Impressions of a War Correspondent

by George Lynch

Boer Prisoners.

XIX

THE CITY OF DUMB DISTANCES

I am sure there must be many to whom the idea occurs at such times of the year as this, at the end of the season, when people are scattering out of London, that friends are leaving whom we would like to have had the time to have seen before they went. How often, looking over the pages of one's address book, one says, "I wonder how it is I have not seen So-and-so for an age," and one feels that people we used to enjoy meeting, if they do not happen to move in the same orbit of metropolitan existence, are vanishing from our ken. They are being lost in the Limbo of long distances. An hour of Underground in very hot weather may give the remoteness of Styx-ferryage.

It would be nice even to be able to speak to one's friends who are not conveniently visitable. In other cities this is possible, but not here. The telephone service of an American town or a Norwegian village is a thing of which London has never got even sufficient sample-taste to realise what she is deprived of, or what she ought very reasonably to demand. There is no reason why London should remain telephonically deaf and dumb. There is nothing which strikes the visitor more forcibly, however, than the long-suffering patience of the Londoner. The exasperatingly slow, inefficient apology for a telephone service that would not be tolerated anywhere else is good enough for London. It is no excuse to plead in apology the great size of the City, when there is the example of New York before one, where there are more telephones, where they are cheaper, and where the average time to get into communication with another subscriber appears to be a third or a fourth of the time taken in London. It is only when one has had actual experience of a thoroughly telephoned town that one appreciates the convenience of it. Look what it means for saving time in shopping, doing business, making appointments, and speaking to one's friends. "I got a telephone put right into my room the day I arrived," said an American friend, "but the people I want to speak to most often don't seem to use them, and it is so darned slow getting on to those that do that now I am keeping a cab by the day; it is quicker in the end, and makes me swear less."

It will only be a matter of time, and that not so very far off, when wireless telegraphy will replace the telephone. The principle of sending messages in a multiplicity of keys, so that a message sent will only be received on the instrument keyed for it, has been established, and only requires practical working out. Until that time London will probably have to remain as deaf and dumb as it is.

As regards getting from one part to another, it is not a cheerful thing to contemplate that what should be the most agreeable way of traversing London—I mean the pathway of the river—should just now be closed, and while Mr. Yerkes looks out on it from his offices in the Hotel Cecil, Londoners have to look to him to see if he or Pierpont Morgan will not open it to them again. What a pleasant alternative from the asphyxiating Underground or the tortoise-moving omnibus would not a fast, comfortably fitted line of river steamers be! It seems inconceivable that, with such a waterway and such primitive and inadequate alternative means of travel, the people should stand its being closed. What a great, stimulating, suggestive pathway it is through the Dingy City! Coming from a dance early the other morning I walked along the Embankment, to see a carpet of blue and silver being laid along the river as if by the angels of the dawn; and at evening in ever-varying schemes of sometimes gorgeous colour a richer carpet is laid sunsetwards, while the smoke and dust exhalation of the City is glorified to an incense offering by the stained rose window to the west. At such times the Dingy City looks great, robed in vague organ-tones of colour. But you must no longer walk on that carpet, even though the angels have laid it for you; you must no longer see your city from that pathway; you must burrow homewards from your work in a sewer-pipe of stink, and deeper rabbit-warrens of burrowing are being prepared for you, and you have no Declaration of Independence that secures to you the undeniable right to breathe fresh air. Long-suffering, patient Londoner! To whom does the City belong, and the river? If you reward with honours the men who make beer or whisky for you, or supply you with cheap tea, or signalise themselves by successfully struggling against disease, there ought to be the inducement of honours and reward waiting for the man or men that would help the millions in their daily struggle with this plague of long distances. Is there no knight to champion the cause of the toilers of London and in earnest tackle this dragon problem of distances? That is left to enterprising Americans who come over from pure philanthropy (?) to help you. Three years of his life are spent by the average-lived Londoner in the Underground, who has to take a daily half-hour's journey in it to get to his business. A man with an office in the neighbourhood of the Stock Exchange and a dwelling-house in South Kensington will spend about four or five years of his life going to and fro. To an extent it is a necessary evil. We cannot transport ourselves by telegraph, but there are things that the people of the largest city in the world might reasonably expect. They might expect to have as good facilities for getting about as the people of the most progressive cities in the world; they might expect to have the power to speak when they will with the same quickness, cheapness, and facility as people of other cities. But there is a dull feeling of resigned apathy about them. They will not insist on making any one "get a move on" them to get these things done; will no more think of hustling themselves than a cab-horse in a growler hired by the hour.

If London may be considered the head—the brain of the Empire—the blood-circulation of that brain is surely of vital importance. When keen competitors seize every time-saving, labour-saving weapon as it is offered to help them in the conquest of trade, can we afford to do without them? The business methods of twenty years ago will not do for to-day, still less will they do for twenty years to come. The methods which our competitors are practising are what will tell, and they cannot be imitated and acquired in a hurry when their importance will become suddenly alarmingly apparent. I think the position is far more serious than the stay-at-home Englishman realises. Perhaps from these passing years the future historian will get material for the opening chapters of his work on "British Trade: its Decline and Fall."