I had abundant time to change my clothes after the theatre, and taxied down to Liverpool Street Station through the deserted City streets. At the station, however, there were many people on the platforms, the refreshment rooms blazed with light, and scores of little parties in them seemed to be partaking of midnight tea. I found that a table had been reserved for me in the restaurant car of the Southend train, and a white-jacketed waiter told me that my supper would be served immediately the train started, and that a compartment in the carriage next to the restaurant car was at my disposal. Mr Amendt had been even better than his word.
Waiting on the platform, I watched another train, a suburban one, on the next line of rails, fill up. Bare-headed ladies, clutching in their hands the programmes of the theatres to which they had been, came sailing along; little messenger boys, their evening's work over, climbed into the carriages, and one gentleman, who evidently thought his time for rest had arrived, took the whole of one side of a third-class compartment to himself, lay down, and went at once to sleep.
When the suburban train had left, a few minutes before midnight, the stream of passengers set towards the Southend train, and I wondered which of them were going to be my fellow-supperers in the restaurant car. A party consisting of an elderly gentleman—I am sure he was an uncle, for he had the good-natured look that all genuine Dickensy uncles acquire—had evidently brought up two nieces and a little schoolboy nephew to see some play. They were returning in the highest of spirits, and got into the restaurant car at once, the uncle asking whether his champagne had been properly iced. A clergyman with a paper bag in his hand, which I think must have contained sponge cakes, looked regretfully at the car, and told the guard that had he known that it was running he would not have brought his supper with him. I saw nobody else who was an obvious supperer, but when the whistle blew and the flag was waved, and the train started, I found that in the section of the restaurant car where my table was there were two elderly ladies at one of the tables, a young man in spectacles at another, the good uncle and his little party at the third and that the fourth was reserved for me. There was on my table a little bunch of chrysanthemums in a glass vase with a heavy foot to prevent it from overturning, and I noticed with appreciation several devices for holding in their places cruets, water bottles, salt cellars and glasses should the train at express pace threaten to shake things off the table. This was the menu of the supper that Mr Amendt had ordered for me:
Lobster Mayonnaise.
Mutton Cutlets Reform.
Roast Grouse. Straw Potatoes.
Salad.
Omelette au Confiture.
Devilled Sardines.
Cheese. Biscuits. Butter.
Watercress. Lettuce. Celery.
Black Coffee.
Like my lunch earlier in the day, the Great Eastern offered me more than I had sufficient appetite to cope with. I found the mayonnaise excellent, and did full justice to the grouse, the omelette and the devilled sardines. The young man in spectacles, I could see, had ordered for his supper fried cod and a glass of porter; the elderly ladies were drinking tea and eating cake; and the uncle and his little party were, like myself, eating a sumptuous meal.
As I ate my supper the train rushed through the East of London, and Bethnal Green and Stratford were patches of lighted windows in the darkness, but when we were out of the zone of bricks and mortar and in the country there was a full moon high above, and fields and trees all grey and shadowy in the mist that was rising.
The two elderly ladies had gone back to their compartment, the young man in spectacles paid his bill, and I judged from this that we must be nearing Southend, and asked for mine. The waiter bowed politely and informed me that I was the guest of the Great Eastern Company. As I could not argue with such an indefinite thing as a railway company, I had to accept the situation, and therefore I cannot set down how much the excellent meal I ate should have cost me.
When the train ran in to the terminus at Southend it certainly did not seem to me that I had been travelling for an hour.