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Page 96
We lunched at the station, and, as the meal progressed, saw again how
widespread and sincere is the German sentiment to which I alluded,
perhaps too lightly, in the last chapter. Our waitresses were all that
could be desired, until there came between us and them a youth from
parts without. He was sallow, and the waitresses were buxom; he might
have been a student of law or medicine, they were naturally of much
lower degree. But they frankly forsook us and sat down beside him in
terms of devotion and an open aspect of radiant happiness. When one went
to draw his lager beer he put an unrepelled arm round the waist of the
other, and when the first came back he chucked her under the chin with
undisguised affection, the while we looked on and starved, none knowing
the language except Isabel, who thought of nothing but blushing. As Mr.
Malt said, if the young man could only have made up his mind, we might
have been able to get along with the rejected one; but, apparently, he
was not in the least embarrassed by numbers, sending a large and
beguiling smile to yet a further hand-maiden, who passed enviously
through the _speise-salle_ with a basin of soup. It was only when Dicky
stalked across to the old woman who sold sausages and biscuits behind a
counter, and pointed indignantly to the person who held all the
available table service of the Strasbourg railway station on his knees,
that we obtained redress. The old woman laughed as if it were amusing,
and called the maidens shrilly; but even then they came with reluctance,
as if we had been mere schnapps instead of ten complete luncheons, one
soup, and a bread and cheese, as Dicky said. The bread and cheese was
the Count, and one gathered from it that the improvement in his
immediate prospects was not yet assured, that the arrangimento was still
in futuro.
We had become such a large party, that it is impossible to relate the
whole of our experiences even in the half hour during which we dawdled
round the Strasbourg waiting-room until the train should start. I know
it was then, for instance, that Mrs. Portheris took Dicky aside and told
him how deeply she sympathised with him in his trying position, and bade
him only be faithful to the dictates of his own heart and all would come
right in time. I know Dicky promised faithfully to do so, but I must not
dwell upon it. Nor is the opportunity adequate to express the
indignation we all felt, and not Mr. Mafferton merely, at the
insufficient personal impression we made upon the German railway
officials. They were so completely preoccupied with their magnificent
selves and their vast business that they were unable even to look at us
when we asked them questions, and their sole conception of a reply was
an order, in terms that sounded brutal to a degree. They were
objectionably burly and red in the face; they wore an offensive number
of buttons and straps upon their uniforms. As Mr. Mafferton said, they
utterly misconceived their position in life, attempting to Kaiser the
travelling public by Divine right instead of recognising themselves as
humble servants, buttoned only to be made more agreeable to the eye.
One such person trampled upon us to such an extent that I have never
been able to satisfy myself that the Senator was sincere in making his
little mistake. We were sitting in dejected rows, with a number of other
foreigners who had been similarly reduced, when this official entered
the waiting-room, advanced to the middle of it, posed with great
majesty, and emitted several bars of a kind of chant or chime. It was
delivered with too much vigour, and it stopped too abruptly, to be
entirely enjoyable; but there was no doubt about the musical intention.
It was not even intoning; it was singing, beginning with moderation,
going on stronger with indignation, and ending suddenly in a crescendo
of denunciation.
We smiled in difficult self-restraint as he went away, and Dicky
remarked that he supposed we were in their hands, we couldn't object to
anything they did to us. In five minutes he came back to exactly the
same spot and sang again the same words, in the same key, with the same
unction. "Encore!" exclaimed Mr. Malt boldly, but cowered under the
glare that was turned upon him, and utterly fell away when we reminded
him of the punishments attached in Germany to the charge of _l�se
majest�_. Precisely five minutes more passed away, and Bawlinbuttons, as
Miss Callis called him, entered again. Then occurred the Senator's
little mistake. In the midst of the second bar, the indignant one,
Bawlinbuttons stopped short, petrified by poppa, who had advanced and
was holding out copper coins whose usefulness we had left behind us, to
the value of about fifteen cents.
"Here's the collection," said poppa benevolently--for an instant or two
he was quite audible--"but unless you know some other tune the company
wish me to say that they won't trouble you any further."
There are misunderstandings that are never rectified, sometimes because
a train draws up at the platform as in this case, and sometimes for
other reasons, and it was natural enough that poppa should fail to
comprehend Bawlinbuttons' indignant shouts to the effect that a Kaiser
should never be mistaken for an organ-grinder, merely because his tastes
are musical. Neither is it likely that the various Teutons who were
waiting for the information will ever understand why the announcement
that the train for Saarburg, Nancy, Frankfort, and Mayence would leave
at ten o'clock precisely was never completed for the third time,
according to the regulation. But we have often wondered since what
Bawlinbuttons did with the coppers.
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