of not calling aright, but which I will call _sentiments_ for want of
some better word. One of them was the feel of the night-air, especially
late in the season, when there was a waste and weariness in it as if
the vast human endeavor for pleasure and success had exhaled its
despair upon it. Whatever there was of disappointment in one's past,
of apprehension in one's future, came to the surface of the spirit, and
asserted its unity with the collective melancholy. It was not exactly a
_Weltschmerz_; that is as out-dated as the romantic movement; but it was
a sort of scientific relinquishment, which was by no means scornful of
others, or too appreciative of one's own unrecognized worth. Through
the senses it related itself to the noises of the quiescing city, to the
smell of its tormented dust, to the whiff of a casual cigar, or the odor
of the herbage and foliage in the park or square that one was passing,
one may not be more definite about what was perhaps nothing at all. But
I fancy that relinquishment of any sort would be easier in London than
in cities of simpler interest or smaller population. For my own part I
was content to deny many knowledges that I would have liked to believe
myself possessed of, and to go about clothed in my ignorance as in a
garment, or defended by it as by armor. There was a sort of luxury in
passing through streets memorable for a thousand things and as dense
with associations as Long Island with mosquitoes when the winds are low,
and in reflecting that I need not be ashamed for neglecting in part what
no man could know in whole. I really suppose that upon any other terms
the life of the cultivated American would be hardly safe from his own
violence in London. If one did not shut one's self out from the complex
appeal to one's higher self one could hardly go to one's tailor or one's
hatter or one's shoemaker, on those missions which, it is a national
superstition with us, may be more inexpensively fulfilled there than
at home. The best way is to begin by giving up everything, by frankly
saying to yourself that you will not be bothered, that man's days of
travel are full of trouble, and that you are going to get what little
joy you can out of them as you go along. Then, perhaps, on some errand
of quite ignoble purport, you will be seized with the knowledge that
in the very spot where you stand one of the most significant things
in history happened. It will be quite enough for you, as you inhale
a breath of the London mixture of smoke, dust, and fog, that it is
something like the air which Shakespeare and Milton breathed when
they were meditating the works which have given so many international
after-dinner orators the assurance of a bond of amity in our common
language. Once, in driving through one of the dullest streets
imaginable, I chanced to look out of the side-window of my hansom, and
saw on a flying house-wall a tablet reading: “Here lived John Dryden,”
and though Dryden is a poet to move one to tenderness as little as may
be, the tears came into my eyes.
It is but one of a thousand names, great in some sort or other, which
make sojourn in London impossible, if one takes them to heart as an
obligation to consciousness of her constant and instant claim. They show
you Johnson's house in Bolt Court, but it only avails to vex you with
the thought of the many and many houses of better and greater men which
they will never show you. As for the scenes of events in fiction you
have a plain duty to shun them, for in a city where the great facts
of the past are written so deep upon the walls and pavement one over
another, it is folly which can be forgiven only to the vacancy of youth
to go looking for the places where this imaginary thing happened. Yet
this claim of folly has been recognized, and if you wish to indulge
it, you can do so at little trouble. Where the real localities are not
available they have fictitious ones, and they show you an Old Curiosity
Shop, for instance, which serves every purpose of having been the home
of Little Nell. There are at least three Cock Taverns, and several
Mitres, all genuine; and so on. Forty odd years ago I myself, on first
arriving in London, lodged at the Golden Cross, because it was there
that David Copperfield stopped; and I was insensately pleased the other
day that there was still a hotel of that name at the old stand. Whether
it was the old inn, I did not challenge the ghost within me to say. I
doubt if you now dine there “off the joint” in the “coffee-room”; more
probably you have a _table d'hôte_ meal served you “at separate tables,”
by a German lad just beginning to ignore English. The shambling elderly
waiter who was part of the furniture in 1861 is very likely dead; and
for the credit of our country I hope that the recreant American whom I
heard telling an Englishman there in those disheartening days, of our
civic corruptions, may have also passed away. He said that he himself
had bought votes, as many as he wanted, in the city of Providence; and
though I could deny the general prevalence of such venality at least in
my own stainless state of Ohio, I did not think to suggest that in such
a case the corruption was in the buyer rather than the seller of the
votes, and that if he had now come to live, as he implied, in a purer
country, he had not taken the right way to be worthy of it. But at
twenty-four you cannot think of everything at once, and a recreant
American is so uncommon that you need hardly, at any age, provide for
him.
