A few moments later a fellow-passenger appeared, a well-dressed, middle-aged man, who asked me in French if the train went to London, and on my replying in the affirmative, he thanked me profusely and joined me.
“I regret, m’sieur, that I, alas! know so very leetle of your Engleesh,” he remarked pleasantly, and continued in French: “Sometimes my ignorance places me in great difficulty when en voyage here.”
Knowing French fairly well we soon commenced to chat in that language. He struck me as a man of considerable refinement and education. Therefore it was no surprise to me when he told me that, as an official at the head office of the Crédit Lyonnais in Paris, it was his duty sometimes to visit their correspondents in the chief commercial centres of Great Britain.
“I am on my way from Glasgow back to Paris,” he said. “But I had to break my journey in York this morning. I shall leave London for Paris to-morrow. I shall travel by the air-route,” he added; “it is so much quicker, and far less fatiguing. I have been backwards and forwards to the Croydon Aerodrome quite half a dozen times of late.”
“Yes,” I remarked. “Travel by aeroplane must be of very considerable advantage to really busy men.”
And thus we chatted until dinner was announced, and we went together along the corridor to the restaurant-car, where we sat opposite each other.
As the train sped along over the flat fertile country through Doncaster and Grantham on that moonlit winter’s night we sat gossiping pleasantly, for I had looked forward to a lonely journey back to London.
I have “knocked about” ever since the commencement of the war, but I abhor a lonely four-hour railway journey. I had had enough of slow railway journeys in France and elsewhere. But on that evening I confess I was greatly taken with my fellow-traveller.
He had all the alertness and exquisite politeness of the Parisian, and he compelled me to have a Benedictine at his expense. Then, as a quid pro quo, he took one of my cigarettes.
Later, when we had concluded the usual and never-altering meal provided by the Great Northern Railway Company—I often wonder who are the culinary artists who devise those menus which face us on all English trains—we returned to our compartment to stretch ourselves in our corners and to smoke. Grantham we had passed and we were approaching Peterborough, the old fen town with the ancient cathedral.