In the cold air is the vague promise of a new day, a faint rumble of market carts and vans as if London stirs in her impressive slumber.
At the Wheel
He was sitting in the acrid unpleasantness of a London fog holding a steering-wheel and—the lives of men and women. It was Sunday.
Inside the well-lit and almost pleasant omnibus a young man, wearing his Sunday hat, and a young girl, completely Sundayfied, sat holding hands as they pretended to read a newspaper. They saw no more than each other's eyes, and what more could they possibly have seen? Portentous women with unnaturally clean children entered or made a fussy exit from time to time, bent, no doubt, on that awfulness of a London Sunday—a visit to relatives. On some faces you could read a kind of comfortable condescension that somehow suggested a glittering descent on poor relations; on others a dutiful resignation—the composure of an ordained martyr preparing to meet the lions—and you pictured a stiff and patronizing tea in a distant but exalted suburb, with criticism underlying an afternoon of smooth insincerity!
All the time the Man at the Wheel exhibited a broad and stocky back to the human comedy he was carrying; sometimes his face, tense and questioning, was turned towards the lit interior as he tried to gauge the right moment to accelerate after the descent of an agile passenger. Mostly, however, he just sat there peering into the white cotton-wool world of fog that was hung with saffron lights, his big hands in gloves, expertly and suddenly taking his vehicle from an unexpected near rush of light as a tramcar clanged past. And the passengers did not notice him. They had paid twopence to be taken in safety through the fog!
* * *
I sat there frankly admiring him.
I have never heard of any poet writing an ode to a London omnibus driver, but he always strikes me as worthy subject of praise. He may not possess the social charm of the old horse-omnibus driver, who, according to legend, wore a top hat and used his whip butt on London as a lecturer uses a wand. He is a more solemn character. Machines always leave their mark on men. The big petrol engine has created a grim, silent, crouching character who, fortunately for London and Londoner's wives and families, has no time for social pleasantries as he urges his great, red, double-decked steed through the thousand perils of a crowded street.
He has, I think, developed a sixth sense. His whole being seems acutely conscious of inches. Watch the way a press of omnibuses in High Holborn or Tottenham Court Road, or any other famous hold-up, will edge and nudge a way with a mere inch between their mudguards, all so skilfully and calmly done as though the scarlet sides of the vehicles had nerves—invisible feelers—that carried warning of danger to the rough, deft hands at the wheel.