As Done in London
London is essentially a he-town, just as Paris is indubitably a
she-town. That untranslatable, unmistakable something which is not to
be defined in the plain terms of speech, yet which sets its mark on
any long-settled community, has branded them both--the one as being
masculine, the other as being feminine. For Paris the lily stands, the
conventionalized, feminized lily; but London is a lion, a shag-headed,
heavy-pawed British lion.
One thinks of Paris as a woman, rather pretty, somewhat regardless of
morals and decidedly slovenly of person; craving admiration, but too
indolent to earn it by keeping herself presentable; covering up the dirt
on a piquant face with rice powder; wearing paste jewels in her
earlobes in an effort to distract criticism from the fact that the
ears themselves stand in need of soap and water. London, viewed in
retrospect, seems a great, clumsy, slow-moving giant, with hair on his
chest and soil under his nails; competent in the larger affairs and
careless about the smaller ones; amply satisfied with himself and
disdainful of the opinions of outsiders; having all of a man's vices and
a good share of his virtues; loving sport for sport's sake and power for
its own sake and despising art for art's sake.
You do not have to spend a week or a month or a year in either Paris or
London to note these things. The distinction is wide enough to be seen
in a day; yes, or in an hour. It shows in all the outer aspects. An
overtowering majority of the smart shops in Paris cater to women; a
large majority of the smart shops in London cater to men. It shows in
their voices; for cities have voices just as individuals have voices.
New York is not yet old enough to have found its own sex. It belongs
still to the neuter gender. New York is not even a noun--it's a verb
transitive; but its voice is a female voice, just as Paris' voice is.
New York, like Paris, is full of strident, shrieking sounds, shrill
outcries, hysterical babblings--a women's bridge-whist club at the hour
of casting up the score; but London now is different. London at all
hours speaks with a sustained, sullen, steady, grinding tone, never
entirely sinking into quietude, never rising to acute discords. The
sound of London rolls on like a river--a river that ebbs sometimes, but
rarely floods above its normal banks; it impresses one as the necessary
breathing of a grunting and burdened monster who has a mighty job on his
hands and is taking his own good time about doing it.
In London, mind you, the newsboys do not shout their extras. They bear
in their hands placards with black-typed announcements of the big news
story of the day; and even these headings seem designed to soothe rather
than to excite--saying, for example, such things as Special From Liner,
in referring to a disaster at sea, and Meeting in Ulster, when meaning
that the northern part of Ireland has gone on record as favoring civil
war before home rule.
The street venders do not bray on noisy trumpets or ring with bells or
utter loud cries to advertise their wares. The policeman does not shout
his orders out; he holds aloft the stripe-sleeved arm of authority
and all London obeys. I think the reason why the Londoners turned
so viciously on the suffragettes was not because of the things the
suffragettes clamored for, but because they clamored for them so loudly.
They jarred the public peace--that must have been it.
I can understand why an adult American might go to Paris and stay
in Paris and be satisfied with Paris, if he were a lover of art and
millinery in all their branches; or why he might go to Berlin if he were
studying music and municipal control; or to Amsterdam if he cared for
cleanliness and new cheese; or to Vienna if he were concerned with
surgery, light opera, and the effect on the human lungs of doing without
fresh air for long periods of time; or to Rome if he were an antiquarian
and interested in ancient life; or to Naples if he were an entomologist
and interested in insect life; or to Venice if he liked ruins with water
round them; or to Padua if he liked ruins with no water anywhere near
them. No: I'm blessed if I can think of a single good reason why a sane
man should go to Padua if he could go anywhere else.
But I think I know, good and well, why a man might spend his whole
vacation in London and enjoy every minute of it. For this old fogy, old
foggy town of London is a man-sized town, and a man-run town; and it has
a fascination of its own that is as much a part of it as London's grime
is; or London's vastness and London's pettiness; or London's wealth and
its stark poverty; or its atrocious suburbs; or its dirty, trade-fretted
river; or its dismal back streets; or its still more dismal slums--or
anything that is London's.
To a man hailing from a land where everything is so new that quite a
good deal of it has not even happened yet, it is a joyful thing to turn
off a main-traveled road into one of the crooked byways in which the
older parts of London abound, and suddenly to come, full face, on a
house or a court or a pump which figured in epochal history or epochal
literature of the English-speaking race. It is a still greater joy to
find it--house or court or pump or what not--looking now pretty much as
it must have looked when good Queen Bess, or little Dick Whittington, or
Chaucer the scribe, or Shakspere the player, came this way. It is fine
to be riding through the country and pass a peaceful green meadow and
inquire its name of your driver and be told, most offhandedly, that it
is a place called Runnymede. Each time this happened to me I felt the
thrill of a discoverer; as though I had been the first traveler to find
these spots.