XX
PARTING GUESTS
However the Golden Cross Inn may have inwardly or outwardly changed,
the Golden Cross Hotel keeps its old place hard by the Charing Cross
station, which is now so different from the station of the earlier day.
I do not think it is one of the most sympathetic of the London stations.
I myself prefer rather the sentiment of the good old Euston station,
which continues for you the feeling of arrival in England, and keeps you
in the glow of landing that you have, or had in the days when you always
landed in Liverpool, and the constant Cunarders and Inmans ignored the
upstart pretensions of Southampton and Plymouth to be ports of entry
from the United States. But among the stations of minor autobiographical
interest, Charing Cross is undoubtedly the first, and you may have
your tenderness for it as the place where you took the train for the
nightboat at Folkestone in first crossing to the continent. How strange
it all was, and yet how not unfriendly; for there is always a great deal
of human nature in England. She is very motherly, even with us children
who ran away from home, and only come back now and then to make sure
that we are glad of having done so. In the lamp-broken obscurity of the
second-class carriage I am aware still of a youthful exile being asked
his destination, and then his derivation, by a gentle old lady in the
seat opposite (she might have been Mother England in person), who,
hearing that he was from America where the civil war was then very
unpromising, could only say, comfortingly: “And very glad to be out of
it, _I_ dare say!” He must protest, but if he failed to convince, how
could he explain that part of his high mission to the ports of the
Lombardo-Venetian Kingdom was to sweep from the Adriatic the Confederate
privateers which Great Britain was then fitting out to prey upon our
sparse commerce there? As a matter of fact he had eventually to do
little or no sweeping of that sort; for no privateers came to interrupt
the calm in which he devoted himself, unofficially, to writing a book
about the chief of those ports.
It was the first of many departures from London, where you are always
more or less arriving or departing as long as you remain in England. It
is indeed an axiom with the natives that if you want to go from any
one point to any other in the island it is easier to come to London and
start afresh for it, than to reach the point across country. The trains
to and from the capital are swifter and more frequent, and you are not
likely to lose your way in the mazes of Bradshaw if you consult the
indefinitely simplified A B C tables which instruct you how to launch
yourself direct from London upon any objective, or to recoil from it. My
impression is that you habitually drive to a London station as nearly in
time to take your train as may be, and that there is very little use
for waiting-rooms. This may be why the waiting-room seems so small and
unattractive a part of the general equipment. It never bears any
such proportion to the rest as the waiting-rooms in the great Boston
stations, or even that of the Grand Central in New York, and is by no
chance so really fine as that of the Atchison and Topeka at Omaha, or
that of the Lake Shore at Pittsburg. Neither the management nor the
climate is so unkind as to keep intending passengers from the platforms,
where they stand talking, or walk up and down, or lean from their
carriage-doors and take leave of attendant friends with repeated pathos.
With us it is either too cold or too hot to do that, and at all
the great stations we are now fenced off from the tracks, as on the
Continent, and unless we can make favor with the gateman, must despatch
our farewells before our parting dear ones press forward to have
their tickets punched. But at no London station, and far less at any
provincial station in England, are you subjected to these formalities;
and the English seem to linger out their farewells almost abusively,
especially if they are young and have much of life before them.
