but there was almost a superabundance of flowers in glaring beds, and
there were pieces of water, where the amateur boatman could have the
admiration of watchers, two or three deep, completely encircling the
ponds. To watch them and to walk up and down the shadeless aisles of
shrubbery, to sit on the too sunny benches, and to resort in extreme
cases to the tea-house which offered them ices as well as tea, seemed
to be the most that the frequenters of Battersea Park could do. We
ourselves ordered tea, knowing the quality and quantity of the public
English ice, which is so very minute that you think it will not be
enough, but which when you taste it is apt to be more than you want.
The spectacle of our simple refection was irresistible, and a crowd of
envious small boys thronged the railing that parted us from the general
public, till the spectacle of their hungry interest became intolerable.
We consulted with the waiter, who entered seriously into our question as
to the moral and social effect of sixpence worth of buns on those boys;
he decided that it would at least not form an example ruinous to the
peace of his tea-house; and he presently appeared with a paper bag that
seemed to hold half a bushel of buns. Yet even half a bushel of buns
will not go round the boys in Battersea Park, and we had to choose as
honest a looking boy as there was in the foremost rank, and pledge him
to a just division of the buns intrusted him in bulk, and hope, as
he ran off down an aisle of the shrubbery with the whole troop at his
heels, that he would be faithful to the trust.
* * * * *
So very mild are the excitements, so slight the incidents, so safe and
tame the adventures of modern travel! I am almost ashamed when I
think what a swashing time a romantic novelist, or a person of real
imagination would have been having in London when so little was
happening to me. There was, indeed, one night after dinner when for a
salient moment I had hopes of something different. The maid had whistled
for a hansom, and a hansom had started for the door where we stood
waiting, when out of the shadows across the way two figures sprang,
boarded the cab, and bade the cabman drive them away under our very
eyes. Such a thing, occurring at almost eleven o'clock, promised a
series of stirring experiences; and an American lady, long resident
in England, encouragingly said, on hearing of the outrage, “Ah, that's
_London!_” as if I might look to be often mishandled by bandits of the
sort; but nothing like it ever befell me again. In fact the security and
gentleness with which life is operated in the capital of the world is
one of the kind things makes you forget its immensity. Your personal
comfort and safety are so perfectly assured that you might well mistake
yourself for one of very few people instead of so many.
London is like nature in its vastness, simplicity, and deliberation,
and if it hurried or worried, it would be like the precession of the
equinoxes getting a move on, and would shake the earth. The street
events are few. In my nine or ten weeks' sojourn, so largely spent in
the streets, I saw the body of only one accident worse than a cab-horse
falling; but that was early in my stay when I expected to see many more.
We were going to the old church of St. Bartholomew, and were walking by
the hospital of the same name just as a cab drove up to its gate bearing
the body of the accident. It was a young man whose bleeding face hung
upon his breast and whose limp arm another young man of the same station
in life held round his own neck, to stay the sufferer on the seat beside
him. A crowd was already following, and it gathered so quickly at the
high iron fence that the most censorious witness could hardly see with
what clumsiness the wounded man was half-dragged, half-lifted from the
cab by the hospital assistants, and stretched upon the ground till he
could be duly carried into the hospital. It may have been a casualty of
the many incident to alcoholism; at the best it was a result of single
combat, which, though it prepared us in a sort for the mediaeval
atmosphere of the church, was yet not of the tragic dignity which would
have come in the way of a more heroical imagination.