I remember that through an open door I was marveling at the domestic
economies of an English barber shop. I use the word economies in this
connection advisedly; for, compared with the average high-polished,
sterilized and antiseptic barber shop of an American city, this shop
seemed a torture cave. In London, pubs are like that, and some dentists'
establishments and law offices--musty, fusty dens very unlike their
Yankee counterparts. In this particular shop now the chairs were hard,
wooden chairs; the looking-glass--you could not rightly call it a
mirror--was cracked and bleary; and an apprentice boy went from one
patron to another, lathering each face; and then the master followed
after him, razor in hand, and shaved the waiting countenances in turn.
Flies that looked as though they properly belonged in a livery stable
were buzzing about; and there was a prevalent odor which made me think
that all the sick pomade in the world had come hither to spend its last
declining hours. I said to myself that this place would bear further
study; that some day, when I felt particularly hardy and daring, I would
come here and be shaved, and afterward would write a piece about it
and sell it for money. So, the better to fix its location in my mind,
I glanced up at the street sign and, behold! I was hard by Drury Lane,
where Sweet Nelly once on a time held her court.
Another time I stopped in front of a fruiterer's, my eye having been
caught by the presence in his window of half a dozen draggled-looking,
wilted roasting ears decorated with a placard reading as follows:
AMERICAN MAIZE OR INDIAN CORN
A VEGETABLE--TO BE BOILED AND THEN
EATEN
I was remarking to myself that these Britishers were surely a strange
race of beings--that if England produced so delectable a thing as green
corn we in America would import it by the shipload and serve it on every
table; whereas here it was so rare that they needs must label it as
belonging to the vegetable kingdom, lest people should think it might be
an animal--when I chanced to look more closely at the building occupied
by the fruiterer and saw that it was an ancient house, half-timbered
above the first floor, with a queer low-browed roof. Inquiring afterward
I learned that this house dated straight back to Elizabethan days and
still on beyond for so many years that no man knew exactly how many;
and I began to understand in a dim sort of way how and why it was these
people held so fast to the things they had and cared so little for the
things they had not.
Better than by all the reading you have ever done you absorb a sense and
realization of the splendor of England's past when you go to Westminster
Abbey and stand--figuratively--with one foot on Jonson and another
on Dryden; and if, overcome by the presence of so much dead-and-gone
greatness, you fall in a fit you commit a trespass on the last
resting-place of Macaulay or Clive, or somebody of equal consequence.
More imposing even than Westminster is St. Paul's. I am not thinking
so much of the memorials or the tombs or the statues there, but of the
tattered battleflags bearing the names of battles fought by the English
in every crack and cranny of the world, from Quebec to Ladysmith, and
from Lucknow to Khartum. Beholding them there, draped above the tombs,
some faded but still intact, some mere clotted wisps of ragged silk
clinging to blackened standards, gives one an uplifting conception of
the spirit that has sent the British soldier forth to girth the globe,
never faltering, never slackening pace, never giving back a step to-day
but that he took two steps forward to-morrow; never stopping--except for
tea.
The fool hath said in his heart that he would go to England and come
away and write something about his impressions, but never write a
single, solitary word about the Englishman's tea-drinking habit, or the
Englishman's cricket-playing habit, or the Englishman's lack of a sense
of humor. I was that fool. But it cannot be done. Lacking these things
England would not be England. It would be Hamlet without Hamlet or the
Ghost or the wicked Queen or mad Ophelia or her tiresome old pa; for
most English life and the bulk of English conversation center about
sporting topics, with the topic of cricket predominating. And at a given
hour of the day the wheels of the empire stop, and everybody in the
empire--from the king in the counting house counting up his money, to
the maid in the garden hanging out the clothes--drops what he or she may
be doing and imbibes tea until further orders. And what oceans of tea
they do imbibe!
There was an old lady who sat near us in a teashop one afternoon. As
well as might be judged by one who saw her in a sitting posture only,
she was no deeper than any other old lady of average dimensions; but
in rapid succession she tilted five large cups of piping hot tea into
herself and was starting on the sixth when we withdrew, stunned by the
spectacle. She must have been fearfully long-waisted. I had a mental
vision of her interior decorations--all fumed-oak wainscotings and
buff-leather hangings. Still, I doubt whether their four-o'clock-tea
habit is any worse than our five-o'clock cocktail habit. It all depends,
I suppose, on whether one prefers being tanned inside to being pickled.
