So you get your extra ticket, and then you wait with everyone else in a big room where most people are eating and drinking to wile away the time. Don't imagine that you can find your empty train, choose your corner, and settle yourself comfortably for your journey as you can in England. You are well looked after, but if you are used to England you never quite lose the impression in Germany that if you are not an official or a soldier you must be a criminal, and that if you move an inch to right or left of what is prescribed you will hear of it. Just before the train starts the warders open your prison doors and shout out the chief places the train travels to. So you hustle along with everyone else, and get the best place you can, and are hauled out by a watchful conductor when you arrive. If it is a small station there is sure to be a dearth of porters, but you get your luggage by going to the proper office and giving up the slip of paper you received when it was weighed. Never forget, as I have known English people do, that you cannot travel in Germany without having your luggage weighed and receiving the Schein for it. If you lose the Schein you are undone. I cannot tell you exactly what would happen, because it would be a tragedy without precedent, but it is impossible that German officials would surrender a trunk without receiving a Schein in exchange; at least, not without months of rigmarole and delay. Even when it is the official who blunders the public suffers for it. We were travelling some years ago from Leipzig to London when the guard examining our tickets let one blow away. Luckily some German gentlemen in the carriage with us saw what happened, gave us their addresses, and offered to help us in any way they could. But we had to buy a fresh ticket and trust to getting our money back by correspondence. Six months later we did get it back, and this is an exact translation of the letter accompanying it:—
"In answer to your gracious letter of the 26th September, we inform your wellbornship, respectfully, that the Ticket Office here is directed, in regard to the ticket by you on the 23rd of September taken, by the guard in checking lost ticket Leipzig-London via Calais 2nd class, the for the distance Hanover to London outpaid fare of 71 m. 40 pf. by post to you to refund."
One must admire the mind that can compose a sentence like that without either losing its way or turning dizzy.
But if you want to see what Germans can give you in the way of order and comfort you must leave the railroad and travel in one of their big American liners. Even if you are not going to America, but only from Hamburg to Dover, it is well worth doing. The interest of it begins the day before, when you take your trunks to the docks and see the steerage passengers assembled for their start. They are a strange gipsy-looking folk, for the most part from the eastern frontier of Germany, bare-footed and wearing scraps of brighter colours than western people choose. When we arrived the doctor was examining their eyes in an open shed, and we saw them huddled together in families waiting their turn. There was no weeping and wailing as there is when the Irish leave their shores. These people looked scared by the bustle of departure, and concerned for the little children with them, and for their poor bundles of clothes; but they did not seem unhappy. In the luggage bureau itself you came across the emigrant upsides with fortune, the successful business German returning to America after a summer holiday in his native land, and speaking the most hideously corrupt and vulgar English ever heard. The most harsh and nasal American is heavenly music compared with nasal American spoken by a German tongue. The great ship was crowded with people of this type, and the resources of Europe could hardly supply them with the luxuries they wanted. We had a special train next day to Cuxhaven, and an army of blue-coated white-gloved stewards to meet us on the platform, and a band to play us on board. Our private rooms were hung with pale blue silk and painted with white enamel and furnished with satin-wood; the passages had marble floors; there were quantities of flowers everywhere, and books, and the electric light. In fact, it was the luxurious floating hotel a modern liner must be to entice such people as those I saw in the luggage bureau to travel in it. The meals were most elaborate and excellent; and I feel sure that any royal family happening to travel incognito on the ship would have been satisfied with them. But my neighbours at table were not. "We shall not dine down here again," said one of them, speaking with the twang I have described. "After to-night we shall have all our meals in the Ritz Restaurant." I looked at her reflectively, and next day after breakfast I stood on the bridge and looked at the other emigrants. The women were singing an interminable droning mass, the men sat about on sacks and played cards, the bare-footed children scuttled to and fro.
"One day some of these people will come back in a Luxus cabin," said a German acquaintance to me.
"And they will dine in the Ritz Restaurant, because our dinner is not good enough for them," I prophesied.
Directly we got to Dover every feature of our arrival helped us to feel at home. There was a batch of large good-natured looking policemen, whose function I cannot explain, but it was agreeable to see them again. There was no order or organisation of any kind to protect and annoy you. The authorities had thoughtfully painted the letters of the alphabet on the platform where the luggage was deposited, and you were supposed to find your own trunks in front of your own letter. I, full of German ideas still, waited a weary time near my letter. "You'll never get them that way," said an English friend. "You'd much better go to the end of the platform and pick them out as you can." So I went, and found a huge pile of luggage pitched anyhow, anywhere, and picked out my own, seized a porter, made him shoulder things, and followed him at risk to life and limb. All the luggage leaving Dover was being tumbled about at our feet, and when we tried to escape it we fell over what had arrived. Porters were rushing to and fro with trunks, just as disturbed ants do with eggs, but in this case it was the German passengers who felt disturbed. They were not used to such ways. When they had to duck under a rope to reach the waiting train they grew quite angry, and said they did not think much of the British Empire. But there was worse to come for us all. Breakfast on board had been early and a fog had delayed our arrival. We were all hungry and streamed into the refreshment room. We filled it.
"What is there to eat?" said one.
The young woman with the hauteur and detachment of her calling did not speak, but just glanced at a glass dish under a glass cover. There were two stale looking ham sandwiches.
"Well," says my Englishman, when I tell him this true story—"we are not a greedy nation."