Charing Cross has the distinction, sole among her sister stations, of a
royal entrance. There is no doubt a reason for this; but as royalty is
always coming and going in every direction, it is not easy to know why
the other stations do not provide themselves with like facilities. One
cannot imagine just how the king and queen get in and out of the common
gateway, but it has to be managed everywhere but at Charing Cross,
no matter what hardship to royalty it involves. Neither has any other
station a modern copy of a Queen Eleanor's Cross, but this is doubtless
because no other station was the last of these points where her coffin
was set down on its way from Lincoln to its final restingplace in
Westminster. You cannot altogether regret their lack after you have seen
such an original cross as that of Northampton, for though the Victorian
piety which replaced the monument at Charing Cross was faithful and
earnest, it was not somehow the art of 1291. One feels no greater
hardness in the Parliamentary zeal which razed the cross in 1647 than in
the stony fidelity of detail which hurts the eye in the modern work,
and refuses to be softened by any effect of the mellowing London air. It
looks out over the scurry of cabs, the ponderous tread of omnibuses, the
rainfall patter of human feet, as inexorably latter-day as anything
in the Strand. It is only an instance of the constant futility of the
restoration which, in a world so violent or merely wearing as ours,
must still go on, and give us dead corpses of the past instead of living
images. Fortunately it cannot take from Charing Cross its preeminence
among the London railway stations, which is chiefly due to its place
in the busy heart of the town, and to that certain openness of aspect,
which sometimes, as with the space at Hyde Park Corner, does the effect
of sunniness in London. It may be nearer or farther, as related to
one's own abode, but it has not the positive remoteness from the great
centres, by force of which, for instance, Waterloo seems in a peripheral
whirl of non-arrival, and Vauxhall lost somewhere in a rude borderland,
and King's Cross bewildered in a roar of tormented streets beyond
darkest Bloomsbury. Even Paddington, which is of a politer situation,
and is the gate of the beautiful West-of-England country, has not the
allure of Charing Cross; even Euston which so sweetly prolongs the
old-fashioned Liverpool voyage from New York, and keeps one to the last
moment in a sense of home, really stays one from London by its kind
reluctance. It is at Charing Cross alone that you are immediately and
unmistakably in the London of your dreams.
I think that sooner or later we had arrived at or departed from all the
great stations, but I will not make so sure of St. Pancras. I am afraid
that I was, more strictly speaking, only at a small church hard by, of
so marked a ritualistic temperament that it had pictures in it, and gave
me an illusion of Italy, though I was explicitly there because of an
American origin in the baptism of Junius Brutus Booth. I am sorry I do
not remember the name of that little church, but it stood among autumn
flowers, in the heart of a still, sunny morning, where the reader will
easily find it. Of Victoria station I am many times certain, for it was
from it that we at last left London, and that at the time of an earlier
sojourn we arrived in a fog of a type which stamped our sense of
the world's metropolis with a completeness which it had hitherto
disappointingly wanted.
It had been a dull evening on the way up from Dover, but not uncommonly
dull for an evening of the English November, and we did not notice that
we had emerged from the train into an intensified obscurity. In the
corridors of the station-hotel hung wreaths of what a confident spirit
of our party declared to be smoke, in expression of the alarming
conviction that the house was on fire. Nobody but ourselves seemed
troubled by the smoke, however, and with a prompt recurrence to the
reading which makes the American an intimate of the English circumstance
though he has never personally known it, we realized that what seemed
smoke must be a very marked phase of London fog. It did not perceptibly
thicken in-doors that night, but the next day no day dawned, nor, for
that matter, the day after the next. All the same the town was invisibly
astir everywhere in a world which hesitated at moments between total and
partial blindness. The usual motives and incentives were at work in
the business of men, more like the mental operations of sleep than of
waking. From the height of an upper window one could look down and feel
the city's efforts to break the mesh of its weird captivity, with an
invisible stir in all directions, as of groping. Of course, life had
to go on, upon such terms as it could, and if you descended from your
window that showed nothing, and went into the street, and joined the
groping, you could make out something of its objects. With a cabman who
knew his way, as a pilot knows his way on a river in a black night, you
could depart and even arrive. In the course of your journey you would
find the thoroughfare thick with hesitating or arrested traffic. At one
place you would be aware of a dull, red light, brightening into a veiled
glare, and you would have come upon a group of horses, detached from
several omnibuses, and standing head to head till they might hopefully
be put to and driven on again. The same light, with the torches carried
by boys, would reveal trucks and carts stopped, or slowly creeping
forward. Cab-horses between the blotches of flame made by the cab-lamps
were craning their necks forward, or twitching them from side to side.
Through the press foot-passengers found their way across the street, and
imaginably in the dark that swallowed up the sidewalks, they were going
and coming on errands that could brook no stay. The wonder was that they
could know which way they were going, or how they could expect to reach
any given point.
Where the buildings were densest the fog was thinnest, and there it was
a greenish-yellow, like water when you open your eyes and look at it far
below the surface. Where the houses fell away, and you found yourself in
a square, or with a park on one side, the vapor thickened into blackness
and seemed to swell, a turbid tide, overhead and underfoot. It hurt your
straining eyes, and got into your throat, and burned it like a sullen
steam. If your cab stopped, miraculously enough, at the address given,
you got out incredulous and fearful of abandonment. When you emerged
again, and found your cab waiting, you mutely mounted to your place and
resumed your strange quality of something in a dream.
