CHAPTER VIII

_TOURING IN THE TUBES_

A SKETCH

“She doth stray about.”--SHAKESPEARE.

Mrs. Rosamond was a pleasant, chatty, little woman, and a universal favourite. Her abundant hair was brown, her eyes, shaded by long dark lashes, were deepest blue, and above them rose, not the “bar of Michael Angelo,” but a low, smooth, and pretty forehead, where, however, a phrenologist would have looked in vain for the faintest trace of the “bump of locality.” She was a shrewd judge of character in men and women, especially the former. She loved beautiful scenery and everything refined in art and literature. She had great sympathy with the suffering and distressed; but her ability to take mental notes of things and places, and to find her way about towns and cities, as some do by instinct, was utterly wanting in Lilian Rosamond; yet, with the strange perversity that impels people with bad eyesight to drive dog-carts or motor-cars, or to steer yachts, she persisted in going about strange localities unaccompanied, and when any expedition was planned, audaciously posed as an authority on quickest and best routes. But she was a native of the fair “North countree,” and, lying _perdu_ beneath her sweet disposition, was a vein--a thin one--of self-will.

“Why,” she argued, “should she not find her way about like other people? Had she not from childhood lived at Lymm, Cheshire, and roamed about that district without difficulty? Had she not frequently travelled to the old county city? Had she not braved the terrors of the Great Central Station at Manchester _en route_ for Halifax--changed carriages there, in fact? And had she not once actually journeyed all by herself to London on a visit, returning safely to her own town?” All of which was perfectly true, but she omitted to add that, in going up to town, her parents had, as it were, to see her “labelled and consigned” through the medium of a fatherly guard, while her friends in town had been strictly enjoined on no account to miss meeting her at Euston, and never to let her go anywhere in the metropolis unaccompanied. In fact, her family were in an agony of suspense until she was back again.

Mrs. Rosamond had married a gentleman-farmer of Welsh extraction, and her life had fallen on pleasant lines in a remote Radnorshire village bearing an unpronounceable name made up of consonants. The year 1902 arrived, and with it, in June, an invitation from her sister-in-law to spend Coronation week with her in Edith Road, West Kensington; and off she started, her easy-going husband, who had seldom tested his wife’s sense (or absence) of locality, and had no suspicion of how much it was lacking, merely remarking as he saw her into the train, “Now, my dear, mind you wait at Paddington a reasonable time to see if Annie is there to meet you. She is not always punctual, and if she does not turn up, take a cab. Don’t attempt to get to Edith Road by omnibus or Underground Railway. You don’t know London, and a four-wheeler will be cheaper in the long run. Now, don’t forget this, there’s a dear little woman, or I shall worry all day long about you.”

In the same carriage with her was a lady of uncertain age, whom Mrs. Rosamond quickly guessed to be unmarried and an “organiser”--one of those assertive, independent, “heel-less” women of the genus _plantigrade_, who know everything and want no assistance from anybody. Falling into conversation, Lilian Rosamond remarked that she hoped to see the King’s procession to the Abbey, a seat having long ago been secured for her, and that she had been told she would have to go a very long distance from the West End and might have to start by the first train on the Twopenny Tube to the Bank, and that then by _another_ Tube she somehow would get to the Borough High Street (where her “stand” was situated) by way of the “Elephant and Castle.”

This led to the subject of West Kensington, her destination, and how she proposed reaching it from Paddington. “Why,” said the plantigrade lady, “what on earth made your husband tell you to take a cab? It is two miles off at least, and you are sure to be over-charged. Never mind what he said. Men are always extravagant in these matters. Besides, you can think for yourself; you are a woman, not a baby. Now, I’ll tell you what to do. If your sister is not at the station, book your luggage--you say you have not got much with you--to be sent on by the railway parcel van, cross the road to the Praed Street District Railway Station, get out at Notting Hill Gate, cross the road there to the Tube station, and for twopence you will be at Shepherd’s Bush in a few minutes.”

