Adventures and Enthusiasms Part 14

"Of course she's not a bit like that Wendy thing really," said the mother.

"Now that I come to look at her I can see heaps of difference," said the daughter.

"None the less," I interjected, "you turned a very honest man into a thief, and a dog-thief at that; and he insists on reparation."

"Yes, indeed," said the mother, "it is really too bad. What reparation can we make?"

I don't pretend that my feelings are completely soothed, but the Clicquot 1904 which took the place of claret at dinner that evening was certainly very good.

[Ill.u.s.tration: LAURA DANCES TO HER MOTHER'S MUSIC. _See "The Innocent's Progress"--Plate 10_]

THE SUFFERER

Having engaged a sleeping-berth I naturally hurried, coin in hand, to the conductor, as all wise travellers do (usually to their discomfiture) to see if I could be accommodated with a compartment to myself and be guaranteed against invasion.

I couldn't.

I then sought my compartment, to learn the worst as to my position, whether above or below the necessarily offensive person who was to be my companion.

He was already there, and we exchanged the hard implacable glare that is reserved among the English for the other fellow in a wagon-lit.

When I discovered that to him had fallen the dreaded upper berth I relaxed a little, and later we were full of courtesies to each other--renunciations of hatpegs, racks, and so forth, and charming mutual concessions as to the light, which I controlled from below--so that by morning we were so friendly that he deemed me a fit recipient of his Great Paris Grievance.

This grievance, which he considered that every one should know about, bore upon the prevalence of spurious coins in the so-called Gay City and the tendency of Parisians to work them off on foreigners. As he said, a more inhospitable course one cannot conceive. Foreigners in Paris should be treated as guests, the English especially. But it is the English who are the first victims of the possessor of francs that are out of date, five-franc pieces guiltless of their country's silver, and ten-franc pieces into whose composition no gold has entered.

He had been in Paris but an hour or so when--but let me tell the story as my travelling companion told it to me.

"I don't know what your experience in Paris has been," he said, "but I have been victimised right and left."

He was now getting up, while I lay at comparative ease in my berth and watched his difficulties in the congested room and disliked his under vest.

"I had been in Paris but a few hours," he continued, "when it was necessary to pay a cabman. I handed him a franc. He examined it, laughed and returned it. I handed him another. He went through the same performance. Having found some good money to get rid of him, I sat down outside a cafe to try and remember where I had received the change in which these useless coins had been inserted. During a week in Paris much of my time was spent in that way."

He sighed and drew on his trousers. His braces were red.

"I showed the bad francs to a waiter," he went on, "and he, like the cabman, laughed. In fact, next to nudity, there is no theme so certain to provoke Parisian mirth as a bad coin. The first thought of every one to whom I showed my collection was to be amused." His face blackened with rage. "This cheerful callousness in a matter involving a total want of principle and straight-dealing as between man and man," he said, "denotes to what a point of cynicism the Parisians have attained."

I agreed with him.

"The waiter," he continued, "went through my money and pointed out what was good and what either bad or out of currency. He called other waiters to enjoy the joke. It seemed that in about four hours I had acquired three bad francs, one bad two-franc piece and two bad five-franc pieces.

I put them away in another pocket and got fresh change from him, which, as I subsequently discovered, contained one obsolete five-franc piece and two discredited francs. And so it went on. I was a continual target for them."

Here he began to wash, and the story was interrupted.

When he re-emerged I asked him why he didn't always examine his change.

"It's very difficult to remember to do so," he said, "and, besides, I am not an expert. Anyway, it got worse and worse, and when a bad gold piece came along I realised that I must do something; so I wrote to the Chief of the Police."

"In French?" I asked.

"No, in English--the language of honesty. I told him my own experiences.

I said that other English people whom I had met had testified to similar trouble; and I put it to him that as a matter of civic pride--_esprit de pays_--he should do his utmost to cleanse Paris of this evil. I added that in my opinion the waiters were the worst offenders."

"Have you had a reply?" I asked.

"Not yet," he said, and having completed his toilet he made room for me.

Later, meeting him in the restaurant-car, I asked him to show me his store of bad money. I wanted to see for myself what these coins were like.

"I haven't got them," he said.

"You sent them to the Chief of the Police with your letter, I suppose?"

I said.

"No, I didn't," he replied. "The fact is--well--as a matter of fact I managed to work them all off again."

A SOUTH SEA BUBBLE

"I want you," said my hostess, "to take in Mrs. Blank. She is charming.

All through the War she has been with her husband in the South Seas.

London is a new place to her."

Mrs. Blank did not look too promising. She was pretty in her way--"elegant" an American would have called her--but she lacked animation. However, the South Seas...! Any one fresh from the Pacific must have enough to tell to see soup, fish, and _entree_ safely through.

I began by remarking that she must find London a very complete change after the sun and serenity that she had come from.

"It's certainly noisier," she said; "but we had our share of rain."

"I thought it was always fine there," I remarked; but she laughed a denial and relapsed into silence.

She was one of those women who don't take soup, and this made the economy of her utterances the more unfair.

Racking my brain for a new start, I fell back on those useful fellows, the authors. Presuming that any one who had lived in that fascinating region--the promised land of so many of us who are weary of English climatic treacheries--would be familiar with the literature of it, I went boldy to work.

"The first book about the South Seas that I ever read," I said, "was Ballantyne's 'Coral Island'."

"Indeed!" she replied.

I asked her if she too had not been brought up on Ballantyne, and she said no. She did not even know his name.

"He wrote for boys," I explained, rather lamely.