“bad” season, throughout May, when the charges of those who live by
it ordinarily feel an expansive rise; when rooms at hotels become
difficult, become impossible; when the rents of apartments double
themselves, and apartments are often not to be had at any price; when
the face of the cabman clouds if you say you want him by the hour, and
clears if you add that you will make it all right with him; when every
form of service begins to have the courage of its dependence; and the
manifold fees which ease the social machine seem to lubricate it so much
less than the same fees in April; when the whole vast body of London
groans with a sense of repletion such as no American city knows except
in the rare congestion produced by a universal exposition or a national
convention. Such a congestion is of annual occurrence in London, and is
the symptomatic expression of the season; but the symptoms ordinarily
recognizable in May were absent until June in the actual year. They were
said to have been suppressed by the reluctance of the tardy spring, and
again by the king's visit to Ireland. As the king is the fountain of
social prosperity it is probable that he had more to do with delaying
the season than the weather had; but by what one hears said of him he
would not have willingly delayed it. He is not only a well-meaning
and well-doing prince, one hears from people of every opinion, but a
promoter of peace and international concord (especially with France,
where his good offices are believed to have been peculiarly effective),
and he is, rather more expectedly, a cheerful sovereign, loving the
gayety as well as the splendor of state, and fond of seeing the world
enjoy itself.
It is no betrayal of the national confidence to repeat what every one
says concerning the present outburst of fashion, that it is a glad
compliance with the king's liking; the more eager because of its long
suppression during the late queen's reign and the more anxious
because of a pathetic apprehension inspired by the well-known serious
temperament of the heir-apparent to the throne. No doubt the joyful
rebound from the depression of the Boer war is also still felt; but for
whatever reason London life is gay and glad, it is certainly making its
hay while the sun shines, and it mixes as many poppies and daisies with
the crop as possible against the time when only grass may be acceptable.
In other terms the prevailing passion for pretty clothes in the masses
as well as the classes is the inspiration of the court, while the free
personal preferences expressed are probably the effect of that strong,
that headstrong, instinct of being like one's self, whether one is like
others or not, which has always moulded precedence and tradition to
individual convenience with the English. One would not have said that
a frock-coat of lustrous black alpaca was just the wear for a tall
middle-aged gentleman in a silk hat and other scrupulous appointments;
but when he appeared in it one hottest Sunday afternoon in that
consecrated close of Hyde Park, and was welcomed by the inmost
flower-group of the gorgeous parterre, one had to own a force of logic
in it. If a frock-coat was the proper thing for the occasion in general,
then the lightest and coolest fabric was the thing for that occasion in
particular. So the wearer had reasoned in sublime self-reliance, and so,
probably, the others reasoned in intelligent acquiescence.
Just what quality he had the courage of one could not have guessed at a
distance, and he must remain part of the immense question which London
continues for the inquirer to the last; but it is safe to say that
he looked distinguished. Out of season, the London type of man looked
undistinguished, but when the season began to make London over, the
pavement of Piccadilly sprouted in a race of giants who were as
trees walking. They were mostly young giants, who had great beauty
of complexion, of course, and as great beauty of feature. They were
doubtless the result of a natural selection, to which money for buying
perfect conditions had contributed as much as the time necessary for
growing a type. Mostly their faces were gentle and kind, and only now
and then hard or cruel; but one need not be especially averse to the
English classification of our species to feel that they had cost more
than they were worth. The very handsomest man I saw, with the most
perfectly patrician profile (if we imagine something delicately aquiline
to be particularly patrician), was a groom who sat his horse beside
Rotten Row, waiting till his master should come to command the services
of both. He too had the look of long descent, but if it could not be
said that he had cost the nation too much time and money, it might still
be conjectured that he had cost some one too much of something better.
Next after these beautiful people I think that in the multitudinously
varied crowd of London I saw no men so splendidly, so brilliantly, so
lustrously handsome as three of those imperial British whose lives
are safer, but whose social status is scarcely better than that of
our negroes. They were three tall young Hindoos, in native dress, and
white-turbaned to their swarthy foreheads, who suddenly filed out of the
crowd, looking more mystery from their liquid eyes than they could well
have corroborated in word or thought, and bringing to the metropolis
of the West the gorgeous and foolish magnificence of the sensuous East.
What did they make of the metropolis? Were they conscious, with or
without rebellion, of their subjection, their absolute inferiority in
the imperial scheme? If looks went for what looks rarely do, except in
women, they should have been the lords of those they met; but as it
was they were simply the representatives of one of the suppressed races
which, if they joined hands, could girdle the globe under British rule.