It was indeed so little worthy of the place, however characteristic
of the observer, that I made haste to forget it as I entered the
church-yard under the Norman arch which has been for some years
gradually finding itself in an adjoining shop-wall. The whole church,
indeed, as now seen, is largely the effect (and it was one of the first
effects I saw) of that rescue of the past from the present which is
perpetually going on all over England. Till lately the Lady Chapel and
the crypt of St. Bartholomew had been used as an ironworker's shop; and
modern life still pressed close upon it in the houses looking on the
graves of the grassless church-yard. With women at the windows that
opened on its mouldy level, peeling potatoes, picking chickens, and
doing other household offices, the place was like something out of
Dickens, but something that yet had been cleaned up in sympathy with the
restoration of the church, going on bit by bit, stone by stone, arch by
arch, till the good monk Rahere (he was gay rather than good before he
turned monk) who founded the Cistercian monastery there in the twelfth
century would hardly have missed anything if he had returned to examine
the church. He would have had the advantage, which he could not have
enjoyed in his life-time, of his own effigy stretched upon his tomb,
and he might have been interested to note, as we did, that the painter
Hogarth had been baptized in his church six hundred years after his own
time. His satisfaction in the still prevalent Norman architecture might
have been less; it is possible he would have preferred the Gothic which
was coming in when he went out.
The interior was all beautifully sad and quiet, gray, dim, twilighted as
with the closes of the days of a thousand years; and in the pale ray an
artist sat sketching a stretch of the clerestory. I shall always feel a
loss in not having looked to see how he was making out, but the image of
the pew-opener remains compensatively with me. She was the first of
her sort to confront me in England with the question whether her very
intelligent comment was conscious knowledge, or mere parrotry. She was a
little morsel of a woman, in a black alpaca dress, and a world-old black
bonnet, who spared us no detail of the church, and took us last into the
crypt, not long rescued from the invasive iron-worker, but now used as
a mortuary chapel for the poor of the parish, which is still full of
the poor. The chapel was equipped with a large bier and tall candles,
frankly ready for any of the dead who might drop in. The old countries
do not affect to deny death a part of experience, as younger countries
do.
We came out into the imperfect circle before the gateway of the church,
and realized that it was Smithfield, where all those martyrs had
perished by fire that the faith of the world might live free. There
can be no place where the past is more august, more pathetic, more
appealing, and none I suppose, where the activities of the present, in
view of it, are more offensive. It is all undermined with the railways
that bring the day's meat-provision to London for distribution
throughout the city, and the streets that centre upon it swarm with
butchers' wagons laden with every kind and color of carnage, prevalently
the pallor of calves' heads, which seem so to abound in England that it
is wonderful any calves have them on still. The wholesale market covers
I know not what acreage, and if you enter at some central point, you
find yourself amid endless prospectives of sides, flitches, quarters,
and whole carcasses, and fantastic vistas of sausages, blood-puddings,
and the like artistic fashionings of the raw material, so that you come
away wishing to live a vegetarian ever after.
The emotions are not at one's bidding, and if one calls upon them, they
are very apt not to come. I promised myself some very signal ones, of
a certain type, from going to the Sunday market of the Jews in what was
once Petticoat Lane, but now, with the general cleaning up and clearing
out of the slums, has got itself called by some much finer and worthier
name. But, really, I had seen much Jewisher things in Hester Street, on
our own East Side. The market did not begin so early as I had been led
to expect it would. The blazing forenoon of my visit was more than half
gone, and yet there was no clothes' auction, which was said to be the
great thing to see. But by nine o'clock there seemed to be everything
else for sale under that torrid July sun, in the long booths and
shelters of the street and sidewalks: meat, fish, fruit, vegetables,
glassware, ironware, boots and shoes, china and crockery, women's tawdry
finery, children's toys, furniture, pictures, succeeding one another
indiscriminately, old and new, and cried off with an incessant jargon of
bargaining, pierced with shrill screams of extortion and expostulation.
A few mild, slim, young London policemen sauntered, apparently unseeing,
unhearing, among the fevered, nervous Semitic crowd, in which the
Oriental types were by no means so marked as in New York, though there
was a greater number of red Jews than I had noted before. The most
monumental features of the scene were the gorgeous scales of wrought
brass, standing at intervals along the street, and arranged with seats,
like swings, for the weighing of such Hebrews as wished to know their
tonnage; apparently they have a passion for knowing it.
