I
Of late years the printers have given us reams and reams of first
impressions of such world centres as London and New York. Not to
mention the army of unknown globe-trotters and writers, celebrities of
every sort and kind have recorded their impressions. I always smile
when my eyes fall upon such writings; and, generally, I recall,
momentarily at all events, some aspect of my own arrival in England as
purser's clerk on board the _Orimba_.
When I read, for example, the celebrity's first impressions of New
York--a confused blend of bouquets, automobiles, newspaper
interviewers, incredibly high buildings, sumptuous luncheons, barbaric
lavishness, bad road surfaces, frenetic hospitality, wild expenditure
of paper money--I think it would be more interesting perhaps,
certainly more instructive, to have the first impressions of the
immigrant, who lands with five pounds, and it may be a wife and a
child or two. Then there is the immigrant from the same end of the
ship who is not allowed to land, who is rejected by the guardians of
this Paradise on earth, because he has an insufficient number of
shillings, or a weakness in his lungs. The bouquets, automobiles,
sumptuous luncheons, and things do not, one may apprehend, figure
largely in the first impressions of these last uncelebrated people,
though their impressions may embrace quite as much of the reality
concerned as do those of the famous; and, it may be, a good deal more.
Broadly speaking, and as far as outlines go, I was in the position of
one who sees England for the first time. There were, I know, subtle
differences; yet, broadly speaking, that was my position. The native-born
Australian, approaching the land of his fathers for the first
time, comes to it with a mass of cherished lore and associations at
least equal in weight and effect to my childhood's knowledge and
experience of England. He very often comes also to relatives. I came,
not only having no claim upon any single creature in these islands,
but having no faintest knowledge of any one among them. I carried two
letters of introduction: one from Mr. Foster to a London newspaper
editor whom he knew only by correspondence, and the other from Mr.
Rawlence to a painter, who just then (though I knew it not) was in
Algiers.
The purser paid me my five pounds before I left the ship, wished me
luck, and vowed, as his habit was in saying good-bye to people, that
he was very glad he had met me. And then I got into the train with my
luggage, and set out for Fenchurch Street and the conquest of London.
The passengers had all disappeared long since. England swallows up
shiploads of them almost every hour without winking. My arrival
differed in various ways from theirs. For instance, I had had no
leisure in which to think about it, to anticipate it, until I was
actually seated in the train, bound for Fenchurch Street. They had
been arriving, in a sense, ever since we left the Mediterranean; after
a passage, by the way, resembling in every particular all other
passages from Australia to England in mail steamers.
To be precise, I think the first impression received by me was that
the England I had come to was a quite astonishingly dingy land. The
people seemed to me to have a dingy pallor, like the table-linen of
the cheaper sort of lodging-house. They looked, not so much ill as
unwashed, not so much poor as cross, hipped, tired, worried, and
annoyed about something. They wore their hats at an angle then
unfamiliar to me, with a forward rake. They must laugh or, at any
rate, smile sometimes, I thought. This is where _Punch_ comes from. It
is the land of Dickens. It is, in short, Merry England. But, as I
regarded the dingy, set faces from the railway's carriage window, it
seemed inconceivable that their owners ever could have laughed, or
screwed up the skin around their eyes to look out happily under sunny
blue skies upon bright and cheery scenes.
Since then I have again and again encountered the most indomitable
cheerfulness in Londoners, in circumstances which would drive any
Australian to tears, or blasphemy, or suicide, or to all three. And I
know now that many Londoners wash as frequently as Australians, or
nearly so. But my first impression of the appearance of those I saw
was an impression of sour, cross, unwashed sadness. And, being an
impressionable person, I immediately found an explanatory theory. The
essential difference between these folk and people following similarly
humble avocations in Sydney, I thought, is that these people, even
those of them who, personally, were never acquainted with hunger, live
in the shadow of actual want; even of actual starvation. In Sydney they
do not. That accounts for the don't-care-a-damn light-heartedness seen in
Australian faces, and for the dominance of care in these faces.
I still had everything to learn, and have since learned some of it.
And I do not think now that my theory was particularly incorrect. The
mere physical fact that the working men in Sydney take a bath every
day as a matter of course, and that in London they do not all take one
every week, trifling as it may seem, is itself accountable for
something. But the ever-present knowledge that starvation is a real
factor in life, not in Asia, but in the house next door but one, if
not in one's own house--that is a great moulder of facial expression.
It plays no part whatever in the life of the country from which I had
come.
As my train drew to within half a dozen miles of its destination, I
became vaguely conscious of the real inner London as distinguished
from its extraordinary dockland and water approaches. We passed a huge
and grimy dwelling-house, overlooking the railway, a 'model'
dwelling-house; and in passing I caught sight of an incredible legend,
graven in stone on the side of this building, intimating that here were
the homes of more than one thousand families. That rather took my breath
away.
Then we dived into a tunnel, and emerged a few seconds later,
screeching hoarsely, right in London. It hit me below the belt. I
experienced what they call a 'sinking' feeling in the pit of my
stomach. I thought what a fool I was, how puny and insignificant; and,
again, what a fool I must be, to come blundering along here into the
maw of this vast beast, this London--I and my miserable five-and-twenty
pounds! For one wild moment the panic-born thought of hurrying
back to my purser and begging re-engagement for the outward trip to
Australia scuttled across my mind. And then the train jolted to a
standstill, and, with a faint kind of nausea in my throat, I stepped
out into London.
I have to admit that it was not at all a glorious or inspiriting
home-coming. It was as different from the home-coming of my dreams (when
a minor capitalist) as anything well could be. But yet this was
indubitably London, my destination; the objective of all my efforts
for a long time past. A uniformed boot-black gave me a sudden thought
of St. Peter's Orphanage--the connection, if any existed, must have
been rather subtle--and that somehow stiffened my spine a little. Here
I was, after all, the utterly friendless Orphanage lad who, a dozen
thousand miles away, had willed that he should go out into the world,
do certain kinds of things, meet certain kinds of people, and journey
all across the world to his native England. Well, without much
assistance, I had accomplished these things, and was actually there,
in London. There was tingling romance in the thought of it, after all.
No drizzling rain could alter that. Having successfully adventured so
far, surely I was not to be daunted by dingy faces, bricks, and
mortar, and houses said to accommodate a thousand families!
And so, with tolerably authoritative words to a porter about luggage,
I squared my shoulders in response to life's undeniable appeal to the
adventurous.