THE RIDE TO LONDON
At last the train was started and we were off. The track was not so
wide, if I am not mistaken, as ours, and the little freight or goods
cars were positively ridiculous--mere wheelbarrows, by comparison
with the American type. As for the passenger cars, when I came to
examine them, they reminded me of some of our fine street cars that
run from, say Schenectady to Gloversville, or from Muncie to Marion,
Indiana. They were the first-class cars, too--the English Pullmans!
The train started out briskly and you could feel that it did not have
the powerful weight to it which the American train has. An American
Pullman creaks audibly, just as a great ship does when it begins to
move. An American engine begins to pull slowly because it has something
to pull--like a team with a heavy load. I didn’t feel that I was in a
train half so much as I did that I was in a string of baby carriages.
Miss X. and her lover, Miss E. and her maid, Barfleur and I comfortably
filled one little compartment; and now we were actually moving, and I
began to look out at once to see what English scenery was really like.
It was not at all strange to me, for in books and pictures I had seen
it all my life. But here were the actual hills and valleys, the actual
thatched cottages, and the actual castles or moors or lovely country
vistas, and I was seeing them!
As I think of it now I can never be quite sufficiently grateful to
Barfleur for a certain affectionate, thoughtful, sympathetic regard
for my every possible mood on this occasion. This was my first trip to
this England of which, of course, he was intensely proud. He was so
humanly anxious that I should not miss any of its charms or, if need
be, defects. He wanted me to be able to judge it fairly and humanly
and to see the eventual result sieved through my temperament. The soul
of attention; the soul of courtesy; patient, long-suffering, humane,
gentle. How I have tried the patience of that man at times! An iron
mood he has on occasion; a stoic one, always. Gentle, even, smiling,
living a rule and a standard. Every thought of him produces a grateful
smile. Yet he has his defects--plenty of them. Here he was at my elbow,
all the way to London, momentarily suggesting that I should not miss
the point, whatever the point might be, at the moment. He was helpful,
really interested, and above all and at all times, warmly human.
We had been just two hours getting from the boat to the train. It
was three-thirty when the train began to move, and from the lovely
misty sunshine of the morning the sky had become overcast with low,
gray--almost black--rain clouds. I looked at the hills and valleys.
They told me we were in Wales. And, curiously, as we sped along first
came Wordsworth into my mind, and then Thomas Hardy. I thought of
Wordsworth first because these smooth, kempt hills, wet with the rain
and static with deep gray shadows, suggested him. England owes so much
to William Wordsworth, I think. So far as I can see, he epitomized in
his verses this sweet, simple hominess that tugs at the heart-strings
like some old call that one has heard before. My father was a German,
my mother of Pennsylvania Dutch extraction, and yet there is a pull
here in this Shakespearian-Wordsworthian-Hardyesque world which is
precisely like the call of a tender mother to a child. I can’t resist
it. I love it; and I am not English but radically American.
I understand that Hardy is not so well thought of in England as he
might be--that, somehow, some large conservative class thinks that his
books are immoral or destructive. I should say the English would better
make much of Thomas Hardy while he is alive. He is one of their great
traditions. His works are beautiful. The spirit of all the things he
has done or attempted is lovely. He is a master mind, simple, noble,
dignified, serene. He is as fine as any of the English cathedrals.
St. Paul’s or Canterbury has no more significance to me than Thomas
Hardy. I saw St. Paul’s. I wish I could see the spirit of Thomas Hardy
indicated in some such definite way. And yet I do not. Monuments do not
indicate great men. But the fields and valleys of a country suggest
them.
At twenty or thirty miles from Fishguard we came to some open water--an
arm of the sea, I understood--the Bay of Bristol, where boats were, and
tall, rain-gutted hills that looked like tumbled-down castles. Then
came more open country--moorland, I suppose--with some sheep, once
a flock of black ones; and then the lovely alternating hues of this
rain-washed world. The water under these dark clouds took on a peculiar
luster. It looked at times like burnished steel--at times like muddy
lead. I felt my heart leap up as I thought of our own George Inness and
what he would have done with these scenes and what the English Turner
has done, though he preferred, as a rule, another key.
At four-thirty one of the charming English trainmen came and asked
if we would have tea in the dining-car. We would. We arose and in a
few moments were entering one of those dainty little basket cars. The
tables were covered with white linen and simple, pretty china and a
silver tea-service. It wasn’t as if you were traveling at all. I felt
as though I were stopping at the house of a friend; or as though I
were in the cozy corner of some well-known and friendly inn. Tea was
served. We ate toast and talked cheerfully.
This whole trip--the landscape, the dining-car, this cozy tea, Miss X.
and her lover, Miss E. and Barfleur--finally enveloped my emotional
fancy like a dream. I realized that I was experiencing a novel
situation which would not soon come again. The idea of this pretty
mistress coming to England to join her lover, and so frankly admitting
her history and her purpose, rather took my mind as an intellectual
treat. You really don’t often get to see this sort of thing. I don’t.
