Part 27 (1/2)
Yet, it must be said on behalf of human nature, that there is kindness to be met with even in the maligned 'bus. If, for instance, some ”absent-minded beggar” should happen to get in without possessing the necessary pence, at least half the 'bus are immediately ready to offer the deficit; and hands are similarly always stretched out to help in the lame and the blind.
[Ill.u.s.tration: _”Benk, Benk!!”_]
Even should a fellow pa.s.senger be exceptionally conversational, it does not, I may add, usually answer to talk much to the casual neighbour on a 'bus, even if it be by way of ingratiating yourself with ”the ma.s.ses.” Especially does this rule hold good where young women are concerned. A seriously-minded girl--a girl, too, who was not a bit of a flirt, or indeed remarkably pretty--once confessed to me her sad experiences in that line. Being much interested in democratic politics, she had one fine day begun to talk--on the 'bus roof--to a young artisan on the ”Eight Hours' Bill.” She imagined herself to be getting along swimmingly, when suddenly the young man, hitherto very intelligent and respectful, began to ”nudge” her (this being, I have reason to believe, the first preliminary to courts.h.i.+p in his cla.s.s).
From ”nudging” he proceeded to ”squeezing”; and, finally, could it be fancy, or was it an arm that began ominously to encircle her waist?
She did not stay to investigate the phenomenon, but clambered down the iron staircase with inelegant haste--a sadder and a wiser young woman!
Another time I myself was ”riding,” as the c.o.c.kneys term it, on the outside of a 'bus towards the sylvan park of Kennington, and, fired no doubt by the lovely summer day, began--with more enthusiasm than prudence--to discuss current topics with my neighbour on the ”garden seat.” He was a well-mannered youth, and for a while I was much edified by his conversation--until, that is, his sudden interjection of ”There's a taisty 'at a-crawsin' of the rowd,” in some inexplicable manner cooled me off.
Carlyle was a constant traveller by 'bus, which economy, it may be, agreed well with his Scotch thriftiness. Mrs. Carlyle, on one of her solitary returns to their Chelsea home, describes him as meeting her by the omnibus, scanning the pa.s.sengers (like the Peri at the gate) from under his well-known old white hat. This white hat, even in Carlyle's day, used to attract attention. ”Queer 'at the old gent wears,” once remarked an unconsciously irreverent pa.s.senger to the conductor of the Chelsea omnibus. ”Queer 'at,” retorted the conductor reprovingly; ”it may be a queer 'at, but what would you give for the 'ed-piece that's inside of it?”
Cabs are vastly more luxurious than omnibuses, but are to be rigidly eschewed by the economical, except in cases where time is of as much value as money. The fact is, that it is almost necessary to overpay cabmen, and especially so if the ”fare” be at all nervous. Hence it has been said with some truth, that life, to be at all worth living in London, should disregard extra sixpences. People of the Jonas Chuzzlewit type may, indeed, take cabs to their utmost s.h.i.+lling limits, but this is a proceeding hardly to be recommended to the sensitive. For the average cabman is prodigal in retort, and not generally reticent on the subject of imagined wrong. In the season overpaying is more than ever necessary, while hiring ”by the hour” is, at least by the nervous, to be deprecated. The familiar device of paying one penny per minute, though fair enough in fact, has been characterised as ”only possible to the hardened Londoner.” Some people make a practice of only overpaying the cabman when, like John Gilpin, they are ”on pleasure bent”; yet I do not know how the cabman is supposed to divine their mission.
The hansom--”the gondola of London,” as Disraeli called it--is far preferable to the antiquated ”four-wheeler” or ”growler,” a vehicle which has never been really popular since Wainwright murdered Harriet Lane, and inconsiderately carried about her mutilated body in one of these conveyances, tied up in American cloth. True, hansoms have their faults. Thus the hansom horse is sometimes afflicted with a mania for going round and round in a manner which suggests his having been brought up in a circus. Sometimes he does nothing but twist his head back to look at his fare; sometimes he persists on turning into every ”mews” he pa.s.ses; sometimes he jibs in a way altogether distracting to a nervous pa.s.senger who can only, for the moment, behold the horse and the driver; but still there is a ”smartness” about the well-turned-out hansom that cannot be gainsaid. The acme of smartness is, perhaps, a private hansom with a liveried driver; these, however, are exclusively seen in the haunts of fas.h.i.+on. It is, perhaps, well for the London resident to be liberally inclined, for in an incredibly short s.p.a.ce of time his or her ”ways” become known to the cab-driving community, and facilities for getting cabs largely depend on their verdict. It may be added that if the hansom-driver is inclined to be pert (a natural inclination, considering the height of his elevation above the general public), more generally the ”growler” is morose, and given to a huskiness that is suggestive of that abode of light and polished bra.s.s--the ”poor man's club.”
