Europe Revised
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 fictitious 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 mass 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 Saturday-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. Saturday 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 competition 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 nobody 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 unassisted 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-flanges 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 grass 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 illustrations.
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 passengers 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-class ticket, or a third-class, you ride first-class; 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 passenger 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 sparsely settled lands, and were dependent on the passing 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 classes 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 muffle unnecessary noises; if they had not built tight covers of reserve about themselves, as the oyster builds a shell 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 institution 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 passers-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 passing 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 passed 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.
I got a clear view of the side face of the queen. As one looked on her profile, which was what you might call firm, and saw the mild-looking little king, who seemed quite eclipsed by her presence, one understood—or anyway one thought one understood—why an English assemblage, when standing to chant the national anthem these times, always puts such fervor and meaning into the first line of it.
Only one untoward incident occurred: The inevitable militant lady broke through the lines as the imperial carriage passed and threw a Votes for Women handbill into His Majesty's lap. She was removed thence by the police with the skill and dexterity of long practice. The police were competently on the job. They always are—which brings me round to the subject of the London bobby and leads me to venture the assertion that individually and collectively, personally and officially, he is a splendid piece of work. The finest thing in London is the London policeman and the worst thing is the shamefully small and shabby pay he gets. He is majestic because he represents the majesty of the English law; he is humble and obliging because, as a servant, he serves the people who make the law. And always he knows his business.
In Charing Cross, where all roads meet and snarl up in the bewildering semblance of many fishing worms in a can, I ventured out into the roadway to ask a policeman the best route for reaching a place in a somewhat obscure quarter. He threw up his arm, semaphore fashion, first to this point of the compass and then to that, and traffic halted instantly. As far as the eye might reach it halted; and it stayed halted, too, while he searched his mind and gave me carefully and painstakingly the directions for which I sought. In that packed mass of cabs and taxis and buses and carriages there were probably dukes and archbishops—dukes and archbishops are always fussing about in London—but they waited until he was through directing me. It flattered me so that I went back to the hotel and put on a larger hat. I sincerely hope there was at least one archbishop.
Another time we went to Paddington to take a train for somewhere. Following the custom of the country we took along our trunks and traps on top of the taxicab. At the moment of our arrival there were no porters handy, so a policeman on post outside the station jumped forward on the instant and helped our chauffeur to wrestle the luggage down on the bricks. When I, rallying somewhat from the shock of this, thanked him and slipped a coin into his palm, he said in effect that, though he was obliged for the shilling, I must not feel that I had to give him anything—that it was part of his duty to aid the public in these small matters. I shut my eyes and tried to imagine a New York policeman doing as much for an unknown alien; but the effort gave me a severe headache. It gave me darting pains across the top of the skull—at about the spot where he would probably have belted me with his club had I even dared to ask him to bear a hand with my baggage.
I had a peep into the workings of the system of which the London bobby is a spoke when I went to what is the very hub of the wheel of the common law—a police court. I understood then what gave the policeman in the street his authority and his dignity—and his humility—when I saw how carefully the magistrate on the bench weighed each trifling cause and each petty case; how surely he winnowed out the small grain of truth from the gross and tare of surmise and fiction; how particular he was to give of the abundant store of his patience to any whining ragpicker or street beggar who faced him, whether as defendant at the bar, or accuser, or witness.
It was the very body of the law, though, we saw a few days after this when by invitation we witnessed the procession at the opening of the high courts. Considered from the stand-points of picturesqueness and impressiveness it made one's pulses tingle when those thirty or forty men of the wig and ermine marched in single and double file down the loftily vaulted hall, with the Lord Chancellor in wig and robes of state leading, and Sir Rufus Isaacs, knee-breeched and sword-belted, a pace or two behind him; and then, in turn, the justices; and, going on ahead of them and following on behind them, knight escorts and ushers and clerks and all the other human cogs of the great machine. What struck into me deepest, however, was the look of nearly every one of the judges. Had they been dressed as longshoremen, one would still have known them for possessors of the judicial temperament—men born to hold the balances and fitted and trained to winnow out the wheat from the chaff. So many eagle-beaked noses, so many hawk-keen eyes, so many smooth-chopped, long-jowled faces, seen here together, made me think of what we are prone to regard as the highwater period of American statesmanship—the Clay-Calhoun-Benton-Webster period.
