“But,” he said, “I’ll make sure for ye, an’ if I’m right you might go to the Park Hotel an’ be comfortable.” Judging by my fur coat he doubtless thought that the expense didn’t matter. Of course he was right, and I made the pilgrimage along that lengthy bridge to the hotel, suitably rewarding (I hope) my friendly porter with a shilling. Then I said to the night porter of the hotel:
“Please do not call me on any account until 9.30, as my train does not go until 10.30, and I want to get warm. Bring me up a cup of tea and some bread and butter and my bill at 9.30 and all will be well.”
He nodded and left me. I turned in, but sleep was out of the question. I heard five strike and six and seven and then, whatever was that diabolical knocking?
“What is it?” I roared. “Hot water,” was the reply. Then I realised that I had been to sleep and I got out of bed, switched on the light, looked at my watch and behold it was 7.40. I am not a hot-tempered man and should have made an ineffectual despot, but if that night porter had been at my absolute disposal then—I really would not like to say. Of course I got no more sleep, and equally of course I had to pay full charge for bed and breakfast. And I have hated Preston Station with a perfect hatred ever since. I suppose all the fraternity are like that—have their special likes and dislikes among stations as amongst people.
Pocklington is a name branded upon my memory, not because of its school, of which I have heard many excellent reports, but know nothing, but because I have made two visits there to lecture and each time have been filled with wonder and laughter. The secretary and mainstay of the lecture society was (and is for all I know) a genial eccentric doctor, a widower living with his daughter. The lecture hall might be a stable or a barn or a shed of sorts, I only know that when I first entered it the audience was clustered round the stove in the centre and the whole scene was worthy of a picture by Rembrandt. I had a queer feeling that none of my audience had ever heard a lecture before, which was absurd, for I know that many of my colleagues had entertained them, but they looked at me as though they thought I might bite, and I looked at them cheerfully as I would have done at a mob of Australian blackfellows. Me!
Yet the lectures were a success. We had a good time together. By the way, I often wonder what a leviathan of Johnson’s calibre would do with a crowd like that. He would probably antagonise the bulk of them before he had been speaking five minutes, because nothing annoys an audience like that more than what they call “putting the pot on,” and I cannot help feeling much sympathy for them. In fact the more I read Boswell’s Johnson the more murderously I feel towards him, and the more prone I am to regard him as the most wrongly puffed-up bully that ever lived. That, however, is a mere matter of opinion and Johnson would probably have disposed of it in one flatulent breath.
What, however, I could not get over in Pocklington was the hotel. It was one of the old-timers and all its staff were genuinely anxious to make the guest comfortable. But to go downstairs half dressed in the morning, find after long enquiry a key, and then traverse a long wet yard in search of relief, these were matters that left their indelible trace, in England, where a man over forty gets soft and slack and notices such things. Yet people go abroad and endure them and never murmur. How is it, I wonder? I read endless encomia upon foreign ways, foreign cooking, foreign politeness, but never a word about foreign dirt, foreign stenches, foreign absence of sanitary arrangements. What a mystery!
It will be a little relief to get my mind off this business of foreign hotels to recall an experience which if it did not amuse me at the time certainly did both interest and amuse my one fellow-passenger. I booked first class as I usually did in those days from Huddersfield to Manchester, where I was due to lecture at the Athenæum at eight, but where I had no offer of hospitality. The train by which I travelled was timed to arrive in Manchester at about seven, ample time for me to find a hotel, change, get a meal, and arrive at the Athenæum by 7.50. But by some accident or stupidity I got into the wrong part of the train and after a long wait at Stalybridge I became disagreeably aware that something was wrong. Indeed I was past the time I had reckoned on arriving at Manchester before we left Stalybridge, and the train was going very deliberately.
At last I saw plainly that if I was going to get to my lecture in time it was all I should do, and turning to my sole fellow-passenger with whom, after the custom of Englishmen, I had not as yet exchanged a word, I said:
“Excuse me, sir, but do you mind if I change my clothes? I am due to lecture at the Athenæum at eight and I fear that I have made a mistake in the train.”