[Ill.u.s.tration: _The Hansom._]
The visitors to London vary, like the omnibus scents, with the varying year. In the spring and early summer, it is the fas.h.i.+onable world that mainly haunts its streets; in the later summer, the French, Italians, Germans--especially Germans--flock with everlasting red Baedekers (indeed, in the London streets in August, you but rarely hear your own language spoken); in autumn, it is chiefly Americans who abound, provided with all ”Europe” in the compa.s.s of one guide-book; in January the country cousins, and thrifty housewives generally, come up for the day, armed with lists of alarming length, to swell the crowds at the winter sales.
One of the things that strikes the foreigner, new to England and England's ways, most in London, is the regulation of the street traffic. The innumerable vehicles that throng the highways of London, every moment threatening, or seeming to threaten, a ”block”; the continuous rumble of many wheels,--omnibuses, cabs, drays, vans, bicycles, motors,--all these, an apparently limitless force, are stopped, as if by magic, by ”the man in blue” simply holding up an arm. All power, for the moment, is vested in him; he is here the one authority against which there is no appeal. Under the protection of the policeman's aegis, the most timid foot-pa.s.senger may pa.s.s in perfect security; the flood will be stayed while his arm, like that of Moses of old, is raised. And there is no such thing as disobedience.
Be the bicyclist never so bold, be the hansom-driver never so smart, woe betide him if he disobey the mandate! Under the policeman's faithful pilotage, the big crossings are safe; danger only lurks in the smaller ones, where his presence is not felt. The ”man in blue”
is, generally, a charming and urbane personage; if, in the exercise of his calling, he sometimes chance to develop a certain curtness, it is, perhaps, that he has in his time been overmuch badgered.... His urbanity, as a rule, is marvellous; and in great contrast to that of his continental brethren. In Germany, the officer of the law shakes his list in people's faces; in France, he gesticulates wildly; in Italy, he is timid and ineffectual; in England, he merely raises his arm, and behold! like the G.o.ds on Olympus, he is obeyed.
Londoners are a curiously callous race, and are, as has been shown, remarkably little interested in their neighbours. The fact is, their life is much too busy for such interest. In the country, your neighbours know everything you do, your business, your position, your income even. In London, all that your neighbours know of you is that you come and that you go; and, once gone, your place knows you no more. Miss Amy Levy, who, more than any other poet, has expressed the feeling of London streets, puts the idea well, in these most pathetic lines:
”They trod the streets and squares where now I tread, With weary hearts, a little while ago; When, thin and grey, the melancholy snow Clung to the leafless branches overhead; Or when the smoke-veiled sky grew stormy-red In autumn; with a re-arisen woe Wrestled, what time the pa.s.sionate spring winds blow; And paced scorched stones in summer;--they are dead.
”The sorrow of their souls to them did seem As real as mine to me, as permanent.
To-day, it is the shadow of a dream, The half-forgotten breath of breezes spent.
So shall another soothe his woe supreme-- No more he comes, who this way came and went.”
(_A London Plane-Tree._)
The Londoner dies--the great bell of St. Pancras may toll out his sixty years, or the deep tones of Westminster call to his memorial service; yet none the less a dance is given at the house next door, and the immediate neighbours know not of the death until they see the hea.r.s.e and the long row of funereal trappings. Truly was it said, that in a crowd is ever the greatest solitude! The mighty pulse of London, that
”Of your coming and departure heeds, As the Seven Seas may heed a pebble cast,”
beats on just the same though you are gone. The vast machine grinds out its daily life, the propellers work, the wheels of Juggernaut hum, while, like a poor moth, you spin your little hour in the sun, and then go under. This terrible desolation of London has resulted, and still results, in many a tragedy, bitter as that of young Chatterton, the boy poet, found dead in a Brooke Street garret:
... ”the marvellous boy, The sleepless soul that perished in his pride....”