This suggestion seemed to Mrs. Rosamond good and attractive, but she bravely resisted the allurements of a journey by an unfamiliar route; and, recalling her husband and his injunction, after waiting a quarter of an hour at Euston and finding that no one came for her, she allowed herself to be stowed away by an attentive and sympathetic porter into a stale, straw-smelling four-wheeler, and arrived safely at No. 28, when cabby promptly asked, and received, half a crown--a moderate eighteenpence more than his legitimate fare; but cabmen, like everybody else, must live somehow!

The longest day recorded in the almanac dawned clear and fair, and Mrs. Rosamond, rising at an unearthly early hour, started for Islington, where she had promised to breakfast with a relative--an unusual kind of feat to attempt, but easy of accomplishment by leaving Shepherd’s Bush very early for the Bank of England, where, as it was explained to her in an off-hand, businesslike manner by her sister’s husband, all she had to do was to hit the right subway, book afresh at the Bank Station of the City and South London Electric Railway, and “in a jiffy, as easy as A B C” (so he put it) she would find herself at the “Angel,” Islington, and be with her aunt in time for the coffee and rolls.

Mrs. Rosamond was delighted at the prospect, and no happier woman than she stood outside the Tube’s terminus that bright summer morning.

The booking-office was full of people--of the working class, thought fair Mrs. Rosamond, who, observing that each person paid the sum of three-halfpence through the glass partition that screened the clerks from too close contact with the public, tendered that modest sum like the others, without specifying her destination. But though plainly, she was too daintily dressed and too self-evidently a lady to escape notice, and was rather surprised at being asked if she wanted a workman’s ticket. “Oh no!” she hastily exclaimed. “I am only going to the Bank, and then to Islington on a visit.” “Well, then, your fare is twopence.” And she received in return a small slip of paper and not the familiar pasteboard ticket covered with undecipherable letters and figures.

Following the crowd, Mrs. Rosamond dropped the document into a sloping box fixed at the side of the gate and presided over by a railway official, the process suggesting to her lively imagination the method by which votes are recorded at a School Board election.

Wide open stood the door of a gigantic lift, the like of which she had never seen, which quickly filled with a compact mass of some fifty men and a sprinkling of women. There were upholstered benches at the sides; and a civil young artisan offered her his seat, but Lilian preferred to stand and look about her. The electro-lighted apartment was not æsthetic, and the unsightly advertisements, and notices warning travellers against smoking, spitting, or standing too near the doors, did not add to its beauty; and when the telescopic gates were clashed together and fastened, the whole thing reminded Mrs. Rosamond of a great cage full of specimens of the British _Homo Sapiens_ packed for conveyance and exhibition to inhabitants of other regions.

Suddenly, gently, and noiselessly the lift began to descend, and it seemed as if it would never stop. But stop it did, at a depth of seventy feet, which might have been seven hundred so far as Mrs. Rosamond’s sensations were concerned. Once again the iron gates clashed, and the wild animals--I mean the passengers--streamed forth, our fair traveller following, to the platform.

Was she dreaming? Had she, like Alice in Wonderland, suddenly become diminutive, and was she waiting for a well-groomed little white rabbit, with gold watch and chain, to emerge from what resembled a burrow at the end of the station? It was so _very_ small. Everything was on a reduced scale, the standing-room was a mere strip of planking, the tube like a pea-shooter. Surely it would not take in the train! However, it was deliciously cool and light, and the tiles that lined the station were, as she found by touching them with her gloved hands, perfectly free from smuts.

In a few moments, from the open cutting at the opposite end of the platform, where lay the shunting tracks, a bright light and metallic clattering heralded the strange-looking chimneyless locomotive. Behind it came five attractive-looking cars joined together, and gleaming with light. At their point of junction were telescopic gates, flung open as soon as the train stopped, and Mrs. Rosamond, who had just time to observe that there were not _two_ rails only on the track, but a _third_ in the middle, hurried into the first car she could find, and the earliest train on the Tube glided into the tunnel _en route_ for the Bank.

