Europe Revised Part 14

In London, mind you, the newsboys do not shout their extras. They bear in their hands placards with black-typed announcements of the big news story of the day; and even these headings seem designed to soothe rather than to excite--saying, for example, such things as Special From Liner, in referring to a disaster at sea, and Meeting in Ulster, when meaning that the northern part of Ireland has gone on record as favoring civil war before home rule.

The street venders do not bray on noisy trumpets or ring with bells or utter loud cries to advertise their wares. The policeman does not shout his orders out; he holds aloft the stripe-sleeved arm of authority and all London obeys. I think the reason why the Londoners turned so viciously on the suffragettes was not because of the things the suffragettes clamored for, but because they clamored for them so loudly.

They jarred the public peace--that must have been it.

I can understand why an adult American might go to Paris and stay in Paris and be satisfied with Paris, if he were a lover of art and millinery in all their branches; or why he might go to Berlin if he were studying music and munic.i.p.al control; or to Amsterdam if he cared for cleanliness and new cheese; or to Vienna if he were concerned with surgery, light opera, and the effect on the human lungs of doing without fresh air for long periods of time; or to Rome if he were an antiquarian and interested in ancient life; or to Naples if he were an entomologist and interested in insect life; or to Venice if he liked ruins with water round them; or to Padua if he liked ruins with no water anywhere near them. No: I'm blessed if I can think of a single good reason why a sane man should go to Padua if he could go anywhere else.

But I think I know, good and well, why a man might spend his whole vacation in London and enjoy every minute of it. For this old fogy, old foggy town of London is a man-sized town, and a man-run town; and it has a fascination of its own that is as much a part of it as London's grime is; or London's vastness and London's pettiness; or London's wealth and its stark poverty; or its atrocious suburbs; or its dirty, trade-fretted river; or its dismal back streets; or its still more dismal slums--or anything that is London's.

To a man hailing from a land where everything is so new that quite a good deal of it has not even happened yet, it is a joyful thing to turn off a main-traveled road into one of the crooked byways in which the older parts of London abound, and suddenly to come, full face, on a house or a court or a pump which figured in epochal history or epochal literature of the English-speaking race. It is a still greater joy to find it--house or court or pump or what not--looking now pretty much as it must have looked when good Queen Bess, or little d.i.c.k Whittington, or Chaucer the scribe, or Shakspere the player, came this way. It is fine to be riding through the country and pa.s.s a peaceful green meadow and inquire its name of your driver and be told, most offhandedly, that it is a place called Runnymede. Each time this happened to me I felt the thrill of a discoverer; as though I had been the first traveler to find these spots.

I remember that through an open door I was marveling at the domestic economies of an English barber shop. I use the word economies in this connection advisedly; for, compared with the average high-polished, sterilized and antiseptic barber shop of an American city, this shop seemed a torture cave. In London, pubs are like that, and some dentists'

establishments and law offices--musty, fusty dens very unlike their Yankee counterparts. In this particular shop now the chairs were hard, wooden chairs; the looking-gla.s.s--you could not rightly call it a mirror--was cracked and bleary; and an apprentice boy went from one patron to another, lathering each face; and then the master followed after him, razor in hand, and shaved the waiting countenances in turn.

Flies that looked as though they properly belonged in a livery stable were buzzing about; and there was a prevalent odor which made me think that all the sick pomade in the world had come hither to spend its last declining hours. I said to myself that this place would bear further study; that some day, when I felt particularly hardy and daring, I would come here and be shaved, and afterward would write a piece about it and sell it for money. So, the better to fix its location in my mind, I glanced up at the street sign and, behold! I was hard by Drury Lane, where Sweet Nelly once on a time held her court.

