees, they rested awhile, descending only to give the girl a chance of fainting in the heat.
And so the weary day dragged on until it was time to return home. They all assembled at the railway-station, much to the reader’s surprise. Why had not some of them taken a boat and been drowned, or been eaten by a sea-serpent? Why had they not even missed the train? We shall learn.
“Fate cannot harm me, I have dined to-day,” says the poet; but disasters seem inevitably to wait upon those who “trip, trip, trip it” to the sea on Sunday; especially if they dine upon emaciated fowl sinfully masquerading as a young goose.
No appalling disaster happened to the swift South Eastern train. It did not, strange to say, break down, and still less did it come into collision with another. Nor even were train-wreckers prowling along the line, to place obstructions upon the metals and so bring the sinful to an appropriately ghastly end. No: nothing of that kind happened; but when two-thirds of the journey had been accomplished a thunderstorm broke. “Never mind, we’ll soon be at home,” said Martha. “Alas! it seemed as if home grew more distant than nearer.”
But at last London was reached and an omnibus with difficulty found. On the way, however, a horse, overworked with Sunday labour, fell dead, and the journey had to be miserably finished in the rain. What, by the way, would have been made to happen to a motor-omnibus? That could not fall dead.
The party reached home at last, but Martha fell ill, and eventually died of consumption. “Never,” declares the supposed narrator of this elegant piece of fiction, “shall I forget our Sunday Trip to Hastings.”
I should think not, indeed!