Chapter XXI

EARLY coaching days are wrapped round with strange adventures and the oddest tales; some, doubtless, of the _ben trovato_, rather than the most truthful, nature. But those stories of coaching miseries and adventure that have been proved truthful are themselves so surprising and incredible to modern ears that even the most improbable of uncertified tales cannot be dismissed as mere romancing. The tale of the Sprightly Lady and the Anxious Gentleman should, for instance, surely be picturesquely written up some day and included in some English (and therefore strictly proper) kind of Thousand and One Nights' Entertainments.

The coach was nearing the outskirts of London. The rheumy air hung in dank and foggy vapours on the countryside and transformed innocent roadside trees and hedges into all sorts of menacing shapes. The guard let off his blunderbuss at a pollard willow that loomed suspiciously like a highwayman out of the reeking air, and the passengers all began to automatically turn their pockets out. It proved a false alarm, and purses and trinkets were returned. But the travellers were uneasy. One gentleman, in especial, feared for ten guineas he carried, whereupon a lady advised him to hide the money in his boot. He had hardly done this when a hoarse voice was heard commanding the coachman to stop. When the unhappy insides had picked themselves up from the straw at the bottom of the coach, into which they had unceremoniously been thrown by the driver's prompt obedience to that behest, they found themselves covered with a pistol projected through the door, and were invited to deliver up their money and jewellery. Those who had little gave it and were thankful it was no more. The lady protested that she had nothing; "but," said she, "if you look in this gentleman's boot you will find ten guineas." There was nothing for it but to take off that boot and hand over the coin; but when the highwayman had gone it was another matter, and the plundered traveller accused her, in no measured terms, of being the robber's accomplice. Bound to admit that appearances were against her, she (how like the Arabian Nights fashion!) invited the company to supper the following evening, when matters should be explained. They accepted, not, it is to be feared, very graciously. The time came, and, ushered into a splendidly-appointed room, with a supper laid, they were re-introduced to their acquaintance of the night before. When the repast was over she opened a pocket-book. "Here," she said, addressing the loser of the ten guineas, "in this book, which I had with me in the coach, are bank-notes to the amount of one thousand pounds. I judged it better for you to lose ten guineas than for me to be robbed of this valuable property. As you have been the means of my saving it, I entreat your acceptance of this bank bill of one hundred pounds."

Much of the humour that went to lighten old road travelling was of an evanescent kind, and has not survived, but a few examples, preserved in contemporary literature, keep their flavour. Among them is the narrative called "Three Blind 'Uns and a Bolter." "I recollect," said the Jehu who told the tale, "having a sanctified chap for a passenger, and nothing that was either said or done was at all to his mind. On that day I happened to have a very awkward team--three blind ones and a very shy off leader, and I confess that two or three times I lost my patience as well as temper. My near leader pulled to such a degree that I was obliged to get down and put up her bearing-rein up to the top of the bit, and curb her enough to break her jaw. After starting again, I could deal with her very well for about a mile, when her mouth got dead again, and I was wicked enough to let drive a few hearty damns at her, my pious companion all the while exhorting me to patience. 'Patience be damned,' at last said I, fairly sick of the two; upon which he bolted as if he had been galvanised.

"'Pray, sir,' said he, 'did you ever hear of Job?'

"'He can't keep out of the shop,' thought I, 'but I won't have it;' so I answered, 'What coach does he drive?'

"'Awful in the extreme,' said he, throwing up his hands, 'I fear you don't read your Bible; but I will tell you--he was the most patient man that ever existed.'

"'But, sir,' said I, 'did he ever drive three blind 'uns and a bolter?'

"'Certainly not,' replied he; 'he was not a coachman.'

"'Then it's accounted for,' said I, 'for if ever he had had four such horses to deal with as I have here, he would have had no more patience than myself.'"

Here, at Kelvedon, one of the old-time coachmen played a drunken trick that would have been impossible in the last years of coaching, when discipline was strict and drivers less eccentric than they had been. He had just driven the London stage from Ipswich, and having more by good luck than careful driving brought his passengers safely to dinner at the "Angel," turned into the bar for a jorum of that favourite drink of coachmen--rum. Emerging, he perceived one of the Harwich to London fish-waggons, fully laden, standing at the door, and, mounting on to the driver's seat, unobserved, he wheeled the waggon round and dashed off at top speed on the way to Colchester, coming to grief at Lexden Hill, where the huge conveyance was upset and two tons weight of fish strewed the king's highway. The mad coachman survived to repent his escapade, but he went on one leg for the remainder of his life.