The friend who had invited me to this spectacle felt its inadequacy so
keenly, in spite of my protests, that he questioned the policemen for
some very squalid or depraved purlieu that he might show me, for we were
in the very heart of Whitechapel, but failing that, because the region
had been so very much reformed and cleaned up since the dreadful murders
there, he had no recourse but to take me on top of a tram-car and show
me how very thoroughly it had been reformed and cleaned up. In a ride
the whole length of Whitechapel Road to where the once iniquitous region
ceased from troubling and rose in a most respectable resurrection as
Stepney, with old-fashioned houses which looked happy, harmless homes, I
could only be bidden imagine avenues of iniquity branching off on either
hand. But I actually saw nothing slumlike; indeed, with a current of
cool east wind in our faces, which the motion of the tram reinforced,
the ride was an experience delightful to every sense. It was significant
also of the endlessness of London that as far as the tram-car took us
we seemed as far as ever from the bounds of the city; whatever point we
reached there was still as much or more London beyond.
Perhaps poverty has everywhere become shyer than it used to be in the
days before slumming (now itself of the past) began to exploit it.
At any rate, I thought that in my present London sojourn I found less
unblushing destitution than in the more hopeless or more shameless
days of 1882-3. In those days I remember being taken by a friend, much
concerned for my knowledge of that side of London, to some dreadful
purlieu where I saw and heard and smelled things quite as bad as any
that I did long afterwards in the over-tenanted regions of New York. My
memory is still haunted by the vision of certain hapless creatures
who fled blinking from one hole in the wall to another, with little or
nothing on, and of other creatures much in liquor and loudly scolding
and quarrelling, with squalid bits of childhood scattered about
underfoot, and vague shapes of sickness and mutilation, and all the time
a buying and selling of loathsome second-hand rags.
In the midst of it there stood, like figures of a monument erected
to the local genius of misery and disorder, two burly figures of
half-drunken men, threatening each other with loud curses and shaken
fists under the chin of a policeman, perfectly impassive, with eyes
dropped upon the fists which all but stirred the throat-latch of his
helmet. When the men should strike, I was aware that it would be his
instant duty, as the guardian of the public peace, to seize them both
and hale them away to prison. But it was not till many years afterwards
that I read in his well-remembered effigy the allegory of civilization
which lets the man-made suffering of men come to the worst before it
touches it, and acts upon the axiom that a pound of prevention is worth
less than an ounce of cure.
I would very willingly have seen something of this kind again, but, as
I say, I happened not to see it. I think that I did not see or hear even
so much simple drunkenness in London as formerly, but again this may
have been merely chance. I fancied that formerly I had passed more
gin-palaces, flaring through their hell-litten windows into the night;
but this may have been because I had become hardened to gin-palaces and
did not notice them. Women seemed to be going in and coming out of such
places in draggle-tailed processions in those wicked days; but now I
only once saw women drinking in a public house. It was a Saturday night,
when, if ever, it may be excusable to anticipate the thirst of the
morrow, for all through the Sunday idleness it cannot be slaked enough.
It was a hot night, and the bar-room door stood open, and within,
fronted by a crowd of their loudly talking, deeply drinking men-kind,
those poor silly things stood drooping against the wall with their
beer-pots dangling limply from their hands, and their mouths fallen
open as if to catch the morsels of wit and wisdom that dropped from the
tongues of their admired male companions. They did not look very bad;
bad people never do look as bad as they are, and perhaps they are
sometimes not so bad as they look. Perhaps these were kind, but not very
wise, mothers of families, who were merely relieving in that moment
of liquored leisure the long weariness of the week's work. I may have
passed and repassed in the street some of the families that they were
the mothers of; it was in that fortnight of the great heat, whose
oppressiveness I am aware of having vainly attempted to share with the
reader, and the street children seemed to have been roused to uncommon
vigilance by it. They played about far into the night, unrebuked by
their mothers, and the large babies, whom the little girls were always
lugging, shared their untimely wakefulness if not their activity. There
was seldom any crying among them then, though by day the voice of grief
and rage was often lifted above the shout of joy. If their mothers did
not call them in-doors, their fathers were still less exacting. After
the marketing, which took place in the neighboring avenue, where there
began to be a tremendous preparation for it in the afternoon, father and
mother alike seemed to have renounced their domestic cares and to have
liberated their offspring to the unrestricted enjoyment of the street.
