perceived that this vividly modern possessor of the most perfect Tudor
house existing was, with the intense actuality of his interests and
ambitions, as English as the most feudal presence in the kingdom. When
we came out of the house and walked towards the group we had left under
a spreading oak (or it might have been an elm; the two are much of the
same habit in England) on the long, wide lawn, one might have fancied
one's self in any most picturesque period of the past, if it had not
been for the informality of the men's dress. Women are always of the
past in the beauty of their attire, and those whom the low sun, striking
across the velvet of the grass, now lighted up in their pretty gowns of
our day, could easily have stepped out of an old picture, or continued
in it as they sat in their wicker chairs around the afternoon tea-table.
XV
FISHING FOR WHITEBAIT
An incident of the great midsummer heat, was an excursion down the
Thames which took us far from the society atmosphere so relaxing to the
moral fibre of the mere witness of the London season. The change was not
to the cooler air which had been imagined, but it immersed us for the
space of the boat's voyage to and from Greenwich among those social
inferiors who are probably the moral betters of their superiors, but
whose company does not always seem the spiritual baptism it doubtless
is. Our fellow-passengers were distinctly of the classes which are lower
as well as middle, and the sole worldly advantage they had of us was
that they were going where they wished, and we were going where we
must. We had started for Richmond, but as there proved to be no boat
for Richmond, we decided to take the boat which was for Greenwich, and
consoled ourselves with visions of whitebait, in memory and honor of
many parliamentary and literary feasts which that fish has furnished. A
whitebait dinner, what would not one suffer of human contiguity for it,
even though it could be only a whitebait lunch, owing to the early hour?
It was the flaming heart of the forenoon when the Greenwich boat puffed
up to her landing at Westminster Bridge, and the lower middle classes
streamed aboard.
She looked very lower middle class herself, poor boat, and she was of
a failing line which the London County Council is about to replace by
a line of municipal boats, without apparently alarming, in the English,
the sensibilities so apprehensive of anarchy with us when there is any
talk of government transportation. The official who sold me tickets
might have been training himself for a position on the municipal line,
he was so civilly explanatory as to my voyage; so far from treating
my inquiries with the sardonic irony which meets question in American
ticket-offices, he all but caressed me aboard. He had scarcely ceased
reassuring me when the boat struck out on the thin solution of dark mud
which passes for water in the Thames, and scuttled down the tide towards
Greenwich.
Her course lay between the shabbiness of Southwark and the grandeur of
the Westminster shore, which is probably the noblest water-front in the
world. Near and far the great imperial and municipal and palatial masses
of architecture lifted themselves, and, as we passed, varied their
grouping with one another, and with the leafy domes and spires which
everywhere enrich and soften the London outlook. Their great succession
ought to culminate in the Tower, and so it does to the mind's eye, but
to the body's eye, the Tower is rather histrionic than historic. It is
like a scenic reproduction of itself, like a London Tower on the stage;
and if ever, in a moment of Anglo-Saxon expansion, the County Council
should think of selling it to Chicago, to be set up somewhere between
the Illinois Central and the Lake, New York need not hopelessly envy her
the purchase: New York could easily build a London Tower that would look
worthier of its memories than the real one, without even making it a
sky-scraper.
[Illustration: WESTMINSTER BRIDGE AND CLOCK TOWER.]
So it seems at the moment, but I am not sure that it is so true as it is
that after passing the Tower the one shore of the Thames begins to lose
its dignity and beauty, and to be of like effect with the other, which
is the Southwark side, and like all the American river-sides that I
remember. Grimy business piles, sagging sheds, and frowsy wharves and
docks grieve the eye, which the shipping in the stream does little
to console. That is mostly of dingy tramp-steamers, or inferior Dutch
liners, clumsy barges, and here and there a stately brig or shapely
schooner; but it gathers nowhere into the forest of masts and chimneys
that fringe the North River and East River. The foul tide rises and
falls between low shores where, when it ebbs, are seen oozy shoals of
slime, and every keel or paddle that stirs the surface of the river
brings up the loathsomeness of the bottom.
