multitude. The boats thickened upon the water as if they had risen
softly from the bottom to which any panic might have sent them; but the
people in them took every chance with the amiability which seems to be
finally the thing that holds England together. The English have got a
bad name abroad which certainly they do not deserve at home; but perhaps
they do not think foreigners worthy the consideration they show one
another on any occasion that masses them. One lady, from her vantage
in the stern of her boat, was seen to hit the gentleman in the bow a
tremendous whack with her paddle; but he merely looked round and smiled,
as if it had been a caress, which it probably was, in disguise. But they
were all kind and patient with one another whether in the same boat
or not. Some had clearly not the faintest notion how a boat should be
managed; they bumped and punched one another wildly; but the occupants
of the boat assailed simply pushed off the attacking party with a
smiling acceptance of its apology, and passed on the incident to another
boat before or beside them. From the whole multitude there came not one
loud or angry note, and, for any appearance of authority on the scene
it was altogether unpoliced, and kept safe solely by the universal
good-humor. The women were there to show themselves in and at their
prettiest, and to see one another as they lounged on the cushions or
lay in the bottoms of the boats, or sat up and displayed their hats and
parasols; the men were there to make the women have a good time. Neither
the one nor the other seemed in the least concerned in the races,
which duly followed one another with the ringing of bells and firing of
pistols, unheeded. By the time the signal came to clear the course for
the crews, the pleasure-craft pushed within the barriers formed a vast,
softly undulating raft covering the whole surface of the water, so that
you could have walked from the barrier to the shore without dipping foot
in the flood. I have suggested that the situation might have had
its perils. Any panic must have caused a commotion that would have
overturned hundreds of the crazy craft, and plunged their freight to
helpless death. But the spectacle smiled securely to the sun, which
smiled back upon it from a cloud-islanded blue with a rather more than
English ardor; and we left it without anxiety, to take our luncheon in
the pavilion pitched beside our barge on the grassy shore.
To this honest meal we sat comfortably down at long tables, and served
one another from the dishes put before us. There was not the ambitious
variety of salads and sweets and fruits and ices, which I have seen at
Harvard Class-Day spreads, but there were the things that stay one more
wholesomely and substantially, and one was not obliged to eat standing
and hold one's plate. Everything in England that can be is adjusted to
the private and personal scale; everything with us is generalized and
fitted to the convenience of the greatest number. Later, we all sat
down together at afternoon tea, a rite of as inviolable observance as
breakfast itself in that island of fixed habits.
I believe some races were rowed while we were eating and drinking, but
we did not mind. We were not there for the races, but for the people who
were there for the races; or who were apparently so. In the mean time,
the multitude of them seemed to have increased, and where I had fancied
that not one boat more could have been pressed in, half a dozen had
found room. The feat must have been accomplished by main strength and
awkwardness, as the old phrase is. It was no place indeed for skill to
evince itself; but people pushed about in the most incredible way when
they tried to move, though mostly they did not try; they let their boats
lie still, and sway with the common movement when the water rose and
sank, or fluctuated unseen beneath them. There were more and more people
of the sort that there can never be enough of, such as young girls
beautifully dressed in airy muslins and light silks, sheltered but not
hidden by gay parasols floating above their summer hats. It was the
fairy multitude of Harvard Class-Day in English terms, and though Henley
never came at any moment to that prodigiously picturesque expression
which Class-Day used to reach when all its youthful loveliness banked
itself on the pine-plank gradines enclosing the Class-Day elm, and
waited the struggle for its garlands, yet you felt at Henley somehow in
the presence of inexhaustible numbers, drawing themselves from a society
ultimately, if not immediately, vaster. It was rather dreadful perhaps
to reflect that if all that brilliant expanse of fashion and beauty had
been engulfed in the hidden Thames it could have been instantly replaced
by as much more, not once but a score of times.
[Illustration: THE CROWD OF SIGHT-SEERS AT HENLEY]
I will not pretend that this thought finally drove me from the scene,
for I am of a very hardy make when it comes to the most frightful sort
of suppositions. But the afternoon was wearing away, and we must go
sometime. It seemed better also to leave the gayety at its height: the
river covered with soft colors, and the barges and house-boats by the
brink, with their companies responsive in harmonies of muslin and gauze
and lace to those afloat; the crowds on the opposite shore in constant
movement, and in vivid agitation when the bell and the pistol announced
a racing event. We parted with our friends on the barge, and found our
way through the gypsy crones squatted on the grass, weaving the web of
fate and selling brooms and brushes in the intervals of their mystical
employ, or cosily gossiping together; and then we took for the station
the harmless fly which we had forever renounced as predatory in the
morning.
