Walking-Stick Papers Part 7

The tall gentleman slowly turned. Slowly, stiffly, with an aristocratic gesture, he raised his arm and placed his gla.s.s in his eye, for a moment. I was frozen by his blank stare, quite through.

Then he lifted his eyebrow; the gla.s.s dropped and bounded before him on its ribbon. And he turned and walked away. Walked away, I dare say, to his frowning club, to tell how he had just been set upon in the street and insulted by some strange ruffian. But, you see, I didn't know; I was an American.

To Epsom I went in a cart to see the Derby. It was at Epsom, you know, that the King's horse was thrown several seasons ago by a suffragette who lost her life in the act. Well, most of the fine gentlemen of England, I think, were there, all in splendid tall grey hats and with their field gla.s.ses slung over their shoulders. And a horde of the cleverest crooks in Europe also.

There I had my pocket "cut" by a pickpocket. That is the way they go through you in England, neatly lift your pocket out. I thought this was an interesting thing, so I told it about that I had had my pocket cut, but I did not see any international significance in the affair.

The achievement, however, I discovered was much relished by my hearers in England. I, an American, had come over there and had my pocket cut.

He, the crook, an Englishman very probably, had been "cuter" than I; he had "had" me, an American.

It is a curious thing, and a fact not generally known, I believe, that all decayed taxicab drivers in London, those who are unfortunate, have fallen from a high estate. Each and every one of them used to drive the London to Oxford coach in the days of 'orses.

I met a number of these personages, fat, with remarkably red faces and large honeycombed noses. Not at all like the alert, athletic lads, a type of mechanical engineer, who have arisen as cabbies with the advent of taxis. What do they know about 'orses?

It was such an old boy who drove me from the neighbourhood of Russell Square, where I was stopping, to Chelsea, where I went into lodgings.

He frequently had the pleasure of driving Americans, he remarked.

"Thank you, sir," he said.

I required to have my shoes repaired, and I inquired of my landlord where might be found a good cobbler. He told me that there was an excellent one in Battersea. "In Battersea!" I said. "Is there none in Chelsea? How am I to get my shoes clear over to Battersea?"

"Why," he replied, "we will send the cobbler a card and he'll send some one over for the boots and----"

"And then, I suppose," I said, "he will send us another card saying that the boots are done and so on. And in the meantime I could have had the boots repaired and worn out again."

Naturally I was for wrapping up the shoes in a piece of newspaper and setting out straight off to find a cobbler. But my landlord would not hear of such a thing at all. "Of course you are an American," he said.

I gathered that while such a proceeding might be all right in my country it wouldn't do in England. He did not want lodgers, I understood, going in and out of his house with parcels under their arms. It would reflect on him. He was a man with a lively mind, and he told me a little story.

"How do you like the new lodger?" asked the first housemaid of the second.

"Oh, he's very nice indeed," replied the second housemaid. "But he's not a gentleman. He helped me carry the coals upstairs yesterday."

"Could you spare me a trifle, sir?" asked the errand man in my street.

"I haven't had tea today."

It's a funny thing, that; isn't it?--our just being all "Americans"

(when we are not referred to as "Yankees" or "Yanks"). We are never United Statesians. It is the "American Amba.s.sador," and the "American Consul-General." I have even heard Dr. Wilson referred to as the "President of America."

One day I saw a tourist. He was an American, a young man I knew in New York. I found him going into the Houses of Parliament. I was fond of going in there frequently, and said I would accompany him.

With an easy stride, at a speed I should say of about two miles an hour, he walked straight through the Houses of Parliament; through the Norman porch, through the King's robing room, the Royal or Victoria gallery, the Prince's chamber, the sumptuously decorated House of Peers, the Peers' lobby, the s.p.a.cious central hall, the Commons'

corridor and the House of Commons; glancing about him the while at art and architecture, lavish magnificence and the eternal garments and symbols of history. Returning to the central hall, we pa.s.sed through St. Stephen's and Westminster Hall and arrived again in the street.

"How long did it take us to do that?" said my friend, questioning his watch.

"Oh, about fifteen minutes," I replied.

He said he thought he would go across the way and "do" the Abbey next while he was in the neighbourhood.

I suppose I could have helped him in the matter of despatch, but I didn't think of it at the time. Later I heard of two Americans who drove up to the abbey in a taxi. Leaping out, one said to the other: "You do the outside and I'll do the inside, and that way we'll save a lot of time."

The thing a man does in America, of course, when he gets into a railroad train is to light a cigar and begin talking to the fellow next to him. There were two of us in the railway carriage compartment on my way down into Surrey. I made a number of amiable observations; I asked a number of pleasant questions. My object was to while away the time in human companionship. "Quite so," was his reply to observations.

In replying to questions he would commit himself to nothing; he wouldn't even say that he didn't know. "I shouldn't undertake to say, sir," was his answer. And then, certainly, there was no possibility of pursuing the subject further.