"Other times, other manners" is a saying that assumes an added force when contrasting the Coaching Age with the Age of Steam. Our fellow-travellers by railway, who glare at us, and we at them, like strange cats on a roof-top, have little idea of the chivalry that ruled on the road a hundred years ago. Glance, if you dare, at a lady who may be the only other occupant of a railway carriage with you, and she wonders whether she had not better call the guard; but it was, in the days of our great-grandfathers, almost the bounden duty of the gentlemen to see that the ladies in whose company the chances of the road might place them lacked nothing that courtesy could supply; whether it were merely the aid of an arm in walking up one of those hills the coaches could only climb unladen, or the more material attention involved in seeing that the dear creatures were duly supplied with refreshments. It was, for instance, long the chivalric custom of the gentlemen travelling by coach to pay for the breakfasts and dinners of the unprotected ladies who might be travelling by the same conveyance. "I vow," says one of these old travellers, "'tis a pleasure in a cavalier to do so; but, the Lord save us, what a prodigious appetite does not the swiftness of the travelling confer upon the fair, whose lassitude and vapours at other times render them incapable of more than drinking a dish of that noxious herb they call 'tay,' a thing which it is only fitting that the heathenish and phanatick peoples of the Indies should partake of. I protest that the ladies of the coach, when we alighted at the 'Angel' at Kelvedon, finding they could not be suited with tay, went to it with a right good will and left as good an account of the claret and the beef as if they had been going empty for a week. Spare me, I do beg, from your languishing creatures who would die of a surfeit of two biscuits at home, but compare with the most valiant of trenchermen abroad."

This protesting gentleman might, had he thought of it, have exclaimed with Othello on the pity "that we can call these delicate creatures ours and not their appetites."

He must have been particularly hard hit in the pocket by the robust appetites of his fellow-travellers, but did not, however, let his feelings appear, for he goes on to tell how he gave as a toast, "the ladies, bless them, whose bright eyes," etc., etc.--a toast we have many times heard of; and, indeed, rather flatters himself upon having "made an impression." He, in fact, seems to have been like Constable, in a way; for it was said of that painter that he was "a gentleman in a stage-coach; nay, more, a gentleman at a stage-coach dinner." "Then," said one, hearing that praise, "he must have been a gentleman indeed!"

That is very significant. It was, then, only your very paragon among gentlemen who could sustain the character at a stage-coach dinner. His manners might survive the strain of the journey itself, and even the sight and sound of lovely Phyllis, adorable when awake, snoring, unlovely to eye and ear, with open mouth and suffocating gurgles; but when after the tedious stage had been accomplished and the passengers had descended, irritable, hungry and thirsty, to a dinner scarce to be eaten, even at express speed, in the short time allowed, then, ay _then_, my friends, came the test! No man so insensible to politeness as a starving man, and few attentions were paid to the ladies by strangers whose sole chance of obtaining the dinner for which they had paid was the resolute determination to attend only to their own wants.

The discomforts of travelling by coach certainly outweighed the pleasures of that old-world method. A pleasant day and the open country made a seat on the outside of stage or mail an eminence not willingly to be exchanged for any other mode of conveyance then known; but, as little David Copperfield found on his first coach journey, _night_ on a coach was an experience once gained not willingly repeated. Being put between two gentlemen, to prevent his falling off, David found himself nearly smothered by their falling asleep, so that he could not help crying out, "Oh! if you please!" which they didn't like at all, because it woke them. With the rising of the sun David found his fellow-passengers sleeping easier than they had done during the night, when terrific gasps and snorts disturbed their midnight slumbers. As the sun rose higher, so their sleep became lighter and they gradually awoke, one by one, each one indignant when charged with having slept. During the rest of his career, David invariably observed "that of all human weaknesses, the one to which our common nature is the least disposed to confess (I cannot imagine why) is the weakness of having gone to sleep in a coach."