So, all that day the pall hung upon the town, and all the next. The
third day the travellers were to sail from Liverpool, and there was some
imperative last-shopping on the eve. Two of them took a courageous cab,
and started for Bond Street. In a few moments the cab was in the thick
of the fog and its consequences, a tangle of stationary vehicles with
horses detached, or marking time, without advancing either way. A
trembling hand lifted the little trap in the cab-roof, and a trembling
voice asked the cabman: “Do you think you can go on?” “I think so, sir.”
The horse's head had already vanished; now his haunches faded away.
Towards the dashboard the shafts of another cab came yawing, and again
the eager voice quavered: “Do you think you can get back?” “Oh yes,
sir,” the answer came more cheerfully, and the shopping was done a week
later in Twenty-third Street.
There is an insensate wish in the human witness to have nature when she
begins misbehaving do her worst. One longs to have her go all lengths,
and this perhaps is why an earthquake, or a volcanic eruption, of
violent type is so satisfactory to those it spares. It formed the secret
joy of the great blizzard of 1888, and it must form the mystical delight
of such a London fog as we had experienced. But you see the blizzard
once in a generation or a century, while if you are good, or good enough
to live in London, you may see a characteristic fog almost any year. It
is another case in which the metropolis of the New World must yield to
the metropolis of the whole world. Fog for fog, I do not say but the fog
in which we left New York, on March 3, 1904, was not as perfect as our
great London fog. But the New York fog was only blindingly white and the
London fog blindingly black, and that is a main difference.
The tender and hesitating mist with which each day of our final
September in London began, must not be confused in the reader's mind
with a true London fog. The mist grew a little heavier, day by day,
perhaps; but only once the sun failed to burn through it before noon,
and that was one of the first days of October, as if in September it had
not yet lost the last of its summer force. Even then, though it rained
all the forenoon, and well into the afternoon, the weather cleared for a
mild, warm sunset, and we could take the last of our pleasant walks from
Half-Moon Street into St. James's Park.
When the last day of our London sojourn came, it was fitly tearful, and
we had our misgivings of the Channel crossing. The crossing of the day
before had been so bad that _Pretty Polly_, who had won the St. Leger,
held all England in approving suspense, while her owners decided that
she should not venture to the defeat that awaited her in France, till
the sea was smoother. But in the morning the papers prophesied fair
weather, and it was promised that _Pretty Polly_ should cross. Her
courage confirmed our own, and we took our initial departure in the
London fashion which is so different from the New York fashion. Not with
the struggle, personally and telephonically, in an exchange of bitter
sarcasms prolonged with the haughty agents of the express monopoly, did
we get our baggage expensively before us to the station and follow in
a costly coupé, but with all our trunks piled upon two reasonable
four-wheelers, we set out contemporaneously with them. In New York we
paid six dollars for our entire transportation to the steamer; in London
we paid six shillings to reach the Victoria station with our belongings.
The right fare would have been five; the imagination of our cabman rose
to three and six each, and feebly fluttered there, but sank to three,
and did not rise again. At our admirable lodging the landlady, the
butler and the chambermaid had descended with us to the outer door in a
smiling convention of regret, the kindly Swiss boots allowed the
street porter to help him up with our trunks, and we drove away in
the tradition of personal acceptability which bathes the stranger in
a gentle self-satisfaction, and which prolonged itself through all the
formalities of registering our baggage for the continent at the station,
of bribing the guard in the hope of an entire first-class compartment
to ourselves and then sharing it with four others similarly promised
its sole use, and of telegraphing to secure seats in the _rapide_ from
Calais to Paris.
Then we were off in a fine chill, small English rain through a landscape
in which all the forms showed like figures in blotting-paper, as
Taine said, once for all. After we had run out of the wet ranks of
yellowish-black city houses, and passed the sullen suburbs,
“All in a death-doing autumn-dripping gloom,”
we found ourselves in a world which was the dim ghost of the English
country we had so loved in the summer. On some of the trees and
hedgerows the leaves hung dull yellow or dull red, but on most they were
a blackening green. The raw green of the cold flat meadows, the purplish
green of the interminable ranks of cabbages, and the harsh green of
the turnip-fields, blurred with the reeking yellow of mustard bloom,
together with the gleaming brown of ploughed fields, formed a prospect
from which the eye turned with the heart, in a rapturous vision of the
South towards which we were now swiftly pulsing.
THE END