This itinerary, I regret to say, was never carried out in full. I
was able at times both to go to the bank and buy a shirt in a single
morning: at other times I was able to buy razor blades and almost to
find the National Picture Gallery. Meantime I was urged on all sides by
my London acquaintances not to fail to see the Tower. "There's a grim
fascination about the place," they said; "you mustn't miss it." I am
quite certain that in due course of time I should have made my way to
the Tower but for the fact that I made a fatal discovery. I found out
that the London people who urged me to go and see the Tower had never
seen it themselves. It appears they never go near it. One night at a
dinner a man next to me said, "Have you seen the Tower? You really ought
to. There's a grim fascination about it." I looked him in the face.
"Have you seen it yourself?" I asked. "Oh, yes," he answered. "I've seen
it." "When?" I asked. The man hesitated. "When I was just a boy," he
said, "my father took me there." "How long ago is that?" I enquired.
"About forty years ago," he answered;
"I always mean to go again but I don't somehow seem to get the time."
After this I got to understand that when a Londoner says, "Have you seen
the Tower of London?" the answer is, "No, and neither have you."
Take the parallel case of the British Museum. Here is a place that is
a veritable treasure house. A repository of some of the most priceless
historical relics to be found upon the earth. It contains, for instance,
the famous Papyrus Manuscript of Thotmes II of the first Egyptian
dynasty--a thing known to scholars all over the world as the oldest
extant specimen of what can be called writing; indeed one can here see
the actual evolution (I am quoting from a work of reference, or at
least from my recollection of it) from the ideographic cuneiform to the
phonetic syllabic script. Every time I have read about that manuscript
and have happened to be in Orillia (Ontario) or Schenectady (N.Y.) or
any such place, I have felt that I would be willing to take a whole trip
to England to have five minutes at the British Museum, just five, to
look at that papyrus. Yet as soon as I got to London this changed. The
railway stations of London have been so arranged that to get to any
train for the north or west, the traveller must pass the British Museum.
The first time I went by it in a taxi, I felt quite a thrill. "Inside
those walls," I thought to myself, "is the manuscript of Thotmes II."
The next time I actually stopped the taxi. "Is that the British Museum?"
I asked the driver, "I think it is something of the sort, sir," he
said. I hesitated. "Drive me," I said, "to where I can buy safety razor
blades."
After that I was able to drive past the Museum with the quiet assurance
of a Londoner, and to take part in dinner table discussions as to
whether the British Museum or the Louvre contains the greater treasures.
It is quite easy any way. All you have to do is to remember that The
Winged Victory of Samothrace is in the Louvre and the papyrus of Thotmes
II (or some such document) is in the Museum.
The Abbey, I admit, is indeed majestic. I did not intend to miss going
into it. But I felt, as so many tourists have, that I wanted to enter
it in the proper frame of mind. I never got into the frame of mind; at
least not when near the Abbey itself. I have been in exactly that frame
of mind when on State Street, Chicago, or on King Street, Toronto, or
anywhere three thousand miles away from the Abbey. But by bad luck I
never struck both the frame of mind and the Abbey at the same time.
But the Londoners, after all, in not seeing their own wonders, are only
like the rest of the world. The people who live in Buffalo never go
to see Niagara Falls; people in Cleveland don't know which is Mr.
Rockefeller's house, and people live and even die in New York without
going up to the top of the Woolworth Building. And anyway the past
is remote and the present is near. I know a cab driver in the city of
Quebec whose business in life it is to drive people up to see the Plains
of Abraham, but unless they bother him to do it, he doesn't show them
the spot where Wolfe fell: what he does point out with real zest is the
place where the Mayor and the City Council sat on the wooden platform
that they put up for the municipal celebration last summer.
No description of London would be complete without a reference, however
brief, to the singular salubrity and charm of the London climate. This
is seen at its best during the autumn and winter months. The climate of
London and indeed of England generally is due to the influence of the
Gulf Stream. The way it works is thus: The Gulf Stream, as it nears the
shores of the British Isles and feels the propinquity of Ireland, rises
into the air, turns into soup, and comes down on London. At times the
soup is thin and is in fact little more than a mist: at other times it
has the consistency of a thick Potage St. Germain. London people are a
little sensitive on the point and flatter their atmosphere by calling it
a fog: but it is not: it is soup. The notion that no sunlight ever gets
through and that in the London winter people never see the sun is
of course a ridiculous error, circulated no doubt by the jealousy of
foreign nations. I have myself seen the sun plainly visible in London,
without the aid of glasses, on a November day in broad daylight; and
again one night about four o'clock in the afternoon I saw the sun
distinctly appear through the clouds. The whole subject of daylight in
the London winter is, however, one which belongs rather to the technique
of astronomy than to a book of description. In practice daylight is
but little used. Electric lights are burned all the time in all houses,
buildings, railway stations and clubs. This practice which is now
universally observed is called Daylight Saving.
But the distinction between day and night during the London winter is
still quite obvious to any one of an observant mind. It is indicated by
various signs such as the striking of clocks, the tolling of bells, the
closing of saloons, and the raising of taxi rates. It is much less easy
to distinguish the technical approach of night in the other cities of
England that lie outside the confines, physical and intellectual, of
London and live in a continuous gloom. In such places as the great
manufacturing cities, Buggingham-under-Smoke, or Gloomsbury-on-Ooze,
night may be said to be perpetual.
*****
I had written the whole of the above chapter and looked on it as
finished when I realised that I had made a terrible omission. I
neglected to say anything about the Mind of London. This is a thing that
is always put into any book of discovery and observation and I can only
apologise for not having discussed it sooner. I am quite familiar with
other people's chapters on "The Mind of America," and "The Chinese
Mind," and so forth. Indeed, so far as I know it has turned out that
almost everybody all over the world has a mind. Nobody nowadays travels,
even in Central America or Thibet, without bringing back a chapter on
"The Mind of Costa Rica," or on the "Psychology of the Mongolian." Even
the gentler peoples such as the Burmese, the Siamese, the Hawaiians, and
the Russians, though they have no minds are written up as souls.
It is quite obvious then that there is such a thing as the mind of
London: and it is all the more culpable in me to have neglected it in as
much as my editorial friend in New York had expressly mentioned it to
me before I sailed. "What," said he, leaning far over his desk after his
massive fashion and reaching out into the air, "what is in the minds of
these people? Are they," he added, half to himself, though I heard him,
"are they thinking? And, if they think, what do they think?"
I did therefore, during my stay in London, make an accurate study of the
things that London seemed to be thinking about. As a comparative basis
for this study I brought with me a carefully selected list of the things
that New York was thinking about at the moment. These I selected
from the current newspapers in the proportions to the amount of space
allotted to each topic and the size of the heading that announced it.
Having thus a working idea of what I may call the mind of New York, I
was able to collect and set beside it a list of similar topics, taken
from the London Press to represent the mind of London. The two placed
side by side make an interesting piece of psychological analysis. They
read as follows:
THE MIND OF NEW YORK THE MIND OF LONDON
What is it thinking? What is it thinking?
1. Do chorus girls make 1. Do chorus girls marry
good wives? well?
2. Is red hair a sign of 2. What is red hair a
temperament? sign of?
3. Can a woman be in 3. Can a man be in love
love with two men? with two women?