After that I did a rash thing. I engaged a Private Secretary on the spur of the moment and without consulting my household.
One morning I had occasion to visit the British Museum. That mausoleum of learning is not an habitual resort of mine, but on this occasion I had found it necessary to refresh my memory on the subject of a small principality situated somewhere in the Pacific, and reported to be in a state of considerable unrest, concerning which the member for Upper Gumbtree, an unpleasantly omniscient young man with a truculent manner, had been asking questions in the House. It seemed that British interests in that quarter were not being adequately protected by our Department, and this extremely pushing gentleman was now gaining much cheap applause in the columns of those low-priced organs which make a living by deriding his Majesty's Ministers, by bombarding us with fatuous inquiries on the subject. My Chief had only the most hazy notion about the place—as a matter of fact I do not believe that either he or any of the permanent officials had ever heard of it—and I was in a precisely similar condition. I was accordingly bidden to get up the subject, and accumulate a mass of information thereon which would not only satiate the appetite of the honourable member, but choke him off for all time.
Finding myself in want of a particular Gazetteer which was not to be found in the office, and being in no mood to take a clerk, however uncritical, into my confidence, I called a hansom and drove straight to the Museum; where, having ensconced myself in the reading-room with the work in question, I prepared to devote a dusty and laborious morning to the service of State.
Immediately opposite me sat a gigantic young man of a slightly threadbare appearance, who was copying some screed out of a bulky tome before him. I regarded him in a reminiscent sort of way for a few minutes, and presently found that my scrutiny was being returned fourfold. Next came an enormous hand that was suddenly thrust across the table towards me, and I remembered him.
We had met six years ago in a railway train, under circumstances which made me extremely glad to make his acquaintance at any price. Kitty and I were on our honeymoon, and happened to be travelling on a Saturday afternoon from Edinburgh to Perth in a train packed to suffocation with the supporters of a football team of the baser sort. We were bound for Inchellan, the Scottish residence of my Chief, who was sending to meet us at Perth.
As the first-class carriages were all occupied by gentlemen with third-class tickets, we travelled third with a company who did not seem to possess any tickets at all. Just before the train started the door was thrown open and two inebriated Scots, several degrees further gone than the rest of the company—which is saying a good deal—were hurled in. If the assemblage had all been of one way of thinking we might have reached Perth with nothing worse than bad headaches, but unfortunately some supporters of the other team were present, and in the midst of a heated and alcoholic debate on the rights and wrongs of the last free kick, two rival orators suddenly arose, clinched, and continued their argument at close grips on the floor. In a moment the party divided itself into two camps, and the conflict became general. As there were ten people in the compartment, of whom seven were engaged in a life-and-death struggle, the movements of the non-combatants—Kitty, myself, and a gigantic youth of gawky appearance—were, to put it mildly, somewhat restricted. Kitty became thoroughly frightened, and hampered my preparations for battle by clinging to my arm. The gigantic youth, seeing this, suddenly took command of the situation.
"Watch you the young leddy!" he bellowed in my ear, "and I'll sort them."
With that he hurled himself into the tumult. The exact details of his performance I could not see, the scientific dusting of railway cushions not having penetrated any further north of the Forth than it has south of the Thames; but the net result was that each combatant was pulled off, picked up, shaken until his teeth rattled, and banged down on to his seat with a brief admonition to mind his manners, until seven bewildered, partially sobered, and thoroughly demoralised patrons of sport sat round about in various attitudes of limp dejection, leaning against one another like dissipated marionettes; while our rustic Hector, bestriding the compartment like a Colossus, dared them to move a finger under penalty of being "skelped."
He bundled them all out at the next stopping-place, without inquiring whether they desired to alight there or no, and I am bound to say that they all seemed as anxious to leave the carriage as he was to expel them. He then shut the door, pulled up the window, and turned to my wife with a reassuring smile.
"Yon was just a storrm in a teapot," he remarked affably.