It’s Gallic in its flavor, to me. Barfleur, being a man of the world,
took it as a matter of course--his sole idea being, I fancy, that the
refinement of personality and thought involved in the situation were
sufficient to permit him to tolerate it. I always judge his emotion
by that one gleaming eye behind the monocle. The other does not
take my attention so much. I knew from his attitude that ethics and
morals and things like that had nothing to do with his selection of
what he would consider interesting personal companionship. Were they
interesting? Could they tell him something new? Would they amuse him?
Were they nice--socially, in their clothing, in their manners, in the
hundred little material refinements which make up a fashionable lady or
gentleman? If so, welcome. If not, hence. And talent! Oh, yes, he had a
keen eye for talent. And he loves the exceptional and will obviously do
anything and everything within his power to foster it.
Having started so late, it grew nearly dark after tea and the distant
landscapes were not so easy to descry. We came presently, in the
mist, to a place called Carmarthen, I think, where were great black
stacks and flaming forges and lights burning wistfully in the dark;
and then to another similar place, Swansea, and finally to a third,
Cardiff--great centers of manufacture, I should judge, for there were
flaming lights from forges (great, golden gleams from open furnaces)
and dark blue smoke, visible even at this hour, from tall stacks
overhead, and gleaming electric lights like bright, lucent diamonds.
I never see this sort of place but I think of Pittsburgh and Youngstown
and the coke ovens of western Pennsylvania along the line of the
Pennsylvania Railroad. I shall never forget the first time I saw
Pittsburgh and Youngstown and saw how coke was fired. It was on my way
to New York. I had never seen any mountains before and suddenly, after
the low, flat plains of Indiana and Ohio, with their pretty little
wooden villages so suggestive of the new life of the New World, we
rushed into Youngstown and then the mountains of western Pennsylvania
(the Alleghanies). It was somewhat like this night coming from
Fishguard, only it was not so rainy. The hills rose tall and green;
the forge stacks of Pittsburgh flamed with a red gleam, mile after
mile, until I thought it was the most wonderful sight I had ever seen.
And then came the coke ovens, beyond Pittsburgh mile after mile of
them, glowing ruddily down in the low valleys between the tall hills,
where our train was following a stream-bed. It seemed a great, sad,
heroic thing then, to me,--plain day labor. Those common, ignorant men,
working before flaming forges, stripped to the waist in some instances,
fascinated my imagination. I have always marveled at the inequalities
of nature--the way it will give one man a low brow and a narrow mind, a
narrow round of thought, and make a slave or horse of him, and another
a light, nimble mind, a quick wit and air and make a gentleman of him.
No human being can solve either the question of ability or utility. Is
your gentleman useful? Yes and no, perhaps. Is your laborer useful? Yes
and no, perhaps. I should say obviously yes. But see the differences in
the reward of labor--physical labor. One eats his hard-earned crust in
the sweat of his face; the other picks at his surfeit of courses and
wonders why this or that doesn’t taste better. I did not make my mind.
I did not make my art. I cannot choose my taste except by predestined
instinct, and yet here I am sitting in a comfortable English home, as
I write, commiserating the poor working man. I indict nature here and
now, as I always do and always shall do, as being aimless, pointless,
unfair, unjust. I see in the whole thing no scheme but an accidental
one--no justice save accidental justice. Now and then, in a way, some
justice is done, but it is accidental; no individual man seems to will
it. He can’t. He doesn’t know how. He can’t think how. And there’s an
end of it.
But these queer, weird, hard, sad, drab manufacturing cities--what
great writer has yet sung the song of them? Truly I do not recall one
at present clearly. Dickens gives some suggestion of what he considered
the misery of the poor; and in “Les Miserables” there is a touch of
grim poverty and want here and there. But this is something still
different. This is creative toil on a vast scale, and it is a lean,
hungry, savage, animal to contemplate. I know it is because I have
studied personally Fall River, Patterson and Pittsburgh, and I know
what I’m talking about. Life runs at a gaunt level in those places.
It’s a rough, hurtling world of fact. I suppose it is not any different
in England. I looked at the manufacturing towns as we flashed by in
the night and got the same feeling of sad commiseration and unrest.
The homes looked poor and they had a deadly sameness; the streets
were narrow and poorly lighted. I was eager to walk over one of these
towns foot by foot. I have the feeling that the poor and the ignorant
and the savage are somehow great artistically. I have always had it.
Millet saw it when he painted “The Man with the Hoe.” These drab towns
are grimly wonderful to me. They sing a great diapason of misery. I
feel hunger and misery there; I feel lust and murder and life, sick
of itself, stewing in its own juice; I feel women struck in the face
by brutal men; and sodden lives too low and weak to be roused by any
storm of woe. I fancy there are hungry babies and dying mothers and
indifferent bosses and noble directors somewhere, not caring, not
knowing, not being able to do anything about it, perhaps, if they did.