Coming back we saw a gang of half-grown boys bathing from the slimy
shoals, running down to the water on planks laid over them, and
splashing joyously into the filthy solution with the inextinguishable
gladness of their years. They looked like boys out of the purlieus of
Dickens's poverty-world, and all London waterside apparitions are more
or less from his pages. The elderly waiter of the forlorn out-dated
hotel to which we went for our whitebait lunch at Greenwich was as much
of his invention as if he had created him from the dust of the
place, and breathed his elderly-waiter-soul into him. He had a queer
pseudo-respectful shuffle and a sidelong approach, with a dawning
baldness at the back of his head, which seemed of one quality with these
characteristics: his dress-coat was lustrous with the greasiness of long
serving. Asked for whitebait, he destroyed the illusion in which we had
come at a blow. He said he could send out and get us some whitebait if
we could wait twenty minutes, but they never had any call for it
now, and they did not keep it. Then he smiled down upon us out of an
apparently humorous face in which there was no real fun, and added that
we could have salmon mayonnaise at once. Salmon mayonnaise was therefore
what we had, and except that it was not whitebait, it was not very
disappointing; we had not expected much of it. After we had eaten it, we
were put in relations with the landlord, regarding a fly which we wished
to take for a drive, in the absence of whitebait. But a fly required, in
Greenwich, an interview with a stableman and a negotiation which, though
we were assured it would be fairly conducted, we decided to forego, and
contented ourselves with exploring the old hostelry, close and faint of
atmosphere and of a smell at once mouldy and dusty. The room that was
called Nelson's, for no very definite reason, and the room in which the
ministry used to have their whitebait dinners in the halcyon days before
whitebait was extinct in Greenwich, pretended to some state but no
beauty, and some smaller dining-rooms that overhung the river had
the merit of commanding a full view of the Isle of Dogs, and in the
immediate foreground--it was as much earth as water that lapped the
shore--a small boy wading out to a small boat and providing himself a
sorrowful evening at home with his mother, by soaking his ragged sleeves
and trousers in the solution. Some young men in rowing costume were
vigorously pulling in a heavy row-boat by way of filling in their
outing; a Dutch steamer, whose acquaintance we had made in coming, was
hurrying to get out of the river into the freshness of the sea, and this
was all of Greenwich as a watering-place which we cared to see.
But that was a pleasant landlord, and he told us of balls and parties,
which, though not imaginably of the first social quality, must have
given his middle-aging hostelry a gayety in winter that it lacked in
summer. He applauded our resolution to see the pictures in the gallery
of the old naval college on the way back to our boat, and saw us to the
door, and fairly out into the blazing sun. It was truly a grilling heat,
and we utilized every scrap of shade as one does in Italy, running from
tree to tree and wall to wall, and escaping into every available portico
and colonnade. But once inside the great hall where England honors her
naval heroes and their battles, it was deliriously cool. It could not
have been that so many marine pieces tempered the torrid air, for they
all represented the heat of battle, with fire and smoke, and the work of
coming to close quarters, with
“hot gun-lip kissing gun.”
The gallery was altogether better in the old admirals and other sea-dogs
of England whose portraits relieved the intolerable spread of the battle
scenes; and it was best of all in the many pictures and effigies and
relics of Nelson, who, next to Napoleon, was the wonder of his great
time. He looked the hero as little as Napoleon; everywhere his face
showed the impassioned dreamer, the poet; and once more gave the lie to
the silly notion that there is a type of this or that kind of great men.
When we had fairly settled the fact to our minds, we perceived that the
whole place we were in was a temple to Nelson, and that whatever minor
marine deities had their shrines there, it was in strict subordination
to him. England had done what she could for them, who had done so much
for her; but they seem consecrated in rather an out-of-the-way place,
now that there is no longer whitebait to allure the traveller to their
worship; and, upon the whole, one might well think twice before choosing
just their apotheosis.