Somehow they brought the sense of this home to the beholder, as none
of the monuments or memorials of England's imperial glory had done, and
then, having fulfilled their office, lost themselves in the crowd.
V
THE SIGHTS AND SOUNDS OF THE STREETS
The specialization of those fatuous Orientals, transient as it was, was
of far greater duration than that of most individual impressions from
the London crowd. London is a flood of life, from which in a powerful
light you may catch the shimmering facet of a specific wavelet; but
these fleeting glimpses leave only a blurred record with the most
instantaneous apparatus. What remains of the vision of that long
succession of streets called by successive names from Knightsbridge to
Ludgate Hill is the rush of a human torrent, in which you are scarcely
more aware of the single life than of any given ripple in a river. Men,
women, children form the torrent, but each has been lost to himself in
order to give it the collective immensity which abides in your mind's
eye.
To the American city-dweller the London omnibus is archaic. Except for
the few slow stages that lumber up and down Fifth Avenue, we have hardly
anything of the omnibus kind in the whole length and breadth of our
continent, and it is with perpetual astonishment and amusement that one
finds it still prevailing in London, quite as if it were not as gross
an anachronism as the war-chariot or the sedan-chair. It is ugly, and
bewilderingly painted over with the names of its destinations, and clad
with signs of patent medicines and new plays and breakfast foods in
every color but the colors of the rainbow. It is ponderous and it
rumbles forward with a sound of thunder, and the motion of a steamer
when they put the table-racks on. Seen from the pavement, or from the
top of another omnibus, it is of barbaric majesty; not, indeed, in the
single example, but as part of the interminable line of omnibuses coming
towards you. Then its clumsiness is lost in the collective uncouthness
which becomes of a tremendous grandeur. The procession bears onward
whole populations lifted high in the air, and swaying and lurching with
the elephantine gait of things which can no more capsize than they can
keep an even pace. Of all the sights of London streets, this procession
of the omnibuses is the most impressive, and the common herd of
Londoners of both sexes which it bears aloft seems to suffer a change
into something almost as rich as strange. They are no longer ordinary
or less than ordinary men and women bent on the shabby businesses that
preoccupy the most of us; they are conquering princes, making a progress
in a long triumph, and looking down upon a lower order of human beings
from their wobbling steeps. It enhances their apparent dignity that they
whom they look down upon are not merely the drivers of trucks and wagons
of low degree, but often ladies of title in their family carriages,
under the care of the august family coachman and footman, or gentlemen
driving in their own traps or carts, or fares in the hansoms that steal
their swift course through and by these ranks; the omnibuses are always
the most monumental fact of the scene. They dominate it in bulk and
height; they form the chief impulse of the tremendous movement, and it
is they that choke from time to time the channel of the mighty torrent,
and helplessly hold it in the arrest of a _block_.
[Illustration: A BLOCK IN THE STRAND.]
No one can forecast the moment when, or the place where, a block may
happen; but mostly it occurs in mid-afternoon, at the intersection of
some street where a line of vehicles is crossing the channel of the
torrent. Suddenly all is at a stand-still, and one of those wonderful
English policemen, who look so slight and young after the vast blue
bulks of our Irish force, shows himself in the middle of the channel,
and holds back its rapids with the quiet gesture of extended hands.
The currents and counter-currents gather and press from the rear and
solidify, but in the narrow fissure the policeman stands motionless,
with only some such slight stir of his extended hands as a cat imparts
to her “conscious tail” when she waits to spring upon her prey.
The mute language of his hands, down to the lightest accent of the
fingers, is intelligible to the dullest of those concerned in its
interpretation, and is telepathically despatched from the nearest to the
farthest driver in the block. While the policeman stands there in the
open space, no wheel or hoof stirs, and it does not seem as if the
particles of the mass could detach themselves for such separate movement
as they have at the best. Softly, almost imperceptibly, he drops his
arms, and lets fall the viewless barrier which he had raised with them;
he remains where he was, but the immense bodies he had stayed liquefy
and move in their opposite courses, and for that time the block is over.