Another time I stopped in front of a fruiterer's, my eye having been caught by the presence in his window of half a dozen draggled-looking, wilted roasting ears decorated with a placard reading as follows:

AMERICAN MAIZE OR INDIAN CORN A VEGETABLE--TO BE BOILED AND THEN EATEN

I was remarking to myself that these Britishers were surely a strange race of beings--that if England produced so delectable a thing as green corn we in America would import it by the shipload and serve it on every table; whereas here it was so rare that they needs must label it as belonging to the vegetable kingdom, lest people should think it might be an animal--when I chanced to look more closely at the building occupied by the fruiterer and saw that it was an ancient house, half-timbered above the first floor, with a queer low-browed roof. Inquiring afterward I learned that this house dated straight back to Elizabethan days and still on beyond for so many years that no man knew exactly how many; and I began to understand in a dim sort of way how and why it was these people held so fast to the things they had and cared so little for the things they had not.

Better than by all the reading you have ever done you absorb a sense and realization of the splendor of England's past when you go to Westminster Abbey and stand--figuratively--with one foot on Jonson and another on Dryden; and if, overcome by the presence of so much dead-and-gone greatness, you fall in a fit you commit a trespa.s.s on the last resting-place of Macaulay or Clive, or somebody of equal consequence.

More imposing even than Westminster is St. Paul's. I am not thinking so much of the memorials or the tombs or the statues there, but of the tattered battleflags bearing the names of battles fought by the English in every crack and cranny of the world, from Quebec to Ladysmith, and from Lucknow to Khartum. Beholding them there, draped above the tombs, some faded but still intact, some mere clotted wisps of ragged silk clinging to blackened standards, gives one an uplifting conception of the spirit that has sent the British soldier forth to girth the globe, never faltering, never slackening pace, never giving back a step to-day but that he took two steps forward to-morrow; never stopping--except for tea.

The fool hath said in his heart that he would go to England and come away and write something about his impressions, but never write a single, solitary word about the Englishman's tea-drinking habit, or the Englishman's cricket-playing habit, or the Englishman's lack of a sense of humor. I was that fool. But it cannot be done. Lacking these things England would not be England. It would be Hamlet without Hamlet or the Ghost or the wicked Queen or mad Ophelia or her tiresome old pa; for most English life and the bulk of English conversation center about sporting topics, with the topic of cricket predominating. And at a given hour of the day the wheels of the empire stop, and everybody in the empire--from the king in the counting house counting up his money, to the maid in the garden hanging out the clothes--drops what he or she may be doing and imbibes tea until further orders. And what oceans of tea they do imbibe!

There was an old lady who sat near us in a teashop one afternoon. As well as might be judged by one who saw her in a sitting posture only, she was no deeper than any other old lady of average dimensions; but in rapid succession she tilted five large cups of piping hot tea into herself and was starting on the sixth when we withdrew, stunned by the spectacle. She must have been fearfully long-waisted. I had a mental vision of her interior decorations--all fumed-oak wainscotings and buff-leather hangings. Still, I doubt whether their four-o'clock-tea habit is any worse than our five-o'clock c.o.c.ktail habit. It all depends, I suppose, on whether one prefers being tanned inside to being pickled.

But we are getting bravely over our c.o.c.ktail habit, as attested by figures and the visual evidences, while their tea habit is growing on them--so the statisticians say.

As for the Englishman's sense of humor, or his lack of it, I judge that we Americans are partly wrong in our diagnosis of that phase of British character and partly right. Because he is slow to laugh at a joke, we think he cannot see the point of it without a diagram and a chart.

What we do not take into consideration is that, through centuries of self-repression, the Englishman has so drilled himself into refraining from laughing in public--for fear, you see, of making himself conspicuous--it has become a part of his nature. Indeed, in certain quarters a prejudice against laughing under any circ.u.mstances appears to have sprung up.

I was looking one day through the pages of one of the critical English weeklies. Nearly all British weeklies are heavy, and this is the heaviest of the lot. Its editorial column alone weighs from twelve to eighteen pounds, and if you strike a man with a clubbed copy of it the crime is a.s.sault with a dull blunt instrument, with intent to kill. At the end of a ponderous review of the East Indian question I came on a letter written to the editor by a gentleman signing himself with his own name, and reading in part as follows:

SIR: Laughter is always vulgar and offensive. For instance, whatever there may be of pleasure in a theater--and there is not much--the place is made impossible by laughter ... No; it is very seldom that happiness is refined or pleasant to see--merriment that is produced by wine is false merriment, and there is no true merriment without it ... Laughter is profane, in fact, where it is not ridiculous.