Lilian Rosamond at once discovered that the cars just fitted the Tube. She would like to have touched the sides, but as the windows were sealed up this was impossible.

Everything looked delightfully clean, and, considering the crowd, she was lucky to find a seat next to an intelligent and quiet-looking, middle-aged man, who turned out to be a foreman engaged upon great building works proceeding in the City. The speed increased, and the noise and the rattling of the cars increased in proportion--a condition of things she had not expected, and it was a relief when the train slowed down and made its first pause at Holland Park. Here a few workmen got in, but not a soul got out! Mrs. Rosamond, looking about her, noticed that her _companions de voyage_ were not in appearance such as she had expected at so early an hour. It is true they nearly all smoked--cigarettes mostly--some sticking to the old-fashioned short clay pipe charged with most pungent tobacco; but they did not swear or use strong language, they were not all dressed in corduroy, nor were their clothes dirty, neither did they universally carry huge “bass-bags” containing saws, and other sharp and nasty tools. Her neighbour, the foreman, with whom she soon got into a lively conversation, told her that most of the men (masons chiefly) were employed on a “big job” at Finsbury, and would travel to the Bank. He also volunteered the information that he lived in Caxton Road, close to the Shepherd’s Bush Station of the Tube; that he had to get his own breakfast at 4.30 or thereabouts, or wait until he got to the City, when he had it at a snug little coffee-shop in Moorfields; that he had used the Tube ever since its opening in 1900 day after day, starting by the first train in the morning, and returning, as his place and work suited, along the route at all hours, from five o’clock to eight, and sometimes (though seldom) by the last train from the Bank at 12.30 p.m.; and that the cars between the former hours--when people were leaving the City for the day--were more crowded than in the early morning, in fact crammed, with not even standing room.

At Notting Hill Gate there was a rush of operatives. By this time the cars were packed, and the little woman perceived the uses of the sliding leather straps suspended overhead, to which the unlucky seatless ones, who filled up the whole of the gangway, held on like grim death, to avoid tumbling about as the train oscillated.

At the Marble Arch some few persons, a dozen or so, tried to push in, but the five cars were _complet_, and so they continued, until, at the British Museum Station, a section of the passengers alighted, as also at Chancery Lane and the General Post Office. Then, after a run of 6½ miles from Shepherd’s Bush in twenty-four minutes, the Central “early workmen” pulled up at the Bank terminus at a platform resembling the others all along the line.

Mrs. Rosamond went up in a big lift, not to the surface as she expected, but found herself landed in a broad asphalted, bewildering subway lined with white bricks. Brilliantly lighted white passages seemed to stretch away in all directions, full of people tearing about here, there, and everywhere in the utmost confusion, some ascending steps that appeared to lead to the daylight, others descending slopes that ended in more brick-lined passages. At once she recalled her host’s injunction “to hit the right subway” for the Islington Tube Line, but becoming a trifle excited and confused, she went up the staircase that looked the shortest, and found herself in Cornhill, along which she strayed a short distance, and came to St. Michael’s, when she thought she had reached the station, because she had been told it was underneath a church. But there was no City and South London Railway, and her host had omitted to say that the subway between it and the Bank was contemplated only. So Lilian asked her way, and quickly found what she was seeking close by at the corner of Lombard Street and King William Street. And now, growing confident by experience, and perceiving that the booking-office and general arrangements resembled those of the Two-penny Tube, though on a smaller scale, she went to the booking-office window and tendered twopence. The clerk politely inquired, “All the way, miss?” and on her replying in the affirmative, demanded, and received, fourpence, giving her an ordinary ticket in return. She thought this strange, being different from the Tube system, the more so when she saw no glass box wherein to drop it. But there was the lift, and so she descended. Alas! when she got to the bottom, she forgot to make inquiries, being absorbed in meditation about her husband. “What was he doing at that particular hour?” she wondered. “Had he gone out fishing? Was he making the rounds of his farm, and looking after his pet livestock, the pigs?” A train came up, and without giving the matter a second thought, she got into it, and found the cars pretty nearly empty. They were narrow and low, and the atmosphere was close.