By the time I reached this conclusion, or inconclusion, it was time to
grill forth to our boat, and we escaped from shade to shade, as before,
until we reached the first-class shelter of the awning at her stern.
Even there it was crowded in agonizing disproportion to the small breeze
that was crisping the surface of the solution; and fifteen or twenty
babies developed themselves to testify of the English abhorrence of
race-suicide among the lower middle classes. They were mostly good, poor
things, and evoked no sentiment harsher than pity even when they were
not good. Still it was not just the sort of day when one could have
wished them given the pleasure of an outing to Greenwich. Perhaps they
were only incidentally given it, but it must have been from a specific
generosity that several children in arms were fed by their indulgent
mothers with large slices of sausage. To be sure they had probably had
no whitebait.
XVI
HENLEY DAY
Our invitation to the regatta at Henley, included luncheon in the tent
of an Oxford college, and a view of the races from the college barge,
which, with the barges of other Oxford colleges, had been towed down the
Thames to the scene of the annual rivalry between the crews of the two
great English universities. There may also have been Cambridge barges,
spirited through the air in default of water for towing them to Henley,
but I make sure only of a gay variety of houseboats stretching up and
down the grassy margin of the stream, along the course the rowers were
to take. As their contest was the least important fact of the occasion
for me, and as I had not then, and have not now, a clear notion which
came off winner in any of the events, I will try not to trouble the
reader with my impressions of them, except as they lent a vivid action
and formed a dramatic motive for one of the loveliest spectacles under
the sun. I have hitherto contended that class-day at Harvard was the
fairest flower of civilization, but, having seen the regatta at Henley,
I am no longer so sure of it.
Henley is no great way from London, and the quick pulse of its
excitement could be sensibly felt at the station, where we took
train for it. Our train was one of many special trains leaving at
quarter-hourly intervals, and there was already an anxious crowd
hurrying to it, with tickets entitling them to go by that train and no
other. It was by no means the youthful crowd it would have been at home,
and not even the overwhelmingly feminine crowd. The chaperon, who now
politely prevails with us in almost her European numbers, was here in
no greater evident force; but gray-haired fathers and uncles and
elderly friends much more abounded; and they looked as if they were not
altogether bent upon a vicarious day's pleasure. The male of the English
race is of much more striking presence than the American; he keeps more
of the native priority of his sex in his costume, so that in this crowd,
I should say, the outward shows were rather on his part than that of his
demurely cloaked females, though the hats into which these flowered
at top gave some hint of the summer loveliness of dress to be later
revealed. They were, much more largely than most railway-station crowds,
of the rank which goes first class, and in these special Henley trains
it was well to have booked so, if one wished to go in comfort, or arrive
uncrumpled, for the second-class and third-class carriages were packed
with people.
There seemed so many of our fellow-passengers, that reaching Henley
in the condition of greed and grudge of all travellers on errands of
pleasure, we made haste to anticipate any rush for the carriages outside
the station which were to take us to the scene of the races. Oddly
enough there was no great pressure for these vehicles, or for the
more public brakes and char-à-bancs and omnibuses plying to the same
destination; and so far from falling victims to covert extortion in the
matter of fares, we found the flys conscientiously placarded with the
price of the drive. This was about double the ordinary price, and so
soon does human nature adjust itself to conditions that I promptly
complained to an English friend for having had to pay four shillings
for a drive I should have had to pay four dollars for at home. In my
resentment I tried to part foes with my driver, who mildly urged that he
had but a few days in the year for doubling his fares, but I succeeded
so ill that when I found him waiting for me at the end of the day, I
amicably took him again for the return to the station.
Of the coming and going through the town of Henley I keep the sort of
impression which small English towns give the passing stranger, of a
sufficiently busy commercial life, doing business in excellent shops
of the modern pattern, but often housed in dwellings of such a
familiar picturesqueness that you wonder what old-fashioned annual or
stage-setting or illustrated Christmas-story they are out of. I never
could pass through such a town without longing to stop in it and know
all about it; and I wish I could believe that Henley reciprocated my
longing, on its bright holiday morning, that we could have had each
other to ourselves in the interest of an intimate acquaintance. It
looked most worthy to be known, and I have no doubt that it is full of
history and tradition of the sort which small towns have been growing
for centuries throughout England.