On the other hand the English in bulk will laugh at a thing which among us would bring tears to the most hardened cheek and incite our rebellious souls to mayhem and manslaughter. On a certain night we attended a musical show at one of the biggest London theaters. There was some really clever funning by a straight comedian, but his best efforts died a-borning; they drew but the merest ripple of laughter from the audience. Later there was a scene between a sad person made up as a Scotchman and another equally sad person of color from the States. These times no English musical show is complete unless the cast includes a North American negro with his lips painted to resemble a wide slice of ripe watermelon, singing ragtime ditties touching on his chicken and his Baby Doll. This pair took the stage, all others considerately withdrawing; and presently, after a period of heartrending comicalities, the Scotchman, speaking as though he had a mouthful of hot oatmeal, proceeded to narrate an account of a fict.i.tious encounter with a bear.

Substantially this dialogue ensued:

THE SCOTCHMAN--He was a vurra fierce grizzly bear, ye ken; and he rushed at me from behind a jugged rock.

THE NEGRO--Mistah, you means a jagged rock, don't you?

THE SCOTCHMAN--Nay, nay, laddie--a jugged rock.

THE NEGRO--Whut's dat you say? Whut--whut is a jugged rock?

THE SCOTCHMAN (forgetting his accent)--Why, a rock with a jug on it, old chap. (A stage wait to let that soak into them in all its full strength.) A rock with a jug on it would be a jugged rock, wouldn't it--eh?

The pause had been sufficient--they had it now. And from all parts of the house a whoop of unrestrained joy went up.

Witnessing such spectacles as this, the American observer naturally begins to think that the English in ma.s.s cannot see a joke that is the least bit subtle. Nevertheless, however, and to the contrary notwithstanding--as Colonel Bill Sterritt, of Texas, used to say--England has produced the greatest natural humorists in the world and some of the greatest comedians, and for a great many years has supported the greatest comic paper printed in the English language, and that is Punch. Also, at an informal Sat.u.r.day-night dinner in a well-known London club I heard as much spontaneous repartee from the company at large, and as much quiet humor from the chairman, as I ever heard in one evening anywhere; but if you went into that club on a weekday you might suppose somebody was dead and laid out there, and that everybody about the premises had gone into deep mourning for the deceased. If any member of that club had dared then to crack a joke they would have expelled him--as soon as they got over the shock of the bounder's confounded cheek. Sat.u.r.day night? Yes. Monday afternoon?

Never! And there you are!

Speaking of Punch reminds me that we were in London when Punch, after giving the matter due consideration for a period of years, came out with a colored jacket on him. If the Prime Minister had done a Highland fling in costume at high noon in Oxford Circus it could not have created more excitement than Punch created by coming out with a colored cover. Yet, to an American's understanding, the change was not so revolutionary and radical as all that. Punch's well-known lineaments remained the same.

There was merely a dab of palish yellow here and there on the sheet; at first glance you might have supposed somebody else had been reading your copy of Punch at breakfast and had been careless in spooning up his soft-boiled egg.

They are our cousins, the English are; our cousins once removed, 'tis true--see standard histories of the American Revolution for further details of the removing--but they are kinsmen of ours beyond a doubt.

Even if there were no other evidences, the kinship between us would still be proved by the fact that the English are the only people except the Americans who look on red meat--beef, mutton, ham--as a food to be eaten for the taste of the meat itself; whereas the other nations of the earth regard it as a vehicle for carrying various sauces, dressings and stuffings southward to the stomach. But, to the notice of the American who is paying them his first visit, they certainly do offer some amazing contradictions.

