If one really wants to know London, one must live there for years and
years.
This sounds like a reasonable and sensible statement, yet the moment it
is made I retract it, as quite misleading and altogether too general.
We have a charming English friend who has not been to the Tower since
he was a small boy, and begs us to conduct him there on the very next
Saturday. Another has not seen Westminster Abbey for fifteen years,
because he attends church at St. Dunstan's-in-the-East. Another says
that he should like to have us 'read up' London in the red-covered
Baedeker, and then show it to him, properly and systematically. Another,
a flower of the nobility, confesses that he never mounted the top of
an omnibus in the evening for the sake of seeing London after dark, but
that he thinks it would be rather jolly, and that he will join us in
such a democratic journey at any time we like.
We think we get a kind of vague apprehension of what London means from
the top of a 'bus better than anywhere else, and this vague apprehension
is as much as the thoughtful or imaginative observer will ever arrive
at in a lifetime. It is too stupendous to be comprehended. The mind
is dazed by its distances, confused by its contrasts; tossed from
the spectacle of its wealth to the contemplation of its poverty, the
brilliancy of its extravagances to the stolidity of its miseries,
the luxuries that blossom in Mayfair to the brutalities that lurk in
Whitechapel.
We often set out on a fine morning, Salemina and I, and travel twenty
miles in the day, though we have to double our twopenny fee several
times to accomplish that distance.
We never know whither we are going, and indeed it is not a matter of
great moment (I mean to a woman) where everything is new and strange,
and where the driver, if one is fortunate enough to be on a front
seat, tells one everything of interest along the way, and instructs one
regarding a different route back to town.
We have our favourite 'buses, of course; but when one appears, and we
jump on while it is still in motion, as the conductor seems to prefer,
and pull ourselves up the cork-screw stairway,--not a simple matter in
the garments of sophistication,--we have little time to observe more
than the colour of the lumbering vehicle.
We like the Cadbury's Cocoa 'bus very much; it takes you by St.
Mary-le-Strand, Bow-Bells, the Temple, Mansion House, St, Paul's, and
the Bank.
If you want to go and lunch, or dine frugally, at the Cheshire Cheese,
eat black pudding and drink pale ale, sit in Dr. Johnson's old seat,
and put your head against the exact spot on the wall where his
rested,--although the traces of this form of worship are all too
apparent,--then you jump on a Lipton's Tea 'bus, and are deposited
at the very door. All is novel, and all is interesting, whether it be
crowded streets of the East End traversed by the Davies' Pea-Fed Bacon
'buses, or whether you ride to the very outskirts of London, through
green fields and hedgerows, by the Ridge's Food or Nestle's Milk route.
There are trams, too, which take one to delightful places, though the
seats on top extend lengthwise, after the old 'knifeboard pattern,'
and one does not get so good a view of the country as from the 'garden
seats' on the roof of the omnibus; still there is nothing we like better
on a warm morning than a good outing on the Vinolia tram that we pick up
in Shaftesbury Avenue. There is a street running from Shaftesbury Avenue
into Oxford Street, which was once the village of St. Giles, one of the
dozens of hamlets swallowed up by the great maw of London, and it still
looks like a hamlet, although it has been absorbed for many years. We
constantly happen on these absorbed villages, from which, not a century
ago, people drove up to town in their coaches.
If you wish to see another phase of life, go out on a Saturday evening,
from nine o'clock on to eleven, starting on a Beecham's Pill 'bus, and
keep to the poorer districts, alighting occasionally to stand with the
crowd in the narrower thoroughfares.
It is a market night, and the streets will be a moving mass of men and
women buying at the hucksters' stalls. Everything that can be sold at
a stall is there: fruit, vegetables, meat, fish, crockery, tin-ware,
children's clothing, cheap toys, boots, shoes, and sun-bonnets, all in
reckless confusion. The vendors cry their wares in stentorian tones,
vying with one another to produce excitement and induce patronage, while
gas-jets are streaming into the air from the roofs and flaring from the
sides of the stalls; children crying, children dancing to the strains of
an accordion, children quarrelling, children scrambling for the refuse
fruit. In the midst of this spectacle, this din and uproar, the women
are chaffering and bargaining quite calmly, watching the scales to see
that they get their full pennyworth or sixpennyworth of this or that. To
the student of faces, of manners, of voices, of gestures; to the person
who sees unwritten and unwritable stories in all these groups of men,
women, and children, the scene reveals many things: some comedies, many
tragedies, a few plain narratives (thank God!) and now and then--only
now and then--a romance. As to the dark alleys and tenements on the
fringe of this glare and brilliant confusion, this Babel of sound and
ant-bed of moving life, one can only surmise and pity and shudder;
close one's eyes and ears to it a little, or one could never sleep for
thinking of it, yet not too tightly lest one sleep too soundly, and
forget altogether the seamy side of things. One can hardly believe that
there is a seamy side when one descends from his travelling observatory
a little later, and stands on Westminster Bridge, or walks along the
Thames Embankment. The lights of Parliament House gleam from a hundred
windows, and in the dark shadows by the banks thousands of coloured
discs of light twinkle and dance and glow like fairy lamps, and are
reflected in the silver surface of the river. That river, as full of
mystery and contrast in its course as London itself--where is such
another? It has ever been a river of pageants, a river of sighs; a river
into whose placid depths kings and queens, princes and cardinals, have
whispered state secrets, and poets have breathed immortal lines; a
stream of pleasure, bearing daily on its bosom such a freight of youth
and mirth and colour and music as no other river in the world can boast.