As for drunkenness, I say again that I did not see much of it, and I
heard less, though that might have been because I did not look or listen
in the right places. With that, as with everything else in London, I
took my chance. Once I overheard the unseen transports of a lady in
Mayfair imaginably kept by the offices of mutual friends from assaulting
another lady. She, however, though she excelled in violence, did not
equal in persistence the injured gentleman who for a long, long hour
threatened an invisible bicyclist under our windows in that humbler
quarter already described as a poor relation of Belgravia. He had
apparently been almost run down by the hapless wheelman, who, in a
moment of fatuous truth, seemed to have owned that he had not sounded
the warning bell. In making this confession he had evidently apologized
with his forehead in the dust, and his victim had then evidently
forgiven him, though with a severe admonition for the future.
Imaginably, then, the bicyclist had remounted his wheel and attempted to
ride off, when he was stopped and brought back to the miserable error
of his confession. The whole ground was then gone over again, and again
pardon with warning was given. Even a glad good-night was exchanged,
the wheelman's voice rising in a quaver of grateful affection. Then he
seemed to try riding off again, and then he was stayed as before by
the victim, whose sense of public duty flamed up at the prospect of his
escape. I do not know how the affair ended; perhaps it never ended;
but exhausted nature sank in sleep, and I at least was saved from its
continuance. I suppose now that the almost injured person was, if not
drunk, at that stage of tipsiness when the sensibilities are keenest and
self-respect is most alert. An American could not, at least, have
been so tedious in his sober senses, and I will not believe that an
Englishman could.
It is to be considered, in any view of the comparative drunkenness of
the great Anglo-Saxon race, which is the hope and example of the
human race in so many things, that much if not most of our American
drunkenness is alien, while English drunkenness is almost entirely
native. If the inebriety of the spirited Celt, which in the early years
of his adoption with us is sometimes conspicuous, were added to the sum
of our home-born intoxication, there could be no doubt which was the
greater. As it is, I am afraid that I cannot claim to have seen more
drunken men in London than in New York; and when I think of the Family
Entrance, indicated at the side-door of every one of our thousands of
saloons, I am not sure I can plume myself on the superior sobriety of
our drinking men's wives. As for poverty--if I am still partially on
that subject--as for open misery, the misery that indecently obtrudes
itself upon prosperity and begs of it, I am bound to say that I have
met more of it in New York than ever I met during my sojourns in London.
Such misery may be more rigidly policed in the English capital, more
kept out of sight, more quelled from asking mercy, but I am sure that
in Fifth Avenue, and to and fro in the millionaire blocks between
that avenue and the last possible avenue eastward, more deserving
or undeserving poverty has made itself seen and heard to my personal
knowledge than in Piccadilly, or the streets of Mayfair or Park Lane,
or the squares and places which are the London analogues of our best
residential quarters.
Of course, the statistics will probably be against me--I have often
felt an enmity in statistics--and I offer my observations as possibly
inexact. One can only be sure of one's own experience (even if one can
be sure of that), and I can do no more than urge a fact or two further
in behalf of my observations. After we returned to London, in September,
I used to stroll much among the recumbent figures of the unemployed
on the grass of Green Park, where, lulled by the ocean roar of the
omnibuses on Piccadilly, they drowsed away the hours of the autumnal
day. These fellow-men looked more interesting than they probably were,
either asleep or awake, and if I could really have got inside their
minds I dare say I should have been no more amused than if I had
penetrated the consciousness of as many people of fashion in the height
of the season. But what I wish to say is that, whether sleeping or
waking, they never, any of them, asked me for a penny, or in any wise
intimated a wish to divide my wealth with me. If I offered it myself, it
was another thing, and it was not refused to the extent of a shilling by
the good fellow whose conversation I bought one afternoon when I found
him, sitting up in his turfy bed, and mending his coat with needle and
thread. I asked him of the times and their badness, and I hope I left
him with the conviction that I believed him an artisan out of work,
taking his misfortune bravely. He was certainly cheerful, and we had
some agreeable moments, which I could not prolong, because I did not
like waking the others, or such of them as might be sleeping.