In the large matters of business the English have been accused of trickiness, which, however, may be but the voice of envious compet.i.tion speaking; but in the small things they surely are most marvelously honest. Consider their railroad trains now: To a greenhorn from this side the blue water, a railroad journey out of London to almost any point in rural England is a succession of surprises, and all pleasant ones. To begin with, apparently there is n.o.body at the station whose business it is to show you to your train or to examine your ticket before you have found your train for yourself. There is no mad scurrying about at the moment of departure, no bleating of directions through megaphones. Unchaperoned you move along a long platform under a grimy shed, where trains are standing with their carriage doors hospitably ajar, and una.s.sisted you find your own train and your own carriage, and enter therein.

Sharp on the minute an unseen hand--at least I never saw it--slams the doors and coyly--you might almost say secretively--the train moves out of the terminal. It moves smoothly and practically without jarring sounds. There is no shrieking of steel against steel. It is as though the rails were made of rubber and the wheel-f.l.a.n.g.es were faced with noise-proof felt. No conductor comes to punch your ticket, no brakeman to bellow the stops, no train butcher bleating the gabbled invoice of his gumdrops, bananas and other best-sellers.

Glory be! It is all so peaceful and soothing; as peaceful and as soothing as the land through which you are gliding when once you have left behind smoky London and its interminable environs; for now you are in a land that was finished and plenished five hundred years ago and since then has not been altered in any material aspect whatsoever. Every blade of gra.s.s is in its right place; every wayside shrub seemingly has been restrained and trained to grow in exactly the right and the proper way. Streaming by your car window goes a tastefully arranged succession of the thatched cottages, the huddled little towns, the meandering brooks, the ancient inns, the fine old country places, the high-hedged estates of the landed gentry, with rose-covered lodges at the gates and robust children in the doorways--just as you have always seen them in the picture books. There are fields that are velvet lawns, and lawns that are carpets of green cut-plush. England is the only country I know of that lives up--exactly and precisely--to its storybook descriptions and its storybook ill.u.s.trations.

Eventually you come to your stopping point; at least you have reason to believe it may be your stopping point. As well as you may judge by the signs that plaster the front, the sides, and even the top of the station, the place is either a beef extract or a washing compound. Nor may you count on any travelers who may be sharing your compartment with you to set you right by a timely word or two. Your fellow pa.s.sengers may pity you for your ignorance and your perplexity, but they would not speak; they could not, not having been introduced. A German or a Frenchman would be giving you gladly what aid he might; but a well-born Englishman who had not been introduced would ride for nine years with you and not speak. I found the best way of solving the puzzle was to consult the timecard. If the timecard said our train would reach a given point at a given hour, and this was the given hour, then we might be pretty sure this was the given point. Timetables in England are written by realists, not by gifted fiction writers of the impressionistic school, as is frequently the case in America.

So, if this timecard says it is time for you to get off you get off, with your ticket still in your possession; and if it be a small station you go yourself and look up the station master, who is tucked away in a secluded cubbyhole somewhere absorbing tea, or else is in the luggage room fussing with baby carriages and patent-churns. Having ferreted him out in his hiding-place you hand over your ticket to him and he touches his cap brim and says "Kew" very politely, which concludes the ceremony so far as you are concerned.

Then, if you have brought any heavy baggage with you in the baggage car--pardon, I meant the luggage van--you go back to the platform and pick it out from the heap of luggage that has been dumped there by the train hands. With ordinary luck and forethought you could easily pick out and claim and carry off some other person's trunk, provided you fancied it more than your own trunk, only you do not. You do not do this any more than, having purchased a second-cla.s.s ticket, or a third-cla.s.s, you ride first-cla.s.s; though, so far as I could tell, there is no check to prevent a person from so doing. At least an Englishman never does. It never seems to occur to him to do so. The English have no imagination.

I have a suspicion that if one of our railroads tried to operate its train service on such a basis of confidence in the general public there would be a most deceitful hiatus in the receipts from pa.s.senger traffic to be reported to a distressed group of stockholders at the end of the fiscal year. This, however, is merely a supposition on my part. I may be wrong.

