‘Not a bit of it, dearie,’ said the cow. ‘It whistles loudest when it’s going to stop longest, and whistles faintest when it’s going to stop shortest. Now if it was whistling soft, we should have to hurry. The moment it stops whistling altogether, then it’s off, and you have to wait for the next. Usually there isn’t a next, and then the trouble begins.’
‘Then do they whistle all the time they stand still?’ asked David.
‘Naturally. When they go, there’s something else to think about.’
She looked at him with a mild milky sort of eye. She was dressed in a large jacket, and a pair of trousers which covered her completely all but her face and her tail.
‘And to think that I ever thought of tossing you,’ she said. ‘Well, bye-gones are gone-byes, and now I feel like a mother to you. Let’s get going with your bits of luggage, or the train you’re going to get will get gone.’
She took up four or five bags on her horns, put some of the lighter stuff like gun-cases and golf-clubs over her ears, and then turned her back to David.
‘Just sling the rest on my tail,’ she said. ‘Stick it through the cords or through the handles. You just put it on.’
She moved backwards and forwards in the most obliging manner, while David put her tail through the handles of boxes and portmanteaux, just as you would string beads on to a thread. Her tail had a surprising sort of spring in it, and when he had put it through a cord or a handle, she gave it a little jerk, and the box hopped along it. Very soon all the heavy stuff was neatly strung on her tail, and she took up the sticks and umbrellas that lay about on the platform, in her mouth.
‘Now, all you’ve got to do is to hold on to the end of my tail,’ she said, ‘and off we go to the 11.29. There’s no more evidence about here.’
They threaded their way down miles of crowded platforms past train after train that was puffing and whistling to show that it wasn’t going yet. Occasionally one stopped whistling, on which all the doors slammed, and next moment there wasn’t any train there at all. There were a tremendous lot of people travelling; now and then in the crowd he got a glimpse of some one he knew like Miss Muffet, or the shoemaker, or members of the happy families, but for the most part they were all strangers. The cow’s head, wreathed in luggage, seemed miles away, but very soon David found there was a sort of telephone in her tail, and he talked to the end of it, asking whatever he wanted to know, and then put it to his ear. When she wished to speak to him a bell rang at the end of it.