But we had only that one day there, and in our haste to give it to
the regatta we could only make sure of driving over a beautiful
picture-postal bridge on our way to the meadows by whose brink our
college barge was moored, and making believe to tug at its chain. It was
really doing nothing of the kind, for it was familiar with boat-racing
in the Thames where the Thames is still the Isis at Oxford, and was as
wholly without the motive as without the fact of impatience. Like many
other barges and house-boats set broadside to the shore for a mile up
and down as closely as they could be lined, it was of a comfortable
cabin below and of a pleasant gallery above, with an awning to keep off
the sun or rain, whichever it might be the whim of the weather to send.
But that day the weather had no whims; it was its pleasure to be neither
wet nor hot, but of a delicious average warmth, informed with a cool
freshness which had the days of the years of youth in it. In fact, youth
came back in all the holiday sights and scents to the elderly witness
who ought to have known better than to be glad of such things as the
white tents in the green meadows, the gypsy fires burning pale in the
sunlight by the gypsy camps, the traps and carriages thronging up and
down the road, or standing detached from the horses in the wayside
shadow, where the trodden grass, not less nor more than the wandering
cigar-whiff, exhaled the memories of far-off circus-days and Fourths
of July. But such things lift the heart in spite of philosophy and
experience, and bid it rejoice in the relish of novelty which a scene
everywhere elementally the same offers in slight idiosyncrasies of time
and place. Certain of these might well touch the American half-brother
with a sense of difference, but there was none that perhaps more
suggested it than the frank English proclamation by sign-board that
these or those grounds in the meadows were this or that lady's, who
might be supposed waiting in proprietory state for her guests within
the pavilion of her roped-off enclosure. Together with this assertion
of private right, and the warning it implied, was the expression of
yet elder privilege in the presence of the immemorial wanderers who had
their shabby camps by the open wayside and offered the passer fortune at
so low a rate that the poorest pleasurer could afford to buy a prophecy
of prosperity from them; I do not know why they proposed to sell with
these favorable destinies small brushes and brooms of their own make.
[Illustration: A HOUSE-BOAT OX THE THAMES AT HENLEY.]
These swarthy aliens, whom no conditions can naturalize, are a fact of
every English holiday without which it would not be so native, as the
English themselves may hereafter be the more peculiarly and intensely
insular through the prevalence of more and more Americans among
them. Most of our fellow-guests on that Oxford barge were our
fellow-countrymen, and I think now that without their difference there
would have been wanting an ultimately penetrating sense of the entirely
English keeping of the affair. The ardor of our fresh interest lent, I
hope, a novel zest to our English hosts for the spectacle which began to
offer itself so gradually to our delight, and which seemed to grow and
open flower-like from the water, until it was a blossom which covered
the surface with its petals.
The course for the races was marked off midway from either shore by
long timbers fastened end to end and forming a complete barrier to the
intrusion of any of the mere pleasure-craft. Our own shore was sacred to
barges and house-boats; the thither margin, if I remember rightly, was
devoted to the noisy and muscular expansion of undergraduate emotion,
but, it seems to me, that farther up on the grounds which rose from it
were some such tents and pavilions as whitened our own side. Still the
impression of something rather more official in the arrangements of that
shore persists with me.
There was a long waiting, of course, before the rowing began, but as
this throughout was the least interest of the affair for any one but the
undergraduates, and the nearest or fairest friends of the crews, I
will keep my promise not to dwell on it. Each event was announced some
minutes beforehand by the ringing of a rather unimpressive hand-bell.