I did not object to his cheerfulness, though for misery to be cheerful
seemed to be rather trivial, and I was better pleased with the
impassioned bearing of a pair who passed me another day as I sat on
one of the benches beside the path where the trees were dropping their
listless leaves. The pair were a father and mother, if I might judge
from their having each a babe in their arms and two or three other babes
at their heels. They were not actually in tatters, but anything more
intensely threadbare than their thin clothes could not be imagined;
they were worse than ragged. They looked neither to the right nor to
the left, but stared straight on and pressed straight on rather rapidly,
with such desperate tragedy in their looks as moved me to that noble
terror which the old-fashioned critics used to inculcate as the best
effect of tragedy on the stage. I followed them a little way before I
gained courage to speak to the man, who seemed to have been sick, and
looked more miserable, if there was a choice, than the woman. Then
I asked him, superfluously enough (it might have seemed in a ghastly
pleasantry, to him) if he was down on his luck. He owned that he was,
and in guarantee of his good faith took the shilling I offered him. If
his need had apparently been less dire I might have made it a sovereign;
but one must not fly in the face of the Providence, which is probably
not ill-advised in choosing certain of us to be reduced to absolute
destitution. The man smiled a sick, thin-lipped smile which showed
his teeth in a sort of pinched way, but did not speak more; his wife,
gloomily unmoved, passed me without a look, and I rather slunk back to
my seat, feeling that I had represented, if I had not embodied, society
to her.
I contribute this instance of poverty as the extremest that came to my
knowledge in London; but I do not insist that it was genuine, and if
any more scientific student of civilization wishes to insinuate that
my tragedy was a masquerade got up by that pair to victimize the
sentimental American stranger, and do him out of one of his ill-got
shillings, I will not gainsay him. I merely maintain, as I have always
done, that the conditions are alike in the Old World and the New, and
that the only difference is in the circumstances, which may be better
now in New York, and now in London, while the conditions are always bad
everywhere for the poor. That is a point on which I shall not yield to
any more scientific student of civilization. But in the mean time my
light mind was taken from that dolorous pair to another pair on the
grass of the slope not far off in front of me.
Hard by the scene of this pathetic passage a pair of quite well-dressed
young people had thrown themselves, side by side, on the September grass
as if it had been the sand at any American seashore, or the embrowned
herbage of Hyde Park in July. Perhaps the shelving ground was dryer than
the moist levels where the professional unemployed lay in scores; but I
do not think it would have mattered to that tender pair if it had been
very damp; so warmly were they lapped in love's dream, they could
not have taken cold. The exile could only note the likeness of their
open-air love-making to that in public places at home, and contrast it
with the decorum of Latin countries where nothing of the kind is known.
If anything, English lovers of this type are franker than with us,
doubtless because of the greater simplicity of the English nature; and
they seem to be of a better class. One day when I was sitting in a penny
chair in Green Park, the agent of the company came and collected the
rent of me. I thought it a hardship, for I had purposely chosen an
inconspicuous situation where I should not be found, and it was long
past the end of the season, when no company should have had the heart to
collect rent for its chairs. But I met my fate without murmuring, and
as the young man who sold me a ticket good for the whole day at a penny,
was obviously not pressed with business, I tried to recoup myself by a
little conversation.
“I suppose your job is pretty well over now? I don't see many of your
chairs occupied.”
“Well, no sir, not by day, sir. But there's quite a few taken at night,
sir--over there in the hollow.” I looked a leading question, and he went
on: “Young people come to sit there in the evening, sir. It's a quiet
place and out of the way.”
“Oh, yes. Where they're not molested by the unemployed?” I cast a
generalizing glance over the dead and wounded of the battle of life
strewn about the grass of an adjacent space.
“Well, that's just where it is, sir. Those fellows do nothing but sleep
all day, and then after dark they get up and begin to prowl. They spy,
some of 'em, on the young people courting, and follow 'em 'ome and
blackmail 'em. They're a bad lot, sir. They wouldn't work if they could
get it.”