If ever London has her epic poet, I think he will sing the omnibus; but
the poet who sings the hansom must be of a lyrical note. I do not see
how he could be too lyrical, for anything more like song does not move
on wheels, and its rapid rhythm suggests the quick play of fancy in that
impetuous form. We have the hansom with us, but it does not perform the
essential part in New York life that it does in London life. In New York
you _may_ take a hansom; in London you _must_. You serve yourself of it
as at home you serve yourself of the electric car; but not by any means
at the same rate. Nothing is more deceitful than the cheapness of the
hansom, for it is of such an immediate and constant convenience that the
unwary stranger's shilling has slipped from him in a sovereign before
he knows, with the swift succession of occasions when the hansom seems
imperative. A 'bus is inexpensive, but it is stolid and bewildering;
a hansom is always cheerfully intelligent. It will set you down at the
very place you seek; you need walk neither to it nor from it; a nod,
a glance, summons it or dismisses. The 'bus may be kind, but it is not
flattering, and the hansom is flattering as well as kind; flattering
to one's pride, one's doubt, one's timid hope. It takes all the
responsibility for your prompt and unerring arrival; and you may trust
it almost implicitly. At any point in London you can bid it go to any
other with a confidence that I rarely found abused. Once, indeed, my
cabman carried me a long way about at midnight, and when he finally left
me at my door, he was disposed to be critical of its remoteness, while
he apologized for the delay. I suggested that in a difficulty like his
a map of London would be a good thing; but though he was so far in drink
as to be able to take the joke in good part, he denied that a map would
be of the least use to a cabman. Probably he was right; my map was not
of the least use to me; and his craft seemed to feel their way about
through the maze of streets and squares and circles by the same instinct
that serves a pilot on a river in the dark. Their knowledge is a thing
of the nerves, not of the brains, if there is a difference; or if there
is none, then it is an affair of the subliminal consciousness, it is
inspiration, it is genius. It could not well be overpaid, and the cabmen
are careful that it is not underpaid. I heard, indeed, of two American
ladies who succeeded in underpaying their cabman; this was their belief
resting upon his solemn declaration; but I myself failed in every
attempt of the kind. My cabman always said that it was not enough; and
then I compromised by giving him too much. Many stories are told of the
abusiveness of the class, but a simple and effective rule is to overpay
them at once and be done with it. I have sometimes had one cast a
sorrowing glance at the just fare pressed into his down-stretched palm,
and drive off in thankless silence; but any excess of payment was met
with eager gratitude. I preferred to buy the cabman's good-will, because
I find this is a world in which I am constantly buying the good-will of
people whom I do not care the least for, and I did not see why I
should make an exception of cabmen. Only once did I hold out against an
extortionate demand of theirs. That was with a cabman who drove me to
the station, and said: “I'll have to get another sixpence for this,
sir.” “Well,” I returned, with a hardihood which astonished me, “you
won't get it of me.” But I was then leaving London, and was no longer
afraid. Now, such is the perversity of the human spirit, I am sorry he
did not get the other sixpence of me. One always regrets these acts of
justice, especially towards any class of fellow-beings whose habits of
prey are a sort of vested rights. It is even in your own interest to
suffer yourself to be plundered a little; it stimulates the imagination
of the plunderer to high conceptions of equity, of generosity, which
eventuate in deeds of exemplary honesty. Once, one of the party left
a shawl in the hansom of a cabman whom I had, after my custom and
principle, overpaid, and who had left us at a restaurant upon our second
thought against a gallery where we had first proposed to be put down. We
duly despaired, but we went and saw the pictures, and when we came out
of the gallery there was our good cabman lying in wait to identify us
as the losers of the shawl which he had found in his cab. Is it credible
that if he had been paid only his legal fare he would have been at such
virtuous pains? It may, indeed, be surmised that if the shawl was not
worth more than an imaginable reward for its restoration he was actuated
by self-interest, but this is a view of our common nature which I will
not take.
One hears a good deal of the greater quiet of London after New York. I
think that what you notice is a difference in the quality of the noise
in London. What is with us mainly a harsh, metallic shriek, a grind
of trolley wheels upon trolley tracks, and a wild battering of their
polygonized circles upon the rails, is in London the dull, tormented
roar of the omnibuses and the incessant cloop-cloop of the cab-horses'
hoofs. Between the two sorts of noise there is little choice for one who
abhors both. The real difference is that in many neighborhoods you can
more or less get away from the specialized noises in London, but you
never can do this in New York. You hear people saying that in these
refuges the London noise is mellowed to a soft pour of sound, like the
steady fall of a cataract, which effectively is silence; but that is
not accurate. The noise is broken and crushed in a huge rumble without a
specialized sound, except when, after midnight, the headlong clatter of
a cab-horse distinguishes itself from the prevailing bulk. But the New
York noise is never broken and crushed into a rumble; it bristles with
specific accents, night and day, which agonizingly assort themselves one
from another, and there is no nook or corner where you can be safe from
them, as you can measurably be in London.
London is, if anything, rather more infested than New York with motors,
as the English more simply and briefly call automobiles. The perspective
is seldom free of them, and from time to time the air is tainted with
their breath, which is now one of the most characteristic stenches of
civilization. They share equally with other vehicles the drives in the
parks, though their speed is tempered there to the prevalent pace.
