visitors, whatever it was, was much dispersed and intercepted by the
screen behind which they were placed. I do not know why the women should
be thus obscured, for, if the minds of members were in danger of being
distracted by their presence, I should think they would be still more
distracted when the element of mystery was added to it by the grille.
Seen across the whole length of the House from the men's gallery
the women looked as if tightly pressed against the grille, and had a
curiously thin, phantasmal effect, or the effect of frescoed figures
done very flat. To the imaginative spectator their state might have
symbolized the relation of women to Parliamentary politics, of which
we read much in English novels, and even English newspapers. Women take
much more interest in political affairs in England than with us; that
is well known; but it may not be so well known that they are in much
greater enjoyment of the franchise, if the franchise is indeed a
pleasure. I do not know whether they vote for school-committeemen, or
whether there are school-committeemen for them to vote for; but they may
vote for guardians of the poor, and may themselves be voted for to that
office; and they may vote for members of the Urban Councils and the
County Councils if they have property to be taxed by those bodies. This
is the right for which our Revolution was made, though we continue, with
regard to women, the Georgian heresy of taxation without representation;
but it is doubtful to the barbarian whether good can come of women's
mixing in parliamentary elections at which they have no vote. Of course,
with us a like interference would be taken jocosely, ironically; it
would, at the bottom, be a good joke, amusing from the tendency of the
feminine temperament to acts of circus in moments of high excitement;
but whether the Englishmen regard it so, the English, alone know.
They are much more serious than we, and perhaps they take it as a fit
manifestation of the family principle which is the underlying force
of the British Constitution. One heard of ladies who were stumping
(or whatever is the English equivalent of stumping) the country on
the preferential tariff question and the other questions which divide
Conservatives and Liberals; but in spite of these examples of their
proficiency the doubt remained whether those who have not the suffrage
can profitably attempt to influence it. Till women can make up their
minds to demand and accept its responsibilities, possibly they will do
best to let it alone.
When they want it they will have it; but until they do, it may not be
for nothing, or even for the control of the members' wandering fancies,
that the House of Commons interposes between them and itself the grille
through which they show like beauteous wraiths or frescoes in the
flat. That screen is emblematic of their real exclusion from the higher
government which their social participation in parliamentary elections,
and the men's habit of talking politics with them, flatter them into a
delusive sense of sharing. A woman may be the queen of England, but she
may not be one of its legislators. That must be because women like being
queens and do not really care for being legislators.
VIII
THE MEANS OF SOJOURN
The secular intensification of the family life makes it possible for the
English to abandon their secular domesticity, when they will, without
apparent detriment to the family life. Formerly the English family which
came up to London for the season or a part of it went into a house of
its own, or, in default of that, went into lodgings, or into a hotel of
a kind happily obsolescent. Such a family now frankly goes into one
of the hotels which abound in London, of a type combining more of the
Continental and American features than the traits of the old English
hotel, which was dark, cold, grim, and silently rapacious, heavy In
appointments and unwholesome in refection. The new sort of hotel is apt
to be large, but it is of all sizes, and it offers a home reasonably
cheerful on inclusive terms not at all ruinous. It has a table-d'hôte
dinner at separate tables and a fair version of the French cuisine. If
it is one of the more expensive, it will not be dearer than our dearest,
and if one of the cheaper, it will be better in every way than our
cheaper. The supply has created a demand which apparently did not exist
before, and the Englishman has become a hotel-dweller, or at least a
hotel-sojourner, such as he had long reproached the American with being.
In like manner, with the supply of good restaurants in great number and
variety, he has become a diner and luncher at restaurants. Whether he
has been able to exact as much as he really wanted of the privacy once
supposed so dear to him, a stranger, even of the middle species, cannot
say, but it is evident that at his hotel or his restaurant he dines or
lunches as publicly as ever the American did or does; and he has his
friends to dinner or lunch without pretence of a private dining-room.
One hears that this sort of open conviviality tempts by its facility to
those excesses of hospitality which are such a drain on English incomes;
but again that is something of which an outsider can hardly venture to
have an opinion. What is probably certain is that the modern hotel and
restaurant, with their cheerful ease, are pushing the old-fashioned
lodging as well as the old-fashioned hotel out of the general favor, and
have already driven them to combine their attractions or repulsions on a
level where they are scarcely distinguishable as separate species.
