Europe Revised

by Irvin S. Cobb

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.