But we are getting bravely over our cocktail habit, as attested by
figures and the visual evidences, while their tea habit is growing on
them--so the statisticians say.
As for the Englishman's sense of humor, or his lack of it, I judge that
we Americans are partly wrong in our diagnosis of that phase of British
character and partly right. Because he is slow to laugh at a joke, we
think he cannot see the point of it without a diagram and a chart.
What we do not take into consideration is that, through centuries of
self-repression, the Englishman has so drilled himself into refraining
from laughing in public--for fear, you see, of making himself
conspicuous--it has become a part of his nature. Indeed, in certain
quarters a prejudice against laughing under any circumstances appears to
have sprung up.
I was looking one day through the pages of one of the critical English
weeklies. Nearly all British weeklies are heavy, and this is the
heaviest of the lot. Its editorial column alone weighs from twelve to
eighteen pounds, and if you strike a man with a clubbed copy of it the
crime is assault with a dull blunt instrument, with intent to kill. At
the end of a ponderous review of the East Indian question I came on a
letter written to the editor by a gentleman signing himself with his own
name, and reading in part as follows:
SIR: Laughter is always vulgar and offensive. For instance, whatever
there may be of pleasure in a theater--and there is not much--the place
is made impossible by laughter ... No; it is very seldom that happiness
is refined or pleasant to see--merriment that is produced by wine is
false merriment, and there is no true merriment without it ... Laughter
is profane, in fact, where it is not ridiculous.
On the other hand the English in bulk will laugh at a thing which
among us would bring tears to the most hardened cheek and incite our
rebellious souls to mayhem and manslaughter. On a certain night we
attended a musical show at one of the biggest London theaters. There was
some really clever funning by a straight comedian, but his best efforts
died a-borning; they drew but the merest ripple of laughter from the
audience. Later there was a scene between a sad person made up as a
Scotchman and another equally sad person of color from the States. These
times no English musical show is complete unless the cast includes a
North American negro with his lips painted to resemble a wide slice of
ripe watermelon, singing ragtime ditties touching on his chicken and
his Baby Doll. This pair took the stage, all others considerately
withdrawing; and presently, after a period of heartrending comicalities,
the Scotchman, speaking as though he had a mouthful of hot oatmeal,
proceeded to narrate an account of a fictitious encounter with a bear.
Substantially this dialogue ensued:
THE SCOTCHMAN--He was a vurra fierce grizzly bear, ye ken; and he rushed
at me from behind a jugged rock.
THE NEGRO--Mistah, you means a jagged rock, don't you?
THE SCOTCHMAN--Nay, nay, laddie--a jugged rock.
THE NEGRO--Whut's dat you say? Whut--whut is a jugged rock?
THE SCOTCHMAN (forgetting his accent)--Why, a rock with a jug on it,
old chap. (A stage wait to let that soak into them in all its full
strength.) A rock with a jug on it would be a jugged rock, wouldn't
it--eh?
The pause had been sufficient--they had it now. And from all parts of
the house a whoop of unrestrained joy went up.
Witnessing such spectacles as this, the American observer naturally
begins to think that the English in mass cannot see a joke that is
the least bit subtle. Nevertheless, however, and to the contrary
notwithstanding--as Colonel Bill Sterritt, of Texas, used to
say--England has produced the greatest natural humorists in the world
and some of the greatest comedians, and for a great many years has
supported the greatest comic paper printed in the English language,
and that is Punch. Also, at an informal Saturday-night dinner in a
well-known London club I heard as much spontaneous repartee from the
company at large, and as much quiet humor from the chairman, as I ever
heard in one evening anywhere; but if you went into that club on a
weekday you might suppose somebody was dead and laid out there, and
that everybody about the premises had gone into deep mourning for the
deceased. If any member of that club had dared then to crack a joke
they would have expelled him--as soon as they got over the shock of
the bounder's confounded cheek. Saturday night? Yes. Monday afternoon?
Never! And there you are!
Speaking of Punch reminds me that we were in London when Punch, after
giving the matter due consideration for a period of years, came out with
a colored jacket on him. If the Prime Minister had done a Highland fling
in costume at high noon in Oxford Circus it could not have created more
excitement than Punch created by coming out with a colored cover. Yet,
to an American's understanding, the change was not so revolutionary and
radical as all that. Punch's well-known lineaments remained the same.
There was merely a dab of palish yellow here and there on the sheet; at
first glance you might have supposed somebody else had been reading
your copy of Punch at breakfast and had been careless in spooning up his
soft-boiled egg.
They are our cousins, the English are; our cousins once removed, 'tis
true--see standard histories of the American Revolution for further
details of the removing--but they are kinsmen of ours beyond a doubt.