In the streets neighboring on Piccadilly there are many apartments which
are effectively small hotels, where you pay a certain price for your
rooms, and a certain fixed price for your meals. You must leave this
neighborhood if you want the true lodging where you pay for your
apartment, and order the provisions which are cooked for you, and which
are apportioned to your daily needs. This is the ideal, and it is
not seriously affected by the reality that your provisions are also
apportioned to the needs of your landlord's family. Even then, the ideal
remains beautiful, and you have an image, somewhat blurred and battered,
of home, such as money cannot elsewhere buy you. If your landlord is the
butler who has married the cook, your valeting and cooking approach as
nearly perfection as you can hopefully demand.
It will be well not to scan too closely the infirmities of the
appointments over which an air of decent reticence is cast, and it will
have been quite useless to try guarding all the points at which you
might be plundered. The result is more vexatious than ruinous, and
perhaps in a hotel also you would be plundered. In a lodging you are
promptly and respectfully personalized; your tastes are consulted,
if not gratified; your minor wants, in which your comfort lies, are
interpreted, and possibly there grows up round you the semblance, which
is not altogether deceitful, of your own house.
The theory is admirable, but I think the system is in decay, though to
say this is something like accusing the stability of the Constitution.
Very likely if some American ghost were to revisit a well-known London
street a hundred years from now, he would find it still with the legend
of “Apartments” in every transom; and it must not be supposed that
lodgings have by any means fallen wholly to the middle, much less the
lower middle, classes. In one place there was a marquis overhead; in
another there was a lordship of unascertained degree, who was heard on a
court night being got ready by his valet and the landlord's whole force,
and then marking his descent to his cab by the clanking of his sword
upon the stairs, after which the joint service spent a good part of
the night in celebrating the event at a banquet in the basement. At two
lodgings in a most unpretentious street, it was the landlords' boast
that a royal princess had taken tea with their tenants, who were of
the quality to be rightfully taken tea with by a royal princess; and at
certain hours of the afternoon during the season it was not uncommon to
see noble equipages standing at the doors of certain apartments with
a full equipment of coachmen and footmen, and ladies of unmistakable
fashion ascending and descending by the carriage-steps like the angels
on Jacob's ladder. It could be surmised that they were visiting poor
relations, or modest merit of some sort, but it was not necessary to
suppose this, and upon the whole I prefer not.
The search for lodgings, which began before the season was conscious of
itself, was its own reward in the pleasures it yielded to the student of
human nature and the lover of mild adventure. The belief in lodgings
was a survival from an age of faith, when in the early eighteen-eighties
they seemed the most commodious and desirable refuge to the outwandering
American family which then first proved them. The fragmentary
outwanderers who now visited London, after an absence of twenty-two
years, did not take into account the fact that their apartment of
long ago was the fine event of the search, prolonged for weeks, of two
friends, singularly intelligent and rarely versed in London; they took
it as a type, and expected to drive directly to its fellow. They drove
indirectly to unnumbered lodgings unlike it and unworthy of its memory,
and it was not until after three days that they were able to fix upon
a lodging that appeared the least remote from their ideal. Then, in a
street not too far from Mayfair, and of the quality of a self-respectful
dependant of Belgravia, they set up their breathless Lares and panting
Penates, and settled down with a sense of comfort that grew upon them
day by day. The place undeniably had its charm, if not its merit. The
drawing-room chairs were in a proper pattern of brocade, and, though
abraded at their edges and corners, were of a tasteful frame; the
armchairs, covered like the sofa in a cheerful cretonne, lent the
parting guest the help of an outward incline; the sofa, heaped with
cushions, could not conceal a broken spring, though it braved it out
with the consciousness of having been sat upon by a royal princess
who had once taken tea in that lodging. But the other appointments,
including a pretty writing-desk and a multitude of china plates almost
hiding the wall-paper, were unfractured, and the little dining-room was
very cosey. After breakfast it had the habit of turning itself into a
study, where one of the outwanderers used to set himself down and ask
himself with pen and ink what he honestly thought and felt about this
England which he had always been more or less bothering about. The
inquiry took time which he might better have spent in day-dreaming
before the prospect of the gray March heaven, with the combs of the
roofs and the chimney-pots mezzotinted against it. He might have more
profitably wasted his time even on the smoke-blackened yellow-brick
house-walls, with their juts and angles, and their clambering pipes
of unknown employ, in the middle distance; or, in the foreground, the
skylights of cluttered outbuildings, and the copings of the walls of
grimy backyards, where the sooty trees were making a fight with the
spring, and putting forth a rash of buds like green points of electric
light: the same sort of light that showed in the eyes of a black cat
seasonably appearing under them. Inquiries into English civilization can
always wait, but such passing effects stay for no man, and I put them
down roughly in behalf of a futile philosopher who ought to have studied
them in their inexhaustible detail.