Away they sped, by London Bridge, the Borough, the “Elephant and Castle,” Kennington Park Road, the Oval, and Stockwell, but the guard did not call out the names of these stations, and only when the terminus was reached did Lilian rouse herself from her reverie, and stepping out of the station after giving up her ticket, gazed aghast, not at the “Angel,” Islington, which she knew was a locality nearly all bricks and mortar, but upon a large open space--Clapham Common! In fact, the poor _voyageuse_ had gone down the wrong lift at the Bank Station, and had failed to notice the names of the stations as she came along.

To recover her equanimity, Mrs. Rosamond thought she would stroll about a little before going back to Islington, which, it was explained to her, was at the other extremity of the line. Much refreshed by an hour’s walk and the novelty of the _terra incognita_, she booked again, and resumed her pilgrimage, determined that this time there should be no mistake.

What was it? Was it fatality? or was it some mischievous whispering spirit that caused her to keep mentally repeating the words, “Bank Station”? An echo, perhaps, of the instructions received the evening before. Anyhow, she did not go straight on, but as soon as the train reached the City, she alighted at the Bank, and found herself once more in the maze of subways branching off from the Central’s booking-office. The little woman was in despair. What must she do? It was no use asking her way, everybody seemed in too violent a hurry to attend to other people; so she walked mechanically down a disagreeably steep asphalted incline and along a wood-paved, white-tiled tunnel, and saw at the end an electric Tube station. There was the usual narrow platform, the glazed tunnel, the electric light, and the four-car train, but no queer-shaped engine, and the carriages looked smaller than those of the Central and of a different build, the glazed sides sloping inwards towards the low roof. There was no booking-office, so she stepped into the train, where, as in an omnibus, tickets were issued and punched for the sum of two-pence. The cars were narrow and stuffy, and she did not like them, but looking up, she caught sight of a brass plate giving the name of the engineers at Preston, Lancashire, and this quite cheered her.

In about five minutes the train stopped, and everybody got out and streamed up stairways and along passages into what proved to be a vast railway terminus--Waterloo; and she realised the dismal fact that by inadvertence she had taken the Waterloo and City Railway, instead of the City and South London! It was the word “City” running in her head that had done the mischief.

Nothing was left but to return, and so, through lofty cavernous regions beneath the terminus, over bridges, and down endless slopes of wood-paving, she managed to reach the up-platform.

Now came the rush of early City-bound men, season-ticket holders, who had travelled by the London and South Western line from all parts of Surrey served by it. They came pelting down the inclines as if their lives depended upon catching a particular train. Most of them carried neat hand-bags, suggestive of legal documents or company prospectuses, and nearly all had a morning paper. The bulk of them were well dressed, with an indefinable air indicative of the suburban resident. Mrs. Rosamond found them exceedingly pleasant, and was soon chatting with a military-looking gentleman, irreproachably groomed, with a lined and shrewd face, and old enough to be her father. He was, in fact, an eminent solicitor in Tower Royal, Cannon Street, who, hearing of her adventures, appeared to sympathise very deeply. “A little _too_ deeply,” said her husband, on hearing her narrative, not that he was distrustful or jealous, but he preferred to do most of the sympathising himself. The man of law tried to be facetious, and in explaining at some length the difference between metropolitan “tubes” and the “Underground,” so confused Mrs. Rosamond that she ended by thinking they were one and the same thing--a fatal error on her part, as we shall see. Dilating upon the subject, and upon the trials she had endured that morning, he remarked that he was sure her friends and the world in general would be great losers were so pleasant and vivacious a lady as herself to remain underground. At which fair Rosamond smiled--she had beautiful teeth, and a smile became her; but she grew somewhat reserved in manner when he insisted upon escorting her along the right subway, and felt decidedly relieved when he courteously left her on the pavement at the “Poultry,” by Mappin and Webb’s.

