On our way back we stopped at a little country church, so peaceful, so
very peaceful, in the evening light, where it stood, withdrawn from the
highway, Norman and Gothic without, and within all so sweet and bare
and clean, that we could not believe in the old ecclesiasticism
which persecuted the Puritans into the exile whither they carried the
persecuting spirit with them. A pretty child, a little girl, opened the
churchyard gate and held it for us to pass, and her gentleness made me
the more question the history of those dreadful days in the past. When I
saw a young lady, in the modern dress which I had so often lost my heart
to at the Church Parade in Hyde Park, going up a leafy lane, toward the
vicarage, from having been for tennis and afternoon tea at some pleasant
home in the neighborhood, I denied the atrocious facts altogether. She
had such a very charming hat on.
The suburbs of Great Grimsby, after you reach them through that zone of
bad smell, are rather attractive, and you get into long clean streets of
small stone houses, like those of Plymouth or Southampton, and presently
you reach the Humber, which is full of the steamers and sail, both
fishing and deep sea, of the prosperous port, with great booms of
sawlogs from Norway, half filling the channel, and with a fringe of tall
chimneys from the sawmills along the shores. Great Grimsby is not only
the centre of a vast distributing trade in coal and lumber, but of a
still vaster trade in fish. It cuts one’s pride, if one has believed
that Gloucester, Massachusetts, is the greatest fishing port in the
world, to learn that Grimsby, with a hundred more fishing sail, is only
“_one_ of the principal fishing ports” of the United Kingdom. What can
one do against those brutal British statistics? We think our towns grow
like weeds, but London seems to grow half such a weed as Chicago in a
single night.
[Illustration: FISHING-SHIPS AT GREAT GRIMSBY]
After we were got well into the town, we found ourselves part of an
immense bicycle parade, with bicyclers of both sexes on their wheels, in
masks and costumes, Pierrots, and Clowns, and Harlequins and Columbines,
in a competition for the prettiest and fanciest dress.
When we came to start from the station on our run to London, we
reflected that there were a great many of these bicyclers, and that they
would probably crowd us in our third-class compartment. So, as we had
bought an excellent supper in baskets, such as they send you on the
trains everywhere in England, and wished to eat it in quiet, we sought
out the guard who was lurking near for the purpose, and bribed him to
shut us into that compartment, and not let any one else in. There
we remained in darkness, with our curtains drawn, and when, near
train-time, the bicyclers began to swarm about the carriages, we heard
them demanding admittance to our compartment from our faithful guard,
if that is the right way to call him. He turned them away with soft
answers, answers so very soft that we could not make out what he said,
but he seemed to be inviting them into other compartments, which he
doubtless pretended were better. The murmurs would die away, and then
rise again, and from time to time we knew that a baffled bicycler was
pulling at our door, or vainly bumping against it. We listened with our
hearts in our mouths; but no one got in, and the train started, and we
opened our baskets and began to eat and to drink, like two aristocrats
or plutocrats. What made our inhuman behavior worse was that we were
really nothing of the kind, but both professed friends of the common
people. The story might show that when it comes to a question of
selfishness men are all alike ready to profit by the unjust conditions.
However, it must be remembered that those people were only bicyclers. If
we could have conceived of them as masses we should have known them for
brothers, and let them in, probably.
* * * * *