HOW IT FEELS TO GET INTO LONDON
AND THEN BE ENGULFED.
One good thing about London is that, in spite of its enormous size, you
are there when you arrive. Take Chicago, by way of contrast. If you
arrive in Chicago along about the middle of the afternoon you may be at
the station by night.
The stranger heading into Chicago looks out of the window at a country
station and sees a policeman standing on the platform. Beyond is a
sign indicating that the wagon road winding away toward the sunset is
287th street, or thereabouts.
"We are now in Chicago," says someone who has been over the road before.
The traveller, surprised to learn that he has arrived at his
destination, puts his magazine and travelling cap into the valise,
shakes out his overcoat, calls on the porter to come and brush him, and
then sits on the end of the seat waiting for the brakeman to announce
the terminal station. After a half-hour of intermittent suburbs and
glorious sweeps of virgin prairie he begins to think that there is some
mistake, so he opens his valise and takes out the magazine and reads
another story.
Suddenly he looks out of the window and notices that the train has
entered the crowded city. He puts on his overcoat, picks up his valise
and stands in the aisle, so as to be ready to step right off as soon as
the train stops.
The train passes street after street and rattles through grimy yards
and past towering elevators, and in ten minutes the traveller tires of
standing and goes back to his seat. The porter comes and brushes him
again, and he looks out at several viaducts leading over to a skyline
of factories and breweries, and begins to see the masts of ships poking
up in the most unexpected places. At last, when he has looked at what
seems to be one hundred miles of architectural hash floating in smoke
and has begun to doubt that there is a terminal station, he hears the
welcome call, "Shuh-kawgo!"
When you are London bound the train leaves the green country (for the
country is green, even in February), dashes into a region of closely
built streets, and you look out from the elevated train across an
endless expanse of chimney-pots. Two or three stations, plated with
enameled advertising signs, buzz past. The pall of smoky fog becomes
heavier and the streets more crowded. Next, the train has come to a
grinding stop under a huge vaulted roof. The noise of the wheels give
way to the roar of London town.
You step down and out and fall into the arms of a porter who wishes to
carry your "bags." You are in the midst of parallel tracks and
shifting trains. Beyond the platform is a scramble of cabs. The
sounds of the busy station are joined into a deafening monotone. You
shout into the ear of your travelling companion to get a "four-wheeler"
while you watch the trunks.
He struggles away to hail a four-wheeler. You push your way with the
others down toward the front of the train to where the baggage is being
thrown out on the platform. You seize a porter and engage him to
attend to the handling of the trunks. As you point them out he loads
them onto a truck. Your companion arrives in a wild-eyed search for
you.
"I've got a four-wheeler," he gasps. "All the baggage here?"
"Yes, yes, yes."
Everybody is excited and hopping about, put into a state of hysteria by
the horrible hubbub and confusion.
"It's number 48."
The porter handling the truck leads the way to the cab platform and
howls "Forty-ite! Forty-ite!"
"'Ere you are," shouts forty-eight, who is wedged in behind two hansoms.
By some miracle of driving he gets over or under or past the hansoms
and comes to the platform. The steamer trunks are thrown on top and
the porter, accepting the shilling with a "'k you, sir," slams the door
behind you.
Then you can hear your driver overhead managing his way out of the
blockade.
"Pull a bit forward, cahn't you?" he shouts. Then to someone else,
"'Urry up, 'urry up, cahn't you?"
You are in a tangle of wheels and lamps, but you get out of it in some
way, and then the rubber tires roll easily along the spattering
pavement of a street which seems heavenly quietude.
This is the time to lean back and try to realise that you are in
London. The town may be common and time-worn to those people going in
and out of the shops, but to you it is a storehouse of novelties, a
library of things to be learned, a museum of the landmarks of history.
We could read the names on the windows, and they were good homely
Anglo-Saxon names. We didn't have to get out of the four-wheeler and
go into the shops to convince ourselves that Messrs. Brown, Jones,
Simpson, Perkins, Jackson, Smith, Thompson, Williams, and the others
were serious men of deferential habits, who spoke in hollow whispers of
the king, drank tea at intervals and loved a pipe of tobacco in the
garden of a Sunday morning.
Some people come to London to see the Abbey and the Tower, but I fear
that our trusty little band came to see the shop windows and the crowds
in the streets.
May the weak and imitative traveller resist the temptation to say that
Fleet street is full of publishing houses, that the British museum
deserves many visits, that the Cheshire Cheese is one of the ancient
taverns, that the new monument in front of the Courts of Law marks the
site of old Temple Bar, that the chapel of King Henry VII. is a superb
example of its own style of decoration, and that one is well repaid for
a trip to Hampton Court. Why seek to corroborate the testimony of so
many letter-writers?
Besides, London does not consist of towers, abbeys, and museums. These
are the remote and infrequent things. After you have left London and
try to call back the huge and restless picture to your mind, the show
places stand dimly in the background. The London which impressed you
and made you feel your own littleness and weakness was an endless swarm
of people going and coming, eddying off into dark courts, streaming
toward you along sudden tributaries, whirling in pools at the open
places, such as Piccadilly Circus and Trafalgar Square. Thousands of
hansom cabs dashed in and out of the street traffic, and the rattling
omnibuses moved along every street in a broken row, and no matter how
long you remained in London you never saw the end of that row.
You go out in London in the morning, and if you have no set programme
to hamper you, you make your way to one of those great chutes along
which the herds of humanity are forever driven.
If you follow the guide-book it will lead you to a chair in which a
king sat 300 years ago. If you can get up an emotion by straining hard
enough and find a real pleasure in looking at the moth-eaten chair,
then you should follow the guide-book. If not, escape from the place
and go to the street. The men and women you find there will interest
you. They are on deck. The chair is a dead splinter of history. All
the people in the street are the embodiment of that history. For
purposes of actual observation I would rather encounter a live cabman
than the intangible, atmospheric suggestion of Queen Elizabeth.
After you have been in London once you understand why your friends who
have visited it before were never able to tell you about it so that you
could understand. It is too big to be put under one focus. The
traveller takes home only a few idiotic details of his stay. He says
that he had to pay for his programme at the theatre, and that he
couldn't get ice at some of the restaurants.
"But tell us about London," says the insistent friend who has
constructed a London of his own out of a thousand impressions gathered
from books and magazines. Then the traveller says that London is
large, he doesn't remember how many millions, and very busy, and there
wasn't as much fog as he had expected, and as for the people they were
not so much different from Americans, although you never had any
difficulty in identifying an American in London. The traveller's
friends listen in disappointment and agree that he got very little out
of his trip, and that when _they_ go to London _they_ will come back
and tell people the straight of it.
As a matter of fact, London is principally a sense of dizziness. This
dizziness comes of trying to keep an intent gaze on too many human
performances. The mind is in a blur. The impressions come with
rolling swiftness. There is no room for them. The traveller overflows
with them. They spill behind him. You could track an American all
around London by the trail of excess information which he drops in his
pathway.
Of course, I have kept a journal, but that doesn't help much. It
simply says that we went out each day and then came back to the hotel
for dinner. There was not much chance for personal experiences,
because in London you are not a person. You are simply a drop of water
in a sea, and any molecular disturbances which may concern you are of
small moment compared to the general splash.