It was getting on towards eleven o’clock, and Mistress Rosamond, who, beyond a cup of coffee hastily swallowed before she started, had tasted nothing for six hours, began to feel faint, experiencing that distressing sensation which makes one think the ground is about to rise up and strike one, and that hearing and vision are about to fail. She _must_ have something to eat and drink, but _where?_ Dimly she recalled how in the old days a very dear brother, who knew his London well, was fond of expatiating upon the merits of certain reliable places in the City where the inner man could be most satisfactorily refreshed--Birch’s, Sweeting’s, Pimm’s in the “Poultry.” Why, she was actually standing in the “Poultry”! So, following the curt, but respectful, directions of a civic policeman, who must have been at least six feet two inches in his stockings, she, without crossing the road, easily discovered the haven of refuge in question, and being shown up to the ladies’ dining-room, sat down at a table near a window which looked upon busy Cheapside.

Though rather too early in the day for the regular menu, consultation with a grey-headed waiter--who strongly reminded her of some Church dignitary (a dean for choice) in layman’s attire, and who became immensely interested in his client, partly because her blue eyes recalled to him those of a daughter “lost awhile”--resulted, within twenty minutes, in a dainty repast, some scalloped oysters, a “portion” of the choicest Scotch salmon cold, with cucumber, and dainty roll and butter, followed by a cheese soufflé, and--by the “dean’s” advice--neither tea, coffee, nor wine, but a glass, just one glass, of Pimm’s “particular” stout, a beverage our traveller was unaccustomed to, but found an admirable accompaniment to her fish luncheon. The bill was paid with a handsome _douceur_, which the “dean” condescended to accept; and refreshed, and with renewed determination to carry out her original line of march, Mrs. Rosamond stepped out and walked along Cheapside.

There the shops at once attracted her attention: the jewellers, the hosiers--in one of which latter she bought some neckties and collars for her spouse--the print-sellers, and the London Stereoscopic Company’s seductive window. Here she looked up at the church clock far above her head, and finding the time getting on, and becoming just a little flurried at the discovery, started at once to resume her wanderings. “If you please, constable, can you tell me the nearest way to the Underground Railway?” “Straight as you can go, miss, down the lane, Bow Lane, in front of you, and you will find the station across the road at the bottom.” “Thank you very much,” and, mentally, “What a fine set of fellows the City policemen are! I wonder if they are all married; where do they live, and what are their wages?”

Straight down the narrow lane she went, and at the Cannon Street end asked another policeman the way to the Underground. He pointed to the opposite side of the road, and, stopping the traffic, conveyed her across, and she found herself in the Mansion House Station of the District Railway.

There were no officials to be seen, only the booking-clerks, one of whom, with the professional instinct for turning an honest penny for his employers, instead of advising her to return to the Bank close by, up Victoria Street, promptly recommended her to book by the District Railway to Bishopsgate Street, get across Finsbury Circus to Moorgate Street, and then take the City and South London Tube Railway to the “Angel.”

By this time Mrs. Rosamond had become too tired to discuss the matter, and was disinclined to go back by the way she had come. So she got into a first-class carriage of a Circle train, and, with a sigh of relief, settled down snugly into the far corner.

Whether it was the reaction, or the effect of the glass of stout, was never known, but after passing Cannon Street Mrs. Rosamond began to feel drowsy and dreamy, imagining she was nearing home in the local train, and wondering if her husband had received her telegram, and would come to meet her. She fell asleep, and a lovely picture she made, with lips slightly parted, and her long, curved eyelashes resting, like a child’s, on her soft cheeks. There was revealed just a few inches of well-fitting black silk clocked stockings, neatly-turned ankles, and a charming pair of very small dark tan shoes.