Just watching these men pass helped me to know better than any reading I had ever done why the English have faith and confidence in their courts. I said to myself that if I wanted justice—exact justice, heaping high in time scales—I should come to this shop and give my trade to the old-established firm; but if I were looking for a little mercy I should take my custom elsewhere.
I cannot tell why I associate it in my mind with this grouped spectacle of the lords of the law, but somehow the scene to be witnessed in Hyde Park just inside the Marble Arch of a Sunday evening seems bound up somehow with the other institution. They call this place London's safety valve. It's all of that. Long ago the ruling powers discovered that if the rabidly discontented were permitted to preach dynamite and destruction unlimited they would not be so apt to practice their cheerful doctrines. So, without let or hindrance, any apostle of any creed, cult or propaganda, however lurid and revolutionary, may come here of a Sunday to meet with his disciples and spout forth the faith that is in him until he has geysered himself into peace, or, what comes to the same thing, into speechlessness.
When I went to Hyde Park on a certain Sunday rain was falling and the crowds were not so large as usual, a bored policeman on duty in this outdoor forum told me; still, at that, there must have been two or three thousand listeners in sight and not less than twelve speakers. These latter balanced themselves on small portable platforms placed in rows, with such short spaces between them that their voices intermingled confusingly. In front of each orator stood his audience; sometimes they applauded what he said in a sluggish British way, and sometimes they asked him questions designed to baffle or perplex him—heckling, I believe this is called—but there was never any suggestion of disorder and never any violent demonstration for or against a statement made by him.
At the end of the line nearest the Arch, under a flary light, stood an old bearded man having the look on his face of a kindly but somewhat irritated moo-cow. At the moment I drew near he was having a long and involved argument with another controversialist touching on the sense of the word tabernacle as employed Scripturally, one holding it to mean the fleshly tenement of the soul and the other an actual place of worship. The old man had two favorite words—behoove and emit—but behoove was evidently his choice. As an emitter he was only fair, but he was the best behoover I ever saw anywhere.
The orator next to him was speaking in a soft, sentimental tone, with gestures gently appropriate. I moved along to him, being minded to learn what particular brand of brotherly love he might be expounding. In the same tone a good friend might employ in telling you what to do for chapped lips or a fever blister he was saying that clergymen and armaments were useless and expensive burdens on the commonwealth; and, as a remedy, he was advocating that all the priests and all the preachers in the kingdom should be loaded on all the dreadnoughts, and then the dreadnoughts should be steamed to the deepest part of the Atlantic Ocean and there cozily scuttled, with all aboard.
There was scattering applause and a voice: "Ow, don't do that! Listen, 'ere! Hi've got a better plan." But the next speaker was blaring away at the top of his voice, making threatening faces and waving his clenched fists aloft and pounding with them on the top of his rostrum.
"Now this," I said to myself, "is going to be something worth while. Surely this person would not be content merely with drowning all the parsons and sinking all the warships in the hole at the bottom of the sea. Undoubtedly he will advocate something really radical. I will invest five minutes with him."
I did; but I was sold. He was favoring the immediate adoption of a universal tongue for all the peoples of the earth—that was all. I did not catch the name of his universal language, but I judged the one at which he would excel would be a language with few if any h's in it. After this disappointment I lost heart and came away.
Another phase, though a very different one, of the British spirit of fair play and tolerance, was shown to me at the National Sporting Club, which is the British shrine of boxing, where I saw a fight for one of the championship belts that Lord Lonsdale is forever bestowing on this or that worshipful fisticuffer. Instead of being inside the ring prying the fighters apart by main force as he would have been doing in America, the referee, dressed in evening clothes, was outside the ropes. At a snapped word from him the fighters broke apart from clinches on the instant. The audience—a very mixed one, ranging in garb from broadcloths to shoddies—was as quick to approve a telling blow by the less popular fighter as to hiss any suggestion of trickiness or fouling on the part of the favorite. When a contestant in one of the preliminary goes, having been adjudged a loser on points, objected to the decision and insisted on being heard in his own behalf, the crowd, though plainly not in sympathy with his contention, listened to what he had to say. Nobody jeered him down.
