But we aren’t “foreigners” (as the natives style everyone who doesn’t belong to their village). That is one of the many charms of arriving at this station. Here no one regards us merely as passengers who can’t find their luggage; or, passengers who have changed where they had no business to; or, passengers who expect the local porter to know by heart all the railway connections and times of return trains throughout the British Isles. Neither are we among the people who look suspiciously at every wagonette driver, certain that he is going to overcharge, and uncertain as to which is likely to overcharge the least. We have no anxieties concerning the truth of the advertised merits of the various hotels, and apartments to let, in the village.
We “belong.”
There is a sense of home-coming in our arrival. The porters actually rush forward to help with our luggage, and the station-master raises his cap.
Old Bob—who occupies the doubly proud position of being the only one among the fly proprietors who displays a pair of steeds attached to his vehicle, while he is also the one who usually drives what he describes as “the e-light-y”—is waiting with his wagonette (and pair, don’t forget) and a cart for the luggage.
It really is comforting to be claimed by someone at the end of a journey, if it be but the wagonette driver. I feel so solitary, such an orphan, when I chance to arrive alone at some strange place in quest of a holiday, possibly unknown to a single person but the landlady-to-be. Don’t you know the sinking feeling that comes over you as you look round upon the crowds of people, some scrambling in, and some scrambling out of the train; every face a blank so far as you are concerned? No one to trouble whether you ever get any further, or whether you remain in that jostling turmoil for ever.
You almost wish you could get into the train and go back to town again; you reflect that there at least the butcher knows you, and the people next door, and the crossing-sweeper at the corner.
You revive after having some tea, but it is possible to spend a very doleful, homesick quarter of an hour between the time you get out of the train and the time you sit down to a meal in some strange room, whose painful unlikeness to the ones you live in accentuates your loneliness.
But that never happens to us in our Valley. Before we have got out of our compartment, Abigail is already on the platform and holding a levee consisting of two porters, the signalman, the assistant engine-driver from a goods train in the siding, and old Bob’s nephew, who drives the cart. All lend a hand as she proceeds to marshal the luggage, and with a peremptory wave of her umbrella, directs its disposal.
Of course there really isn’t much luggage. That is one of the advantages of retreating to your own secluded cottage; being off the beaten track as we are, there is no necessity to take many “toilettes”—either demi or semi—or a large variety of lounge robes, or matinées, or boudoir negligées, or rest frocks, or tea-gowns, or cocoa-coats, or evening wraps built of chiffon, and really necessary, handy things of that sort. All we take with us is just a few clothes to wear.