They add to the general noise the shuddering bursts of their swift
percussions, and make the soul shrink from a forecast of what the
aeroplane may be when it shall come hurtling overhead with some peculiar
screech as yet unimagined. The motor plays an even more prominent part
in the country than in London, especially in those remnants of time
which the English call weekends, and which stretch from Friday afternoon
to the next Monday morning. It is within these limits that people are
ordinarily “asked down,” and as the host usually lives from five to ten
miles from the nearest station, the guest is met there by a motor which
hurls him over the intervening ground at the speed of the train he has
just left. The motor is still the rich man's pleasure, as the week-end
is his holiday; and it will be long before the one will be the poor
man's use, or the other his leisure. For the present he must content
himself, in England, at least, with his own legs, and with the
bank-holiday which now comes so often as to be dreaded by his betters
when it lets him loose upon their travel and sojourn in excursional
multitude. This is not likely ever to come under question of affecting
the London season, as one heard the week-end accused of doing. It was
theorized that people went out of town so much, in order to be at home
in the country for their friends, that with two afternoons and three
nights lost to the festivities of London, the season was sensibly if not
vitally affected. But that was in the early weeks of it. As it grew and
prospered through the latter half of June and the whole of July, the
week-end, as an inimical factor, was no longer mentioned. It even began
to be recognized as an essential element of the season. Like the king's
visits to Denmark, to Ireland, to Germany, it really served to intensify
the season.
At this point, I find it no longer possible to continue celebrating that
great moment in the social life of a vast empire without accusing myself
of triviality and hypocrisy. I have become aware that I really care
nothing about it, and know almost as little. I fancy that with most
English people who have passed the heyday of their youth, perhaps
without having drunk deeply, or at all, of the delirious fountain of
fashion, it is much the same. The purpose that the season clearly serves
is annually gathering into the capital great numbers of the people best
worth meeting from all parts of the world-wide English dominion, with
many aliens of distinction, not counting Americans, who are held a kind
of middle species by the natives. It is a time of perpetual breakfasts,
lunches, teas, and dinners, receptions, concerts, and for those who can
bear it, balls till the day of twenty-four hours' pleasure begins again,
with the early rites of Rotten Row. Those who have a superfluity of
invitations go on at night from one house to another till they fall
lifeless into bed at their own. One may fancy, if one likes, that they
show the effects of their pleasure the next day, that many a soft cheek
pales its English rose under the flapping panama hats among the riders
in the Park, and that, lively as they still are, they tend rather to be
phantoms of delight. But perhaps this is not so. What is certain is that
for those who do not abuse the season it is a time of fine as well as
high enjoyment, when the alien, or the middle species, if he is known,
or even tolerably imagined, may taste a cup of social kindness, of
hospitality, deeper if not richer than any in the world. I do not say
that one of the middle species will find in it the delicate, the wild,
the piquant flavors of certain remembered cups of kindness at home; and
I should not say this even if it were true; but he will be an ungrateful
and ungracious guest if he criticises. He will more wisely and justly
accuse himself of having lost his earlier zest, if he does not come away
always thinking, “What interesting people I have met!”
VI
SOME MISGIVINGS AS TO THE AMERICAN INVASION
It is perhaps more than possible that among the interesting people one
meets at luncheons and teas and dinners, there will be, or have been,
other Americans; and this suggests the perilous question whether the
English like the Americans better than formerly. An Englishman might
counter by asking whether the Americans like the English better than
formerly; but that would not be answering the question, which I hope to
leave very much where I found it. Yet Americans have heard and read
so much of their increasing national favor with their contemporary
ancestors that they may be excused if not satisfied in a curiosity as
to the fact. Is the universal favor which an emotional and imaginative
press like ours has portrayed them as presently enjoying in England
a reality, or is it one of the dreams which our press now and then
indulges, and of which the best that can be said is that they do no
harm?
One not only hears of this favor at home, but when one goes to England
one still hears of it. To be sure one hears of it mainly from Americans,
but they have the best means of knowing the fact; they are chiefly
concerned, and they are supported in their belief by the almost unvaried
amenity of the English journals, which now very rarely take the tone
towards Americans formerly habitual with them. Their change of tone is
the most obvious change which I think Americans can count upon noting
when they come to England, and I am far from reckoning it insignificant.
It did not happen of the newspapers themselves; it must be the
expression of a prevalent mood, if not a very deeply rooted feeling in
their readers. One hears of their interest, their kindness, not from
the Americans alone; the English themselves sometimes profess it, and if
they overestimate us, the generous error is in the right direction. At
the end it must cease to be an error, for, as we Americans all know,
we need only to be better understood in order to be more highly prized.
Besides, liking is much oftener the effect of willing than has been
supposed.