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Updated: May 4, 2025
"I don't quite know how long I shall be," he continued. "I shall have to let you know when I am back." "Yes, let me know," she replied in an even tone. The tone was, for her, suspiciously even. He was a little uneasy. "You don't ask me where I'm going," he said, with a little cumbrous effort to rally her. She was looking straight before her, past the bus-driver. "I know," she said.
Now, old Mackwayte stood at her elbow in his rig-out as an old London bus-driver in the identical, characteristic clothes which he had worn for this turn for the past 25 years. He was far too old a hand to show any nervousness he might feel at the ordeal before him. He was chatting in undertones in his gentle, confidential way to the stage manager.
The 'bus-driver, with London stout, and plenty of it, polishing his round cheeks like the brasswork of a locomotive, his neck well wound and buttressed with thick comforter and collar, heedeth not, but goes on his round, now fast, now slow, always stolid and rubicund, the rain running harmlessly from him as if he were oiled.
Commonly he clutched a big rattle, and sometimes he went along hailing the bus-drivers and policemen along the road outside the railings as "Dadda!" and "Babba!" in a sociable, democratic way. "There goes that there great Boomfood baby," the bus-driver used to say. "Looks 'ealthy," the forward passenger would remark. "Bottle fed," the bus-driver would explain.
It was a public-house in those days, too. But I never heard of the Horns!" The 'bus-driver was impressed by this statement, but he would not lightly yield in the argument. "Of course," he said, "The Elephant my 'ave been well-known in them dys, and I don't sy it ain't well-known in these dys, but I do sy thet it ain't so well-known now as wot the 'Orns is.
He wore his collars so high that he had to order them of a drummer, and as he came down street from the depot, riding magnificently with the 'bus-driver, after the train had gone, the clerks used to cry: "Look out for your horses; the steam-piano is coming!" But it didn't affect the Young Prince.
Sometimes I used to consider it, and with that bus-driver of Stevenson's who drove to the station and then drove back, cry 'My God is this life! There was nothing real anywhere. Nobody ever expected a woman in our set to do anything worth doing."
It is said that when a 'bus-driver has a holiday he always goes and rides with the man who is taking his place; but when Rembrandt had a holiday he went away from the studio, not towards it. He would walk alone, off across the meadows, and along the canals, and once we find him tramping thirty miles to visit cousins who were fishermen on the seacoast. Happy fisher-folk!
On the stage was a gnarled old man with ruddy cheeks and a muffler, a seedy top hat on his head, a coaching whip in his hand, the old horse bus-driver of London in his habit as he had lived. The old fellow stood there and just talked to the audience of a fine sporting class of men that petrol has driven from the streets, without exaggerated humor or pathos.
My friend, who had not the courage of an ever-present literary mission, fled abashed from the place, and I think he was right; but surely it was no harm to overhear the affianced of a 'bus-driver talking tender nothings to him all the way from Knightsbridge to Kensington, bending over from the seat she had taken next him.
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