The hotel in Liverpool swarmed and buzzed with busy and murmurous
American arrivals. One could hardly get at the office window, on account
of them, to plead for a room. A dense group of our countrywomen were
buying picture-postals of the rather suave office-ladies, and helplessly
fawning on them in the inept confidences of American women with all
persons in official or servile attendance. “Let me stay here,” one of
them entreated, “because there’s such a draught at the other window.
May I?” She was a gentle child of forty-five or fifty; and I do not know
whether she was allowed to stay in the sheltered nook or not, tender
creature. As she was in every one else’s way there, possibly she was
harshly driven into the flaw at the other window.
[Illustration: ST. GEORGE’S HALL, LIVERPOOL]
The place was a little America which swelled into a larger with the
arrivals of the successive steamers, though the soft swift English
trains bore our co-nationals away as rapidly as they could. Many
familiar accents remained till the morning, and the breakfast-room was
full of a nasal resonance which would have made one at home anywhere in
our East or West. I, who was then vainly trying to be English, escaped
to the congenial top of the farthest bound tram, and flew, at the rate
of four miles an hour, to the uttermost suburbs of Liverpool, whither
no rumor of my native speech could penetrate. It was some balm to my
wounded pride of country to note how pale and small the average type of
the local people was. The poorer classes swarmed along a great part
of the tram-line in side streets of a hard, stony look, and what
characterized itself to me as a sort of iron squalor seemed to prevail.
You cannot anywhere have great prosperity without great adversity, just
as you cannot have day without night, and the more Liverpool evidently
flourished the more it plainly languished. I found no pleasure in the
paradox, and I was not overjoyed by the inevitable ugliness of the brick
villas of the suburbs into which these obdurate streets decayed. But
then, after divers tram changes, came the consolation of beautiful
riverside beaches, thronged with people who looked gay at that distance,
and beyond the Mersey rose the Welsh hills, blue, blue.