It was not yet the rush-hour for the run back to London, and we easily
got an empty compartment, in which we were presently joined by a group
of extremely handsome people, all of a southern type, but differing in
age and sex. There were a mother and a daughter, and a father evidently
soon to become a father-in-law, and the young man who was to make him
so. The women were alike in their white gowns, and alike in their dark
beauty, but the charms of the mother had expanded in a bulk incredible
of the slender daughter. She and her father were rather silent, and
the talk was mainly between the mother and the future of the girl. They
first counted up the day's expenses, and the cost of each dish they had
had at luncheon. “Then there was the champagne,” the lady insisted. “It
isn't so much when you count that out; and you know we chose to have
it.” They all discussed the sum, and agreed that if they had not wanted
the champagne their holiday would not have cost inordinately. “And now,”
the mother continued to the young man, “you must order that box for the
opera as soon as ever you reach the hotel. Order it by telephone. Give
the girl your boutonnière; that will jolly her. Get a four-guinea box
opposite the royal box.”
As she sat deeply sunk in the luxurious first-class seat, her little
feet could not reach the floor, and the effort with which she bent
forward was heroic. The very pretty girl in the corner at her elbow was
almost eclipsed by her breadth and thickness; and the old gentleman in
the opposite corner spoke a word now and then, but for the most part
silently smelled of tobacco. The talk which the mother and future
son-in-law had to themselves, though it was so intimately of their own
affairs, we fancied more or less carried on at us. I do not know why
they should have wished to crush us with their opulence since they would
not have chosen to enrich us; but I have never had so great a sense of
opulence. They were all, as I said, singularly handsome people, in the
dark, liquid, lustrous fashion which I am afraid our own race can
never achieve. Yet with all this evident opulence, with their resolute
spirits, with their satisfaction in having spent so much on a luncheon
which they could have made less expensive if they had not chosen to
gratify themselves in it, with their prospect of a four-guinea box,
opposite the box of royalty, at the opera, it seemed to me they were
rather pathetic than otherwise. But I am sure they would have never
imagined themselves so, and that in their own eyes they were a radiantly
enviable party returning from a brilliant day at Henley.
XVII
AMERICAN ORIGINS--MOSTLY NORTHERN
The return in mid-September to the London which we left at the end of
July, implicates a dramatic effect more striking than any possible in
the mere tourist's experience. In the difference between this London and
that you fully realize the moral and physical magnitude of the season.
The earlier London throbbed to bursting with the tide of manifold life,
the later London lies gaunt, hollow, flaccid, and as if spent by the
mere sense of what it has been through. The change is almost incredible,
and the like of it is nowhere to be witnessed with us. It seems a sort
of bluff to say that a city which still holds all its six millions
except a few hundred thousands, is empty, but that is the look a
certain part of London has in September, for the brilliant and perpetual
movement of those hundred thousands was what gave it repletion.
The fashion that fluttered and glittered along Piccadilly and the
streets of shops is all away at country-houses or at the sea-side or in
the mountains of the island or the continent. The comely young giants
who stalked along the pavement of Pall Mall or in the paths of the
Park are off killing grouse; scarcely a livery shows itself; even the
omnibus-tops are depopulated; long rows of idle cabs are on the ranks;
the stately procession of diners-out flashing their white shirt-fronts
at nightfall in interminable hansoms has vanished; the tormented
regiments of soldiers are at peace in their barracks; a strange quiet
has fallen on that better quarter of the town which is really, or
unreally, the town. With this there is an increase of the homelike
feeling which is always present, with at least the happy alien, in
London; and what gayety is left is cumulative at night and centralized
in the electric-blazing neighborhoods of the theatres. There, indeed,
the season seems to have returned, and in the boxes of the playhouses
and the stalls fashion phantasmally revisits one of the scenes of its
summer joy.
One day in Piccadilly, in a pause of the thin rain, I met a solitary
apparition in the diaphanous silks and the snowy plumes of hat and boa
which the sylphs of the church parade wore in life through those halcyon
days when the tide of fashion was highest. The apparition put on a bold
front of not being strange and sad, but upon the whole it failed. It
may have been an impulse from this vision that carried me as far as Hyde
Park, where I saw not a soul, either of the quick or the dead, in the
chilly drizzle, save a keeper cleaning up the edges of the road. In the
consecrated closes, where the vanished children of smartness used to
stand or sit, to go and come like bright birds, or flowers walking, the
inverted chairs lay massed together or scattered, with their legs in
the air, on the wet grass, and the dripping leaves smote damply together
overhead. Another close, in Green Park the afternoon before, however, I
saw devoted to frequenters of another sort. It had showered over-night,
and the ground must still have been wet where a score of the bodies of
the unemployed, or at least the unoccupied, lay as if dead in the sun.