He could not be reproached with insensibility to his domestic
circumstance, from the combination of cook and butler which took him
into its ideal keeping to the unknown, unheard, and unseen German baron
who had the dining-room floor, and was represented through his open door
by his breakfast-trays and his perfectly valeted clothes. The valeting
in that house was unexceptionable, and the service at table was of a
dress-coated decorum worthy of finer dinners than were ever eaten there.
The service throughout was of a gravity never relaxed, except in the
intimate moments of bringing the bath in the morning, when the news
of the day before and the coming events of the present day were
suggestively yet respectfully discussed.
The tenants of the drawing-room floor owed some of their most fortunate
inspirations in sight-seeing to the suggestions of the landlord, whose
apartments I would in no wise leave to depreciatory conjecture. There
was, indeed, always a jagged wound in the entry wall made by some
envious trunk; but there was nothing of the frowziness, the shabbiness
of many of those houses in the streets neighboring Mayfair where many
Americans are eager to pay twice the fee demanded in this house on the
borders of Belgravia.
The Americans I am imagining had first carried on their search in those
genteel regions, which could hardly have looked their best in the last
moments of preparation before the season began. The house-cleaning which
went on in all of them was no more hurried than the advance of the
slow English spring outside, where the buds appeared after weeks of
hesitation, and the leaves unfolded themselves at long leisure, and the
blossoms deliberated in dreamy doubt whether they had not better stay in
than come out. Day after day found the lodging-houses with their carpets
up, and their furniture inverted, and their hallways and stairways
reeking from slop-pails or smelling from paint-pots, and with no visible
promise of readiness for lodgers. They were pretty nearly all of one
type. A young German or Swiss--there for the language--came to the door
in the coat he had not always got quite into, and then summoned from
the depths below a landlord or landlady to be specific about times and
terms, to show the rooms, and conceal the extras. The entry was oftenest
dim and narrow, with a mat sunk into the floor at the threshold and worn
to the quick by the cleansing of numberless feet; and an indescribable
frowziness prevailed which imparted itself to the condition of widowhood
dug up by the young foreigner from the basement. Sometimes there
responded to his summons a clerical, an almost episcopal presence, which
was clearly that of a former butler, unctuous in manner and person from
long serving. Or sometimes there would be something much more modern, of
an alert middle-age or wary youth; in every case the lodging-keeper was
skilled far beyond the lodging-seeker in the coils of bargaining, and
of holding in the background unsurmised charges for electric lights, for
candles, for washing, for baths, for boots, and for what-know-I, after
the most explicit declaration that the first demand included everything.
Nothing definite could be evolved but the fact that when the season
began, or after the first of May the rent would be doubled.