Time sped on, and, with it, the Circle train, past Bishopsgate, Farringdon Street, and King’s Cross, with its maze of metropolitan underground lines; through dismal tunnels, black with smoke; through brick-lined cuttings, foul with sooty deposit; past stations, each one hung, by way of adornment, with the same monotonous, highly-coloured “works of art,” drawing attention to Colman’s Mustard, Reckitt’s Blue, Nestle’s Milk, Bovril, Oxo, Lemco, Globe Polish, Ogden’s Cigarettes, Bird’s Custards, and Stephen’s Inks, and provided with penny-in-the-slot machines, with bookstalls bearing a strong family likeness, and with here and there a refreshment bar, where buns and sandwiches of the Mugby Junction type might be had.

At High Street, Kensington, where the engine was changed, the guard looked in, admired the sleeping beauty, and discreetly withdrew in silence.

In the middle of the tunnel between Sloane Square and Victoria, the train pulled up with a jerk, the signal having been suddenly put against it. Mrs. Rosamond woke, and looking at her watch, found that she must have been slumbering nearly an hour, and a fellow-passenger told her that by the time the train reached the Mansion House Station she would have completely traversed the circle of the Underground! “Well, I _will_ see this matter through,” she said to herself, “and I will not go again into that horrid Bank Subway. After all, I shall soon be at Bishopsgate Street.” So she went on.

How, on her arrival there, she escaped having to pay the full fare, no one knows. She kept her own counsel; but the ticket collector and the guard probably thought she was too nice to be worried with interrogations.

Her brief impressions of the Underground were that only in a few respects was the Tube an improvement upon it. The Inner Circle Trains, she thought, ran more smoothly; there was less rocking of the carriages, and less rattling noise; but they were badly lighted; the banging of doors was awful; the atmosphere sulphurous and stifling; and carriages, stations, staircases, and tunnels looked as if they had not been cleaned for months. Worse than all was the mode of pulling up the train with a jerk, which, at each stopping-place, almost invariably threw the alighting passengers into their fellow-travellers’ laps.

Resolved now to ask her way at every step, she contrived, by minutely following directions, to find and to cross Finsbury Circus, whence she was quickly in Moorgate Street, and at once discovered the City and South London Railway Station. Continuing to seek information for the Islington lift, the Islington platform, and the Islington train, she would not budge an inch until she had been thoroughly posted up. Once more in a Tube car, and by way of Old Street, and the City Road, she at last arrived at the “Angel,” and felt as if she had indeed reached the gates of heaven!

Milner Street was close by, and she was soon at her aunt’s house, but, alas! not to breakfast, for it was nearing twelve o’clock. That relation, an impatient woman, tired of waiting, had gone out for the day, and had left no message! This was too much for the little woman, it was the last straw, and flinging herself on the sofa, she thought sympathetically of how in the past

“A north-country maid up to London had strayed, Although with her nature it did not agree; She wept and she sighed, and she bitterly cried, I wish once again in the north I could be.”

Quickly she returned to Shepherd’s Bush, _viâ_ the Bank and the Twopenny Tube, in the latter finding a totally different class of people from those she had travelled with in the morning, and plenty of room for everybody. She went back home the next day, sacrificing her seat for the Coronation procession; and she registered a vow that if ever she came to London again she would study closely the route for any proposed expedition as carefully as if she were on an “unaccompanied” Continental tour.

She kept her vow; and, I believe, eventually, her “bump of locality” became considerably developed.

The moral of this practically true sketch is, that in view of the complicated system of metropolitan Tubes and Undergrounds, no one without an experienced escort, unless endowed with a talent for locality, can hope to get about London without trouble and difficulty. In fact, a _Metropolitan Bradshaw_, or _Metropolitan Guide to Underground London_ is urgently needed.