They were having their holiday, but they did not make me feel as if
I were still enjoying my outing so much as some other things: for
instance, the colored minstrelsy, which I had heard so often at the
sea-side in August, and which reported itself one night in the Mayfair
street which we seemed to have wholly to ourselves, and touched our
hearts with the concord of our native airs and banjos. We were sure they
were American darkies, from their voices and accents, but perhaps they
were not as certainly so as the poor little mother was English who came
down the place at high noon with her large baby in her arms, swaying
it from side to side as she sang a plaintive ballad to the skies, and
scanned the windows for some relenting to her want.
The clubs and the great houses of Mayfair, which the season had used so
hard, were many of them putting themselves in repair against the next
time of festivity, and testifying to the absence of their world. One
day I found the solitude rather more than I could bear without appeal to
that vastly more multitudinous world of the six millions who never leave
London except on business. I said in my heart that this was the hour to
go and look up that emotion which I had suspected of lying in wait for
me in St. Paul's, and I had no sooner mounted an omnibus-top for the
journey through Piccadilly, the Strand, and Fleet Street, than I found
the other omnibus-tops by no means so depopulated as I had fancied. To
be sure, the straw hats which six weeks before had formed the almost
universal head-covering of the 'bus-top throngs were now in a melancholy
minority, but they had not so wholly vanished as they vanish with us
when September begins. They had never so much reason to be here as with
us, and they might have had almost as much reason for lingering as they
had for coming. I still saw some of them among the pedestrians as well
as among the omnibus-toppers, and the pedestrians abashed me by their
undiminished myriads. As they streamed along the sidewalks, in a torrent
of eager life, and crossed and recrossed among the hoofs and wheels
as thickly as in mid-July, they put me to shame for my theory of
a decimated London. It was not the tenth man who was gone, nor the
hundredth, if even it was the thousandth. The tremendous metropolis
mocked with its millions the notion of nobody left in town because a few
pleasurers had gone to the moors or the mountains or the shores.
Yet the season being so dead as it was in the middle of September, the
trivial kodak could not bear to dwell on the mortuary aspects which the
fashionable quarters of London presented. It turned itself in pursuance
of a plan much cherished and often renounced, to seek those springs or
sources of the American nation which may be traced all over England,
and which rather abound in London, trusting chances for the involuntary
glimpses which are so much better than any others, when you can get
them. In different terms, and leaving apart the strained figure which I
cannot ask the reader to help me carry farther, I went one breezy, cool,
sunny, and rainy morning to meet the friend who was to guide my steps,
and philosophize my reflections in the researches before us. Our
rendezvous was at the church of All Hallows Barking, conveniently
founded just opposite the Mark Lane District Railway Station, some
seven or eight hundred years before I arrived there, and successively
destroyed and rebuilt, but left finally in such good repair that I could
safely lean against it while waiting for my friend, and taking note of
its very sordid neighborhood. The street before it might have been a
second-rate New York, or, preferably, Boston, business street, except
for a peculiarly London commonness in the smutted yellow brick and harsh
red brick shops and public-houses. There was a continual coming and
going of trucks, wagons, and cabs, and a periodical appearing of
hurried passengers from the depths of the station, all heedless, if not
unconscious, of the Tower of London close at hand, whose dead were so
often brought from the scaffold to be buried in that church.
Our own mission was to revere its interior because William Penn was
baptized in it, but when we had got inside we found it so full of
scaffolding and the litter of masonry, and the cool fresh smell of
mortar from the restorations going on that we had no room for the
emotions we had come prepared with. With the compassion of a kindly man
in a plasterer's spattered suit of white, we did what we could, but it
was very little. I at least was not yet armed with the facts that, among
others, the headless form of Archbishop Laud had been carried from the
block on Tower Hill and laid in All Hallows; and if I had known it,
I must have felt that though Laud could be related to our beginnings
through his persecution of the Puritans, whom he harried into exile, his
interment in All Hallows was only of remote American interest. Besides,
we had set out with the intention of keeping to the origins of colonies
which had not been so much studied as those of New England, and we had
first chosen Penn as sufficiently removed from the forbidden ground. But
we had no sooner left the church where he was baptized, to follow him in
the much later interest of his imprisonment in the Tower, than we found
ourselves in New England territory again. For there, round the first
corner, under the foliage of the trees and shrubs that I had been
ignorantly watching from the church, as they stiffly stirred in the
September wind, was that Calvary of so many martyr-souls, Tower Hill.