The treaty usually took place in the dishevelled drawing-room, after
a round of the widely parted chambers, where frowzy beds, covered with
frowzy white counterpanes, stood on frowzy carpets or yet frowzier
mattings, and dusty windows peered into purblind courts. A vulgar
modernity coexisted with a shabby antiquity in the appointments; a
mouldering wall showed its damp through the smart tastelessness of
recent paper; the floor reeled under a combination of pseudo-aesthetic
rugs. The drawing-room expected to be the dining-room also, and faintly
breathed the staleness of the meals served in it. If the front windows
often opened on a cheerful street, the back windows had no air but that
of the sunless spaces which successive architectural exigencies had
crowded with projecting cupboards, closets, and lattices, above basement
skylights which the sky seldom lighted. The passages and the stairs were
never visible except after dark; even then the foot rather than the
eye found the way. Yet, once settled in such a place, it developed
possibilities of comfort, of quiet, of seclusion, which the hardiest
hopefulness could not have forecast. The meals came up and could be
eaten; the coffee, which nearly all English hotels have good and nearly
all English lodgings bad, could be exchanged for tea; the service was
always well-intentioned, and often more, and except that you paid twice
as much as it all seemed worth, you were not so ill-used as you might
have been.
It is said that the whole system, if not on its last legs, is unsteady
on its feet from the competition of the great numbers of those
large, new, reasonably cheap, and admirably managed hotels. Yet the
lodging-houses remain by hundreds of thousands, almost by millions,
throughout the land, and if the English are giving them up they are
renouncing them with national deliberation. The most mysterious fact
concerning them is that they are, with all their multitude, so difficult
to get, and are so very bad when you have got them. Having said this, I
remember with fond regret particular advantages in every lodging of my
acquaintance.
[Illustration: ST. PAUL'S CATHEDRAL.]
IX
CERTAIN TRAITS OF THE LONDON SPRINGTIME
The painting-up which the apartments, as they always call themselves,
undergo inside and out, in preparation for the season, is a rite to
which all London bows during April as far as it can afford it. The
lodging-house may restrict itself to picking out in fresh green its
front door and window-frames, or perhaps reddening its area railing;
but private houses pretending to be smart clothe themselves from eave to
basement in coats of creamy white, or other blond tints susceptible of
the soonest harm from the natural and artificial climates of London.
While the paint is fresh, or “wet,” the word by which you are warned
from its contact everywhere, it is undeniably pleasing; it gives the
gray town an air of girlish innocence, and, with the boxes of brilliant
flowers at every window-sill, promises a gayety which the season
realizes in rather unusual measure. It is said that the flowers at the
windows must be renewed every month, against the blight of the London
smoke and damp, and, if the paint cannot be renewed so often, it is of
perhaps a little more durable beauty. For a month of preparation, while
the house-fronts in the fashionable streets are escaladed by painters
emulous of the perils of the samphire-gatherer's dreadful trade, the air
is filled with the clean, turpentiny odor, and the eye is pleased with
the soft colors in which the grimy walls remember the hopes of another
spring, of another London season.
If the American's business or pleasure takes him out of town on the edge
of the season and brings him back well over its border, he will have an
agreeable effect from his temporary absence. He will find the throngs he
left visibly greater and notably smarter. Fashion will have got in its
work, and the streets, the pavements, the parks will have responded with
a splendor, a gayety earlier unknown. The passing vehicles will be more
those of pleasure and not so much those of business; the passing feet
will be oftener those going to luncheon and afternoon tea, and not so
solely those hurrying to or lagging from the toils of the day. Even the
morning trains that bring the customary surburbans seem to arrive with
multitudes fresher and brighter than those which arrived before the
season began. I do not know whether it was in tribute to the joyful time
that a housemaid, whom I one morning noted scrubbing down and whitening
up the front steps of a stately mansion, wore a long, black train and a
bolero hat and jacket, and I do not say that this is the usual dress of
the London housemaid, poor thing, in the London season, when putting
on them the scrupulous effect of cleanliness which all the London
steps wear in the morning. One might as well pretend that the may is
consciously white and red on all the hawthorns of the parks and squares
in honor of the season. The English call this lovely blossom so with no
apparent literary association, but the American must always feel as if
he were quoting the name from an old ballad. It gives the mighty town
a peculiarly appealing rustic charm, and it remains in bloom almost as
long as its namesake month endures. But that is no great wonder: when
a tree has worked as hard as a tree must in England to get its blossoms
out, it is naturally in no hurry to drop them; it likes to keep them on
for weeks.
