“You vont to be put down at Sharing Cross,” repeated the other bitterly, as he led him back to his seat. “I shall put yer down in the middle of the road if I ’ave much more of yer. You stop there till I come and sling yer out. I ain’t likely to let yer go much past yer Sharing Cross, I shall be too jolly glad to get rid o’ yer.”
The poor Frenchman subsided, and we jolted on. At “The Angel” we, of course, stopped. “Charing Cross,” shouted the conductor, and up sprang the Frenchman.
“Oh, my Gawd,” said the conductor, taking him by the shoulders and forcing him down into the corner seat, “wot am I to do? Carn’t somebody sit on ’im?”
He held him firmly down until the ’bus started, and then released him. At the top of Chancery Lane the same scene took place, and the poor little Frenchman became exasperated.
“He keep saying Sharing Cross, Sharing Cross,” he exclaimed, turning to the other passengers; “and it is no Sharing Cross. He is fool.”
“Carn’t yer understand,” retorted the conductor, equally indignant; “of course I say Sharing Cross—I mean Charing Cross, but that don’t mean that it is Charing Cross. That means—” and then perceiving from the blank look on the Frenchman’s face the utter impossibility of ever making the matter clear to him, he turned to us with an appealing gesture, and asked:
“Does any gentleman know the French for ‘bloomin’ idiot’?”
A day or two afterwards, I happened to enter his omnibus again.
“Well,” I asked him, “did you get your French friend to Charing Cross all right?”
“No, sir,” he replied, “you’ll ’ardly believe it, but I ’ad a bit of a row with a policeman just before I got to the corner, and it put ’im clean out o’ my ’ead. Blessed if I didn’t run ’im on to Victoria.”