Chapter XVII

Britain in Twenty Minutes

To a greater degree, I take it, than any other race the English have mastered the difficult art of minding their own affairs. The average Englishman is tremendously knowledgable about his own concerns and monumentally ignorant about all other things. If an Englishman's business requires that he shall learn the habits and customs of the Patagonians or the Chicagoans or any other race which, because it is not British, he naturally regards as barbaric, he goes and learns them--and learns them well. Otherwise your Britisher does not bother himself with what the outlander may or may not do.

An Englishman cannot understand an American's instinctive desire to know about things; we do not understand his lack of curiosity in that direction. Both of us forget what I think must be the underlying reasons--that we are a race which, until comparatively recently, lived wide distances apart in spa.r.s.ely settled lands, and were dependent on the pa.s.sing stranger for news of the rest of the world, where he belongs to a people who all these centuries have been packed together in their little island like oats in a bin. London itself is so crowded that the noses of most of the lower cla.s.ses turn up--there is not room for them to point straight ahead without causing a great and bitter confusion of noses; but whether it points upward or outward or downward the owner of the nose pretty generally refrains from ramming it into other folks'

business. If he and all his fellows did not do this; if they had not learned to keep their voices down and to m.u.f.fle unnecessary noises; if they had not built tight covers of reserve about themselves, as the oyster builds a sh.e.l.l to protect his tender tissues from irritation--they would long ago have become a race of nervous wrecks instead of being what they are, the most stolid beings alive.

In London even royalty is mercifully vouchsafed a reasonable amount of privacy from the intrusion of the gimlet eye and the chisel nose.

Royalty may ride in Rotten Row of a morning, promenade on the Mall at noon, and shop in the Regent Street shops in the afternoon, and at all times go unguarded and unbothered--I had almost said unnoticed. It may be that long and constant familiarity with the inst.i.tution of royalty has bred indifference in the London mind to the physical presence of dukes and princes and things; but I am inclined to think a good share of it should be attributed to the inborn and ingrown British faculty for letting other folks be.

One morning as I was walking at random through the aristocratic district, of which St. James is the solar plexus and Park Lane the spinal cord, I came to a big mansion where foot-guards stood sentry at the wall gates. This house was further distinguished from its neighbors by the presence of a policeman pacing alongside it, and a newspaper photographer setting up his tripod and camera in the road, and a small knot of pa.s.sers-by lingering on the opposite side of the way, as though waiting for somebody to come along or something to happen. I waited too.

In a minute a handsome old man and a well-set-up young man turned the corner afoot. The younger man was leading a beautiful stag hound. The photographer touched his hat and said something, and the younger man smiling a good-natured smile, obligingly posed in the street for a picture. At this precise moment a dirigible balloon came careening over the chimneypots on a cross-London air jaunt; and at the sight of it the little crowd left the young man and the photographer and set off at a run to follow, as far as they might, the course of the balloon. Now in America this could not have occurred, for the balloon man would not have been aloft at such an hour. He would have been on the earth; moreover he would have been outside the walls of that mansion house, along with half a million, more or less, of his patriotic fellow countrymen, tearing his own clothes off and their clothes off, trampling the weak and sickly underfoot, bucking the doubled and tripled police lines in a mad, vain effort to see the flagpole on the roof or a corner of the rear garden wall. For that house was Clarence House, and the young man who posed so accommodatingly for the photographer was none other than Prince Arthur of Connaught, who was getting himself married the very next day.

The next day I beheld from a short distance the pa.s.sing of the bridal procession. Though there were crowds all along the route followed by the wedding party, there was no scrouging, no shoving, no fighting, no disorderly scramble, no unseemly congestion about the chapel where the ceremony took place. It reminded me vividly of that which inevitably happens when a millionaire's daughter is being married to a duke in a fashionable Fifth Avenue church--it reminded me of that because it was so different.

Fortunately for us we were so placed that we saw quite distinctly the entrance of the wedding party into the chapel inclosure. Personally I was most concerned with the members of the royal house. As I recollect, they pa.s.sed in the following order:

His Majesty, King George the Fifth. Her Majesty, Queen Mary, the Other Four Fifths. Small fractional royalties to the number of a dozen or more.