The leaves, by the beginning of June, were in their silken fulness; the
trees stood densely, softly, darkly rounded in the dim air, and they
did not begin to shed their foliage till almost two months later. But I
think I had never so exquisite a sense of the loveliness of the London
trees as one evening in the grounds of a country club not so far out
of London as not to have London trees in its grounds. They were mostly
oaks, beeches, and sycamores; they frequented the banks of a wide, slow
water, which could not be called a stream, and they hung like a palpable
sort of clouds in the gathering mists. The mists, in fact, seemed of
much the same density as the trees, and I should be bolder than I like
if I declared which the birds were singing their vespers in. There was
one thrush imitating a nightingale, which I think must have been singing
in the heart of the mist, and which probably mistook it for a tree of
like substance. It was having, apparently, the time of its life; and
really the place was enchanting, with its close-cropped, daisy-starred
lawns, and the gay figures of polo-players coming home from a distant
field in the pale dusk of a brilliant day of early June.
The birds are heard everywhere in London through that glowing month, and
their singing would drown the roar of the omnibuses and the clatter
of the cab-horses' hoofs if anything could. The little gardens of the
houses back together and form innumerable shelters and pleasaunces for
them. The simple beauty of these umbrageous places is unimaginable to
the American city-dweller, who never sees anything but clothes-lines
in blossom from his back windows; but they exist nearly everywhere in
London, and a more spacious privacy can always be secured where two
houses throw their gardens together, as sometimes happens.
The humblest, or at least the next to the humblest, London house has
some leafy breathing-place behind it where the birds may nest and
sing, and our lodging in the street which was almost Belgravian was not
without its tree and its feathered inmates. When the first really
warm days came (and they came at the time appointed by the poets), the
feathered hostess of the birds, in a coop under the tree, laid an egg
in honor of her friends building overhead. This was a high moment of
triumph for the landlord's whole family. He happened to be making some
very gravelly garden-beds along the wall when the hen proclaimed her
achievement, and he called his children and their mother to rejoice with
him. His oldest boy ran up a flag in honor of the event, and his lodgers
came to the window to enjoy the scene, as I am sure the royal princess
would have done if she had been taking tea there that afternoon.
He was a good man, that landlord, and a kind man, and though his
aspirates were dislocated, his heart, however he miscalled it, was
in the right place. We had many improving conversations, by which I
profited more than he; and he impressed me, like Englishmen of every
class, as standing steadfastly but unaggressively upon the rights of his
station. In England you feel that you cannot trespass upon the social
demesne of the lowliest without being unmistakably warned off the
premises. The social inferiors have a convention of profound respect for
the social superiors, but it sometimes seemed provisional only, a mask
which they expected one day to drop; yet this may have been one of
those errors which foreigners easily make. What is certain is that the
superior had better keep to his place, as the inferior keeps to his.
Across the barrier the classes can and do exchange much more kindness
than we at a distance imagine; and I do not see why this is not a good
time to say that the English manner to dependants is beyond criticism.
The consideration for them seems unfailing; they are asked to do things
if they please, and they are invariably and distinctly thanked for the
smallest service. There are no doubt exceptions to the kindness which
one sees, but I did not see the exceptions. The social machinery has so
little play that but for the lubrication of these civilities the grind
of class upon class might be intolerable. With us in America there is
no love lost between rich and poor; unless the poor are directly and
obviously dependent on the rich our classes can be frankly brutal with
one another, as they never seem in England. Very possibly that perfect
English manner from superiors is also a convention, like the respect of
the inferiors, but it is a becoming one.
This is getting rather far away from the birds, not to say my landlord,
who told me that when he first took that house a flock of starlings used
to visit him in the spring. He did not tell me that his little house
stood in the region of Nell Gwynne's mulberry-gardens; his knowledge
was of observation, not of reading; and he was a gossip only about
impersonal things. Concerning his lodgers he was as a grave for silence,
and I fancy this is the strict etiquette of his calling, enforced by
the national demand for privacy. He did, indeed, speak once of a young
German lodger whom he had kept from going to a garden-party in full
evening-dress, but the incident was of a remoteness which excused its
mention. What had impressed him in it was the foreigner's almost tearful
gratitude when he came home and acknowledged that he had found everybody
in the sort of frock-coat which the landlord had conjured him to wear.
[Illustration: WESTMINSTER ABBEY.]