Sometimes we sally forth in search of adventures in the thick of a
'London particular,' Mr. Guppy's phrase for a fog. When you are once
ensconced in your garden seat by the driver, you go lumbering through
a world of bobbing shadows, where all is weird, vague, grey, dense; and
where great objects loom up suddenly in the mist and then disappear;
where the sky, heavy and leaden, seems to descend bodily upon your head,
and the air is full of a kind of luminous yellow smoke.
A Lipton's Tea 'bus is the only one we can see plainly in this sort
of weather, and so we always take it. I do not wish, however, to be
followed literally in these modest suggestions for omnibus rides,
because I am well aware that they are not sufficiently specific for the
ordinary tourist who wishes to see London systematically and without any
loss of time. If you care to go to any particular place, or reach that
place by any particular time, you must not, of course, look at the most
conspicuous signs on the tops and ends of the chariots as we do; you
must stand quietly at one of the regular points of departure and try to
decipher, in a narrow horizontal space along the side, certain little
words that show the route and destination of the vehicle. They say
that it can be done, and I do not feel like denying it on my own
responsibility. Old Londoners assert that they are not blinded or
confused by Pears' Soap in letters two feet high, scarlet on a gold
ground, but can see below in fine print, and with the naked eye,
such legends as Tottenham Court Road, Westbourne Grove, St. Pancras,
Paddington, or Victoria. It is certainly reasonable that the omnibuses
should be decorated to suit the inhabitants of the place rather than
foreigners, and it is perhaps better to carry a few hundred stupid souls
to the wrong station daily than to allow them to cleanse their hands
with the wrong soap, or quench their thirst with the wrong (which is to
say the unadvertised) beverage.
The conductors do all in their power to mitigate the lot of unhappy
strangers, and it is only now and again that you hear an absent-minded
or logical one call out, 'Castoria! all the w'y for a penny.'
We claim for our method of travelling, not that it is authoritative, but
that it is simple--suitable to persons whose desires are flexible and
whose plans are not fixed. It has its disadvantages, which may indeed
be said of almost anything. For instance, we had gone for two successive
mornings on a Cadbury's Cocoa 'bus to Francesca's dressmaker in
Kensington. On the third morning, deceived by the ambitious and
unscrupulous Cadbury, we mounted it and journeyed along comfortably
three miles to the east of Kensington before we discovered our mistake.
It was a pleasant and attractive neighbourhood where we found ourselves,
but unfortunately Francesca's dressmaker did not reside there.
If you have determined to take a certain train from a certain station,
and do not care for any other, no matter if it should turn out to be
just as interesting, then never take a Lipton's Tea 'bus, for it is the
most unreliable of all. If it did not sound so learned, and if I did not
feel that it must have been said before, it is so apt, I should quote
Horace, and say, 'Omnibus hoc vitium est.' There is no 'bus unseized by
the Napoleonic Lipton. Do not ascend one of them supposing for a moment
that by paying fourpence and going to the very end of the route you will
come to a neat tea station, where you will be served with the cheering
cup. Never; nor with a draught of Cadbury's cocoa or Nestle's milk,
although you have jostled along for nine weary miles in company with
their blatant recommendations to drink nothing else, and though you may
have passed other 'buses with the same highly-coloured names glaring at
you until they are burned into the grey matter of your brain, to remain
there as long as the copy-book maxims you penned when you were a child.
These pictorial methods doubtless prove a source of great financial
gain; of course it must be so, or they would never be prosecuted; but
although they may allure millions of customers, they will lose two in
our modest persons. When Salemina and I go into a cafe for tea we ask
the young woman if they serve Lipton's, and if they say yes, we take
coffee. This is self-punishment indeed (in London!), yet we feel that
it may have a moral effect; perhaps not commensurate with the physical
effect of the coffee upon us, but these delicate matters can never be
adjusted with absolute exactitude.
Sometimes when we are to travel on a Pears' Soap 'bus we buy beforehand
a bit of pure white Castile, cut from a shrinking, reserved, exclusive
bar with no name upon it, and present it to some poor woman when we
arrive at our journey's end. We do not suppose that so insignificant a
protest does much good, but at least it preserves one's individuality
and self-respect.