[Ill.u.s.tration: _A Doorstep Party._]
London, the ”stony-hearted stepmother,” as De Quincey called Oxford Street--has many a time given her children stones for bread. Many are the men and women, poets, authors, journalists, actors, who come up to the vast city, attracted by ”the deceitful lights of London,” to starve in Soho or Bloomsbury garrets (Bloomsbury, to which place, it is said, more MSS. are returned than to any other locality in the British Isles). Too proud to beg, too sensitive to fight, they soon become ousted in the struggle for life, and very often get pushed altogether out of the ranks; or, if they do succeed, are soured by years of trial and suffering. The biographies of successful men sometimes tell of such early struggles: but of the many who are not successful, the submerged ones, you do not hear. Some of the Bloomsbury and Bayswater boarding-houses afford sad evidence of retrenched fortunes and squalid lives. The ragged window blind, the dirty tablecloth, covered always with remains of meals; the sad, lined, discontented faces pressed close to the dingy panes, the eternal smell of onions or fried fish, the general wretchedness and frowsiness of everything--all tell tales of a sadder kind than those of d.i.c.kens's Mrs. Tibbs or Mrs. Todgers. And, descending yet lower in the social scale, individual cases become yet sadder. I once lived in a London square, next door to an empty house. For two days a battered corpse lay on the other side of the wall, in the garden, and no one knew of it. It was only the poor caretaker left in the ”mansion” who, weary of existence, had herself severed the Gordian knot of life. And, in the immediate neighbourhood of another square of ”desirable residences,” no less than three murders was considered the usual winter average--murders, too, of the worst and most squalid type.
Such, in London, is the close juxtaposition of ”velvet and rags,”
luxury and misery. London is the refuge of blighted lives, of the queer flotsam and jetsam of humanity. Where can they all come from?
and what were their beginnings? Among such waifs and strays do I recall one old man--feeble, pitiful, wizened, who carried an empty black bag, and stretched it out towards me appealingly. The contents, if any, of the black bag, I never discovered; but I often gave him a penny, simply because he was so unutterably pathetic. He is gone now, and his place knows him no more. But he always haunts my dreams. And the afflicted girl--white-faced and expressionless--who sat for many years close to the ”Horse-Shoe” of Tottenham Court Road (indeed, she may sit there still), her face calm as that of a Caryatid, as though oblivious of Time and inured to suffering, through all the noise and tumult of drovers' carts and omnibuses; she has often seemed to me as a type of the eternal, dumb sorrow of humanity.
Yet this isolation of London, terrible as it is for the poor and suffering,--is,--for the well-to-do cla.s.s at least,--in some ways advantageous. For one thing, it allows more liberty of action;--for another, it prevents any undue personal pride. It is, fortunately, rare indeed for the individual to be as conceited in London as he is in the provinces. True,--London has occasional aesthetic crazes and literary fas.h.i.+ons; but, as a rule,--and with the exception of special cliques and coteries such as those of Chelsea and Hampstead,--people are not unduly puffed up in London. The city, with its vast size, acts as an automatic equaliser;--personality becomes lost,--and individuals tend to find their proper level. The Londoner is apt to realise,--that, in the words of Mr. Gilbert's song,--”he never would be missed.” Nowhere is there more liberty; no one even notices you as you walk the streets. A man used, some years ago, to walk about the Bloomsbury squares with long hair in be-ribboned pigtails, and in a harlequin dress; the street-boys hardly marked him; even a Chinaman in full costume only attracts a following of a few nursery-maids and perambulators. But in London it really matters very little what you do, or how you dress. Dress here is in fact immaterial, unless you are bent on social successes. Eyes are not for ever scanning you critically, as they do in country villages. And, for ladies who work in slums and ”mean streets,”--the safest plan is always to wear dark, shabby, and quiet clothes--clothes that do not ”a.s.sert themselves.”
Otherwise, it is likely that she may be accosted as ”dear” or ”Sally,”--invited to take ”a drop o' tea,” or otherwise chaffed by rough women standing akimbo at street doors. This practice of standing at doors and gossiping would appear, indeed, to be the main occupation of women of the lower cla.s.s; but, poor things! they enjoy it; and their life, after all, must contain but few enjoyments. It is perhaps, less certain that their babies enjoy the ”cold step,” on which they are unceremoniously flopped at all hours of the day. An overdose of ”cold step” may, indeed, partially account for the bronchitis which riddles the ranks of the children of the poor. You may see a family of six slum children playing happily in the damp gutter one week; the week following, you may find half of them dead or dying from a visitation of this fell plague. To say that the children of London are decimated by it would be putting the case much too mildly. The mothers, however, take a different view. ”She niver looked 'erself agin sence that 'ere crool vaccination,”--a mother will say placidly,--ignoring the cold step and the bronchitis that did the work. ”Cold step,” indeed, to their minds, acts as a refres.h.i.+ng tonic; they call it ”bringin' 'im,--or 'er,--up 'ardy.”