Then a pistol-shot was fired; and then, after the start far up the
course, the shells came sweeping swiftly down towards us. I noticed that
the men rowed in their undershirts, and not naked from their waists up
as our university crews do, or used to do, and I missed the Greek joy I
have experienced at New London, when the fine Yale and Harvard fellows
slipped their tunics over their heads, and sat sculpturesque in their
bronze nudity, motionlessly waiting for the signal to come to eager
life. I think that American moment was more thrilling than any given
moment at Henley; and though there is more comfort in a college barge,
and more gentle seclusion for the favored spectator, I am not going
to own that it equals as a view-point the observation-train, with
its successive banks of shouting and glowing girls, all a flutter of
handkerchiefs and parasols, which used to keep abreast of the racing
crews beside the stately course of the Connecticut Thames. Otherwise I
think it best to withhold comparisons, lest the impartial judge should
decide in favor of Henley.
There was already a multitude of small boats within the barriers keeping
the race-course open, and now and then one of these crossed from shore
to shore. They were of all types: skiffs and wherries and canoes and
snub-nosed punts, with a great number of short, sharply rounded craft,
new to my American observance, and called cockles, very precisely
adapted to contain one girl, who had to sit with her eyes firmly fixed
on the young man with the oars, lest a glance to this side or that
should oversee the ticklishly balanced shell. She might assist her eyes
in trimming the boat with a red or yellow parasol, or a large fan, but
it appeared that her gown, a long flow as she reclined on the low seat,
must be of one white or pale lavender or cowslip or soft pink, lest any
turmoil of colors in it should be too much for the balance she sought to
keep. The like precaution seemed to have been taken in the other boats,
so that while all the more delicate hues of the rainbow were afloat on
the stream, there was nothing of the kaleidoscope's vulgar variety
in the respective costumes. As the numbers of the boats momentarily
increased, it was more and more as if the church-parade of Hyde Park had
taken water, and though in such a scene as that which spread its soft
allure before us, it was not quite imaginable that all the loveliness
one saw was of the quality of that in the consecrated paddocks near
Stanhope Gate, neither was it imaginable that much of the beauty was not
as well-born as it was well-dressed. Those house-boats up and down the
shore must mainly have been peopled by persons of worldly worth, and
of those who had come from the four quarters to Henley for the day,
not every one could have been an actress with her friends, though each
contributed to the effect of a spectacle not yet approached in any
pantomime. There was a good deal of friendly visiting back and forth
among the house-boat people; and I was told that it was even more than
correct for a young man to ask a house-boat girl to go out with him in
one of the small boats on the water, but how much this contributed to
keep the scene elect I do not know.
If one looked steadily at the pretty sight, it lost reality as things do
when too closely scrutinized, and became a visionary confluence of lines
and colors, a soft stir of bloom like a flowery expanse moved by the
air. This ecstatic effect was not exclusive of facts which kept one's
feet well on the earth, or on the roof of one's college barge. Out of
that “giddy pleasure of the eyes” business lifted a practical front from
time to time, and extended a kind of butterfly net at the end of a pole
so long that it would reach anywhere, and collected pennies for the
people in boats who had been singing or playing banjos or guitars or
even upright pianos. For, it must be explained, there were many in that
aquatic crowd who were there to be heard as well as seen, and this gave
the affair its pathos. Not that negro minstrelsy as the English have
interpreted the sole American contribution to histrionic art, is in
itself pathetic, except as it is so lamentably far from the original;
but that any obvious labor which adds to our gayety is sorrowful; and
there were many different artists there who were working hard. Sometimes
it was the man who sang and the woman who played; but it was always
the woman who took up the collection: she seemed to have the greater
enterprise and perseverance. Of course in the case of the blackened
minstrels, some man appealed to the love of humor rather than the love
of beauty for the bounty of the spectators. In the case of an old-time
plantation darkey who sang the familiar melodies with the slurring
vowels and wandering aspirates of East London, and then lifted a face
one-half blackened, the appeal to the love of humor was more effective
than the other could have been. A company of young men in masks with a
piano in their boat, which one played while another led the singing
in an amazing falsetto, were peculiarly successful in collecting their
reward, and were all the more amusingly eager because they were, as our
English friends believed, undergraduates on a lark.