Faces in the Strand
When you ride up the Strand on top of an omnibus—and probably in rain—please remember that someone is envying you with all his heart, that someone would give six months' pay to sit in your damp seat and see the lines of traffic converge on Charing Cross.
To the west in Canada, to the south in Africa, to the east in India, and far over the sea in Australia and New Zealand, are the lonely men. Where the red border line of Empire ends on the map in an alien colour are the little outposts in which these men work and dream. At the end of day they ram down the tobacco in their pipes and think of home with the characteristic sentimentality of the exile, for solitude makes a man very like a child. "Lord to be in London now!" How many times in the twenty-four hours does this cry go up all over the earth? We who take our London carelessly as a matter of course can have no conception of its meaning to these wanderers who, feeling the ache of home-sickness, are too old to cry.
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The Strand!
That means London in shack, bungalow, and camp. It means more: it symbolizes—home! Not Piccadilly, not Pall Mall, not fashionable Mayfair or Belgravia, but the curious old Victorian Strand.
What a street it is. It does not belong to London. Piccadilly, Regent Street, and Oxford Street stole its birthright long ago. It belongs to the Empire. Look at its shops. They are full of pith helmets and spine pads, veld shirts and tropical drill, ammunition belts and puttees. Your smart subaltern going out to join the Indian cavalry may buy his clothes in Savile Row, but your old colonial, who has been pegging down the flag somewhere for the best part of his life, comes back to shop in the Strand, to walk in the Strand, to exult in the Strand....
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Take the faces. In days when colonials come home you will find nothing more interesting in London. The exile makes straight for the Strand; if he does not know it he makes its acquaintance at once, joyfully, reverently; for he has heard men speak of it as men speak of their mothers. As he walks along he begins to believe that he has really come home.
You will see him shouldering his way gingerly through the crowds with the gentleness of a big man not used to pavements, and he looks up at the landmarks, a shop where he bought a gun once, a restaurant where once Mary ... well, never mind, that was over long ago. Or he may be that strange thing, a tenderfoot in London, a tenderfoot from the prairies or the veld or the Afghan frontier. He is fulfilling his destiny: He is walking down the Strand! When he gets back men will say to him: "Well, and how did you find London?"