Even if there were no other evidences, the kinship between us would
still be proved by the fact that the English are the only people except
the Americans who look on red meat--beef, mutton, ham--as a food to be
eaten for the taste of the meat itself; whereas the other nations of the
earth regard it as a vehicle for carrying various sauces, dressings and
stuffings southward to the stomach. But, to the notice of the American
who is paying them his first visit, they certainly do offer some amazing
contradictions.
In the large matters of business the English have been accused of
trickiness, which, however, may be but the voice of envious competition
speaking; but in the small things they surely are most marvelously
honest. Consider their railroad trains now: To a greenhorn from this
side the blue water, a railroad journey out of London to almost any
point in rural England is a succession of surprises, and all pleasant
ones. To begin with, apparently there is nobody at the station whose
business it is to show you to your train or to examine your ticket
before you have found your train for yourself. There is no mad scurrying
about at the moment of departure, no bleating of directions through
megaphones. Unchaperoned you move along a long platform under a grimy
shed, where trains are standing with their carriage doors hospitably
ajar, and unassisted you find your own train and your own carriage, and
enter therein.
Sharp on the minute an unseen hand--at least I never saw it--slams the
doors and coyly--you might almost say secretively--the train moves
out of the terminal. It moves smoothly and practically without jarring
sounds. There is no shrieking of steel against steel. It is as though
the rails were made of rubber and the wheel-flanges were faced with
noise-proof felt. No conductor comes to punch your ticket, no brakeman
to bellow the stops, no train butcher bleating the gabbled invoice of
his gumdrops, bananas and other best-sellers.
Glory be! It is all so peaceful and soothing; as peaceful and as
soothing as the land through which you are gliding when once you have
left behind smoky London and its interminable environs; for now you are
in a land that was finished and plenished five hundred years ago and
since then has not been altered in any material aspect whatsoever. Every
blade of grass is in its right place; every wayside shrub seemingly has
been restrained and trained to grow in exactly the right and the proper
way. Streaming by your car window goes a tastefully arranged succession
of the thatched cottages, the huddled little towns, the meandering
brooks, the ancient inns, the fine old country places, the high-hedged
estates of the landed gentry, with rose-covered lodges at the gates and
robust children in the doorways--just as you have always seen them in
the picture books. There are fields that are velvet lawns, and lawns
that are carpets of green cut-plush. England is the only country I know
of that lives up--exactly and precisely--to its storybook descriptions
and its storybook illustrations.
Eventually you come to your stopping point; at least you have reason to
believe it may be your stopping point. As well as you may judge by
the signs that plaster the front, the sides, and even the top of the
station, the place is either a beef extract or a washing compound. Nor
may you count on any travelers who may be sharing your compartment with
you to set you right by a timely word or two. Your fellow passengers
may pity you for your ignorance and your perplexity, but they would
not speak; they could not, not having been introduced. A German or a
Frenchman would be giving you gladly what aid he might; but a well-born
Englishman who had not been introduced would ride for nine years with
you and not speak. I found the best way of solving the puzzle was to
consult the timecard. If the timecard said our train would reach a given
point at a given hour, and this was the given hour, then we might be
pretty sure this was the given point. Timetables in England are written
by realists, not by gifted fiction writers of the impressionistic
school, as is frequently the case in America.
So, if this timecard says it is time for you to get off you get off,
with your ticket still in your possession; and if it be a small station
you go yourself and look up the station master, who is tucked away in
a secluded cubbyhole somewhere absorbing tea, or else is in the luggage
room fussing with baby carriages and patent-churns. Having ferreted him
out in his hiding-place you hand over your ticket to him and he touches
his cap brim and says "Kew" very politely, which concludes the ceremony
so far as you are concerned.
Then, if you have brought any heavy baggage with you in the baggage
car--pardon, I meant the luggage van--you go back to the platform and
pick it out from the heap of luggage that has been dumped there by the
train hands. With ordinary luck and forethought you could easily pick
out and claim and carry off some other person's trunk, provided you
fancied it more than your own trunk, only you do not. You do not do this
any more than, having purchased a second-class ticket, or a third-class,
you ride first-class; though, so far as I could tell, there is no check
to prevent a person from so doing. At least an Englishman never does. It
never seems to occur to him to do so. The English have no imagination.
I have a suspicion that if one of our railroads tried to operate its
train service on such a basis of confidence in the general public there
would be a most deceitful hiatus in the receipts from passenger traffic
to be reported to a distressed group of stockholders at the end of the
fiscal year. This, however, is merely a supposition on my part. I may be
wrong.