I could weep just at the sight of a large, drab, hungry manufacturing
town. I feel sorry for ignorant humanity. I wish I knew how to raise
the low foreheads; to put the clear light of intellect into sad, sodden
eyes. I wish there weren’t any blows, any hunger, any tears. I wish
people didn’t have to long bitterly for just the little thin, bare
necessities of this world. But I know, also, that life wouldn’t be as
vastly dramatic and marvelous without them. Perhaps I’m wrong. I’ve
seen some real longing in my time, though. I’ve longed myself and I’ve
seen others die longing.
Between Carmarthen and Cardiff and some other places where this drab,
hungry world seemed to stick its face into the window, I listened
to much conversation about the joyous side of living in Paris,
Monte Carlo, Ostend and elsewhere. I remember once I turned from
the contemplation of a dark, sad, shabby world scuttling by in the
night and rain to hear Miss E. telling of some Parisian music-hall
favorite--I’ll call her Carmen--rivaling another Parisian music-hall
favorite by the name of Diane, let us say, at Monte Carlo. Of course
it is understood that they were women of loose virtue. Of course it is
understood that they had fine, white, fascinating bodies and lovely
faces and that they were physically ideal. Of course it is understood
that they were marvelous mistresses and that money was flowing freely
from some source or other--perhaps from factory worlds like these--to
let them work their idle, sweet wills. Anyhow they were gambling,
racing, disporting themselves at Monte Carlo and all at once they
decided to rival each other in dress. Or perhaps it was that they
didn’t decide to, but just began to, which is much more natural and
human.
As I caught it, with my nose pressed to the carriage window and the
sight of rain and mist in my eyes, Carmen would come down one night
in splendid white silk, perhaps, her bare arms and perfect neck and
hair flashing priceless jewels; and then the fair Diane would arrive a
little later with her body equally beautifully arrayed in some gorgeous
material, her white arms and neck and hair equally resplendent. Then
the next night the gowns would be of still more marvelous material and
artistry, and more jewels--every night lovelier gowns and more costly
jewels, until one of these women took all her jewels, to the extent of
millions of francs, I presume, and, arraying her maid gorgeously, put
all the jewels on her and sent her into the casino or the ballroom or
the dining-room--wherever it was--and she herself followed, in--let
us hope--plain, jewelless black silk, with her lovely flesh showing
voluptuously against it. And the other lady was there, oh, much to her
chagrin and despair now, of course, decked with all her own splendid
jewels to the extent of an equally large number of millions of francs,
and so the rivalry was ended.
It was a very pretty story of pride and vanity and I liked it. But
just at this interesting moment, one of those great blast furnaces,
which I have been telling you about and which seemed to stretch for
miles beside the track, flashed past in the night, its open red furnace
doors looking like rubies, and the frosted windows of its lighted shops
looking like opals, and the fluttering street lamps and glittering arc
lights looking like pearls and diamonds; and I said: behold! these are
the only jewels of the poor and from these come the others. And to a
certain extent, in the last analysis and barring that unearned gift of
brain which some have without asking and others have not at all, so
they do.
It was seven or eight when we reached Paddington. For one moment, when
I stepped out of the car, the thought came to me with a tingle of
vanity--I have come by land and sea, three thousand miles to London!
Then it was gone again. It was strange--this scene. I recognized
at once the various London types caricatured in _Punch_, and _Pick
Me Up_, and _The Sketch_, and elsewhere. I saw a world of cabs and
‘busses, of porters, gentlemen, policemen, and citizens generally. I
saw characters--strange ones--that brought back Dickens and Du Maurier
and W. W. Jacobs. The words “Booking Office” and the typical London
policeman took my eye. I strolled about, watching the crowd till it was
time for us to board our train for the country; and eagerly I nosed
about, trying to sense London from this vague, noisy touch of it. I
can’t indicate how the peculiar-looking trains made me feel. Humanity
is so very different in so many little unessential things--so utterly
the same in all the large ones. I could see that it might be just as
well or better to call a ticket office a booking office; or to have
three classes of carriages instead of two, as with us; or to have
carriages instead of cars; or trams instead of street railways; or
lifts instead of elevators. What difference does it make? Life is the
same old thing. Nevertheless there was a tremendous difference between
the London and the New York atmosphere--that I could see and feel.
“A few days at my place in the country will be just the thing for you,”
Barfleur was saying. “I sent a wireless to Dora to have a fire in the
hall and in your room. You might as well see a bit of rural England
first.”
He gleamed on me with his monocled eye in a very encouraging manner.
We waited about quite awhile for a local or suburban which would take
us to Bridgely Level, and having ensconced ourselves first class--as
fitting my arrival--Barfleur fell promptly to sleep and I mused with my
window open, enjoying the country and the cool night air.