He wasn't reading a paper; he wasn't doing anything but gaze straight in front of him. I concluded that he was "sore" at me; I concluded that he was a surly bear, anyway. And so an hour or so pa.s.sed in utter silence.

The pretty landscape whirled by; we went through a hundred tunnels (more or less); the little engine gave a shrill little squeak now and then; at old, old railway stations, that remind one agreeably of jails, rough-looking men in black shirt sleeves and corduroy waistcoats ran out to the train to open the carriage doors, and I forgot the gentleman altogether. Till at length we came to his station.

When he had got out he turned to latch the door, and putting his head in at the window, he said to me in the pleasantest manner possible: "Good aufternoon, sir." He wasn't sore at me a bit! That was simply his fashion of travelling, in silence.

I was going into the countryside, to the country places where the old men have pleasant faces and the maidens quiet eyes. To fare forth upon the King's highway, to hedgerows and blossoms and the old lanes of Merrie England, to mount again the old red hills, bird enchanted, and dip the valleys bright with sward, to the wind on the heath, brother, to hills and the sea, to lonely downs, to hold converse with simple shepherd men, and, when even fell, the million tinted, to seek some ancient inn for warmth in the inglenook, and bite and drop, and where, when the last star lamp in the valley had expired, I would rest my weary bones until the sweet choral of morning birds called me on my way.

There was an ancient character going along the road. He walked with a staff, a crooked stick. His coatless habit was the colour of clay; his legs were bound about just below the knee by a strap (wherein, at one side, he carried his pipe), so that his trowsers flared at the bottom like a sailor's; over his shoulder he bore a flat straw basket. Under his chin were whiskers; his eyes were merry and bright and his cheeks just like fine rosy apples, with a great high light on each. I asked of him the way and we trudged along together. "You are from Mericy,"

he said with delight.

He told me about himself. He was seventy-four and he had never had "a single schooling" in his life. Capel was his home, a village of about twenty houses which we were approaching, thirty miles or so from London. The last time he been to London was when he was fifteen. He had then seen some fireworks there. No fireworks in Capel, he said, had ever been able to touch him since. He had been pushing on, he said, pushing on, pushing on all the while.

"You were not born in Capel, then?" I said.

Born in Capel! Why, he had been born seven miles from Capel.

The difficulty was that I had overlooked the fact that everybody goes out of London town at Whitsuntide. Village and county town I tried and I could not find where to lay my head. Everything was, as they say in England, "full up." It was coming on to rain and the night fell chill and black. Would I have to use my rucksack for a pillow and sleep in the fields?

At length I found a man--it was at quaint G.o.dalming, I think, where the famous Charterhouse School is--who could not give me a room, but offered me a bed and breakfast at half a crown. "There's another fellow up there," he said. "But he's a nice, quiet fellow; something like yourself," he said. "I think you'll like him."

"You are an American," remarked my landlord. I sat with him in his little parlour behind the bar. It had a gun over the mantelpiece, a great deal of painted china and a group of stuffed birds in a gla.s.s case. He asked me if I liked reading, because, if I did, he had an old dictionary to which I was welcome at any time.

At length it was the hour for bed. I followed my heavy host with his candle up difficult stairs. "I think they're all asleep," he said.

"They're all asleep!" I exclaimed. "Who are?"

"Why," replied my landlord, "there are five of them, you know. But they are nice quiet fellows. Something like yourself," he added. "I think you will like them."

In that shadowed, gabled room were the noises of many sunk in slumber.

Well, they were, I found in the morning, rather inoffensive young fellows, all cyclists, and indeed not altogether unlike myself. It was after my bacon and eggs that I found on my way a place for a "wash and brush up, tuppence."

"Traveller, sir?" inquired the publican, in response to my knock and peering cautiously out at his door. For it was Sunday, after three o'clock in the afternoon and not yet six; and to obtain refreshment at a public house at that hour one must be a "traveller over three miles'

journey." "I'm a traveller all the way from the U.S.A.," said I.

I stood my battered shilling ash stick in a corner and looked out again from my window over the old red roofs and at the back of the house where he dwelt who when the Queen had commanded his presence said, "I'm an old man, ma'am, and I'll take a seat." When Annie, the maid, had brought my "shaving water, sir," in a kind of a tin sprinkling can and when I had used it I took up my Malacca town cane and went out to see how old Father Thames was coming on.

I thought I would buy some writing paper and I went into a drug store kind of a place. "I see you are an American, sir," said the shopman.

"This is a chemist's shop," he explained; "you get paper at the stationer's, just after the turning, at the top of the street."

Hurrying for my pa.s.sport, I inquired as to the location of such and such a street--whatever the name of it is--where, I understood, the place was where this was to be had. "Ah!" said he whom I addressed, "you want the American Consul-General."