|I saw a surprising spectacle in Regent Street last evening. It was a
hansom cab. Not a derelict hansom cab such as you may still occasionally
see, with an obsolete horse in the shafts and an obsolete driver on the
box, crawling along like a haggard dream, or a forlorn spectre that has
escaped from a cemetery and has given up hope of ever finding its way
back--no, but a lively, spic-and-span hansom cab, with a horse trotting
in the shafts and tossing its head as though it were full of beans
and importance, and a slap-up driver on the box, looking as happy as
a sandboy as he flicked and flourished his whip, and, still more
astonishing, a real passenger, a lady, inside the vehicle.
I felt like taking my hat off to the lady and giving a cheer to the
driver, for the apparition was curiously pleasing. It had something of
the poignancy of a forgotten odour or taste that summons up whole vistas
of the past--sweetbriar or mignonette or the austere flavour of the
quince. In that trotting nag and the swaying figure on the box there
flashed upon me the old London that used to amble along on four legs,
the London before the Deluge, the London before the coming of King
Petrol, when the hansom was the jaunty aristocrat of the streets, and
the two-horse bus was the chariot of democracy. London was a slow place
then, of course, and a journey say, from Dollis Hill to Dülwich, was a
formidable adventure, but it was very human and humorous. When you took
your seat behind, or still better, beside the rosy-cheeked bus-driver,
you settled down to a really good time. The world was in no hurry and
the bus-driver was excellent company. He would tell you about the sins
of that “orf horse,” the idiosyncrasies of passengers, the artifices of
the police, the mysteries of the stable. He would shout some abstruse
joke to a passing driver, and with a hard wink include you in
the revelry. The conductor would stroll up to him and continue a
conversation that had begun early in the morning and seemed to go on
intermittently all day--a conversation of that jolly sort in which,
as Washington Irving says, the jokes are rather small and the laughter
abundant.
In those happy days, of course, women knew their place. It was inside
the bus. The outside was consecrated to that superior animal, Man. It
was an act of courage, almost of impropriety, for a woman to ride on the
top alone. Anything might happen to her in those giddy moral altitudes.
And even the lady I saw in the hansom last night would not have been
quite above suspicion of being no better than she ought to be. The
hansom was a rather roguish, rakish contraption that was hardly the
thing for a lady to be seen in without a stout escort. It suggested
romance, mysteries, elopements, late suppers, and all sorts of
wickednesses. A staid, respectable “growler” was much more fitting for
so delicate an exotic as Woman. If she began riding in hansoms
alone anything might happen. She might want to go to public
dinners next--think of it!--she might be wanting to ride a
bicycle--horrors!--she might discover a shameless taste for cigarettes,
or demand a living wage, or University degrees, or a vote, just for all
the world as though she was the equal of Man, the Magnificent....
As I watched this straggler from the past bowling so gaily and
challengingly through the realm that he had lost, my mind went back to
the coming of King Petrol, whose advent heralded a new age. How clumsy,
and impossible he seemed then! He was a very Polyphemus of fable,
mighty, but blind and blundering. He floundered along the streets,
reeling from right to left like a drunken giant, encountering the
kerb-stone, skimming the lamp-post. He was in a perpetual state of
boorish revolt, standing obstinately and mulishly in the middle of the
street or across the street amidst the derision and rejoicing of those
whose empire he threatened, and who saw in these pranks the assurance of
his ultimate failure. Memory went back to the old One a.m. from the Law
Courts, and to one night that sums up for me the spirit of those days of
the great transition....
It was a jocose beast that, with snortings and trumpetings, used to
start from the vicinity of the Law Courts at One a.m. The fellow knew
his power. He knew that he was the last thing on wheels to skid along
the Edgeware Road. He knew that he had journalists aboard, worthless men
who wrote him down in the newspapers, unmoral men who wrote articles
(from Our Peking Correspondent)
in Fleet Street, and then went home to bed with a quiet conscience;
chauffeurs from other routes returning home, who when the car was “full
up” hung on by teeth and toe-nails to the rails, or hilariously crowded
in with the driver; barmaids and potboys loudly jocular, cabmen--yes,
cabmen, upon my honour, cabmen in motor buses! You might see them in the
One a.m. from the Law Courts any morning, red faced and genial as only
cabmen can be, flinging fine old jokes at each other from end to end
of the car, passing the snuff-box, making innocent merriment out of the
tipsy gentleman with the tall hat who has said he wants to get out at
Baker Street, and who, lurching in his sleep from right to left, is
being swept on through Maida Vale to far Cricklewood. What winks are
exchanged, what jokes cracked, what lighthearted raillery! And when the
top hat, under the impetus of a bigger lurch than usual, rolls to the
floor--oh, then the car resounds with Homeric laughter, and the tipsy
gentleman opens his dull eyes and looks vacantly around. But these
revels soon are ended.
An ominous grunt breaks in upon the hilarity inside the car:
First a shiver, and then a thrill,