It is no longer, if it ever was, a hill, or even a perceptible rise of
ground, but a pleasant gardened and planted space, not distinguishable
from a hundred others in London, with public offices related to the
navy closing it mostly in, but not without unofficial public and private
houses on some sides. It was perhaps because of its convenience for
his professional affairs that Admiral Penn had fixed such land-going
residence as an admiral may have, in All Hallows Barking parish, where
his great son was born. “Your late honored father,” his friend Gibson
wrote the founder of Pennsylvania, “dwelt upon Great Tower Hill, on the
east side, within a court adjoining to London Wall.” But the memories
of honored father and more honored son must yield in that air to such
tragic fames as those of Sir Thomas More, of Strafford, and above these
and the many others in immediate interest for us, of Sir Harry Vane,
once governor of Massachusetts, who died here among those whom the
perjured second Charles played false when he came back to the throne of
the perjured first Charles. In fact you can get away from New England
no more in London than in America; and if in the Tower itself the long
captivity of Sir Walter Raleigh somewhat dressed the balance, we were
close upon other associations which outweighed the discovery of the
middle south and of tobacco, a thousandfold.
Perhaps Tower Hill has been cut down nearer the common level than it
once was, as often happens with rises of ground in cities, or perhaps it
owed its distinction of being called a hill to a slight elevation from
the general London flatness. Standing upon it you do not now seem lifted
from that grade, but if you come away, Tower Hill looms lofty and large,
as before you approached, with its head hid in the cloud of sombre
memories which always hangs upon it. The look of the Tower towards it is
much more dignified than the theatrical river-front, but worse than this
even is the histrionic modern bridge which spans the Thames there as at
the bottom of a stage. We took an omnibus to cross it, and yet before we
were half-way over the bridge, we had reason to forget the turrets and
arches which look as if designed and built of pasteboard. There, in
the stretch of the good, dirty, humble Thames, between Tower Bridge and
London Bridge, was the scene of the fatally mistaken arrest of Cromwell,
Hampden, and their friends, by Charles I., when they were embarking
for New England, if indeed the thing really happened. Everybody used to
think so, and the historians even said so, but now they begin to doubt:
it is an age of doubt. This questionably memorable expanse of muddy
water was crowded, the morning I saw it, with barges resting in the
iridescent slime of the Southwark shoals, and with various craft of
steam and sail in the tide which danced in the sun and wind along the
shore we were leaving. It is tradition, if not history, that just in
front of the present custom-house those mighty heirs of destiny were
forced to leave their ship and abide in the land they were to ennoble
with the first great republican experiment of our race, after the
commonwealth failed to perpetuate itself in England, perhaps, because
of a want of imagination in both people and protector, who could not
conceive of a state without an hereditary ruler. The son of Cromwell
must follow his father, till another son of another father came back to
urge his prior claim to a primacy that no one has ever a right to except
the direct and still renewed choice of the citizens. It is all very
droll at this distance of time and place; but we ourselves who grew up
where there had never been kings to craze the popular fancy, could not
conceive of a state without one for yet a hundred years and more, and
even then some of us thought of having one. The lesson which the English
Commonwealth now had set itself, though lost upon England, was at
last read in its full meaning elsewhere, and the greatest of American
beginnings was made when Cromwell was forced ashore from his ship in
front of the Custom-house, if he was. There is a very personable edifice
now on the site of whatever building then stood there, and it marks the
spot with sufficiently classical grace, whether you look down at it from
the Tower Bridge, as I did, first, or up at it from London Bridge, as I
did, last.
[Illustration: THE TOWER OF LONDON.]
We were crossing into Southwark at the end of Tower Bridge that we might
walk through Tooley Street, once a hot-bed of sedition and dissent,
which many of its inhabitants made too hot to hold them, and so fled
away to cool themselves in different parts of the American wilderness.
It was much later that the place became famous for the declaration of
the three tailors of Tooley Street who began, or were fabled to have
begun, a public appeal with the words: “We, the people of England,” and
perhaps the actuality of Tooley Street is more suggestive of them than
of those who went into exile for their religious and political faith. In
the former time the region was, no doubt, picturesque and poetic, like
all of that old London which is so nearly gone, but now it is almost
the most prosaic and commonplace thoroughfare of the newer London. It
is wholly mean as to the ordinary structures which line its course, and
which are mainly the dwellings of the simple sort of plebeian folks who
have always dwelt in Tooley Street, and who so largely form the ancestry
of the American people. No grace of antiquity remains to it, but there
is the beauty of that good-will to men which I should be glad to think
characteristic of our nation in one of the Peabody tenements that the
large-hearted American bequeathed to the city of his adoption for better
homes than the London poor could otherwise have known.