What a form for novelty to take, for the first night of London, for the excitement of a new life! He sank down upon the hard horse-hair sofa, and looked round with speechless dismay. Here he was shut up as in a box, closed in, as if he were in a prison. In a prison it would almost be more cheerful; you would be aware, at least, of a host of other minds, of other hearts beating. Here there was nothing. A little parlour, with a little bed-room behind; a landlady, with nodding ribbons in her cap; a door which shuts out the world. It was like waking up after a night of fiery dreams, and finding yourself shut in a closet, separated from everything—the blind drawn, the door closed, the room shut up, and the young victim all alone.
CHAPTER II.
LONDON.
He had eaten, for he was hungry, and ham and bread and butter are not to be despised when nothing better is to be had. Even, which was curious to his state of mind, he had eaten largely, putting up before him the railway book which he had not read on his journey, and going on unconsciously with his vigorous, youthful appetite. This, the first act of his solitude, was by no means so disagreeable as he had feared. It increased his personal comfort, for he had eaten scarcely anything all day, and the increase of personal comfort ameliorates everything. When he had finished, he carried one of his candles to a small table near the window, and sat down there and read on, finishing his book, which had interested him. When he had closed it, and laid it on the table, the realisation of all the circumstances, which returned to his mind, was not so heavy as the first time. His heart began to spring up again, after being crushed under the foot of fate. It began to throb and tingle with the thought that he was in London, on the border of everything that was most living and desirable. The little fumes of interest of his story increased the effect by soothing away his personal misery. And now, as he sat in the small, silent room, something came to him which he had been conscious of all along, without knowing what it was, a sound continuous, like the far-off sound of the sea or of the wind, but subdued, as though the storm was far off, a sound which, now that he was free from those claims made by his lowered bodily condition upon his mind, became more and more apparent, filling the air with an uninterrupted murmur. What was it?
He sat up and listened, and then, with an excitement which made his heart jump, he recognised what it was. It was London! Had he not read in many a book of that great, low volume of sound, which some people described as the sound of many waters, and some as the distant roar of a tempest. It was soft here in his little hermitage, amid the strange solitude and silence, but rolled and murmured continuous, never ending. He perceived now that he had noticed it from the first moment, that all along he had wondered when it would stop, vaguely disquieted by it without knowing what it was; and now he knew that it would never stop, that it was the breath of the great multitude, the hum of their endless going on and on. John sat and listened to it till it went to his head, exciting him like wine. He could not rest. The contrast of this little prison-chamber in which he sat, and all that was implied in that low, continuous roar and hum of men, stirred his imagination more and more. He got up and opened the window, and looked out. Opposite to him was the great mass of building dark against the sky, which seemed to oppress and stifle the neighbourhood, taking away the air; but outside of that, away across the river where the world was, the hum, the roar, the continuous roll of sound came stronger and stronger. It called upon the young soul which stood and throbbed and listened. He had the habits of his youth and innocence strong upon him—a sort of unspoken sense of duty that restrained him and kept him from following his own impulses. It was not till some time had elapsed that he began to think it possible to obey that call—to go out and see what it was which gave forth that mighty voice. When the thought entered his mind it filled all his veins with excitement. Should he go? Why should he not go? No word had been said to him to bind him to remain where he was. It was not to waste day and night shut up in a dreary little room that he had come to London. He looked round upon the blank, grey walls, and found their bondage intolerable. It was like a box in which he was shut up. His brain and his veins seemed to be swelling, bursting with life that must have an outlet somehow. No, certainly, he could not stay there. He must have air and room to breathe; he must see for himself what was meant by London. But John, even in his excitement, was prudent. He put away his watch—which was not the one Mrs. Egerton had given him, but the old, dear silver one, the one that had no value at all and yet so great a value. He was aware that in London the natural thing was to rob a countryman, to take his watch from him. He would not expose his treasure to such a risk; but when he had laid that away he felt, with confidence, that there was nothing else to lose. They might hustle or knock him down, if they could, but there was nothing else they could do to him. Nevertheless, it was with something of that warlike exhilaration, with which a struggle is foreseen at his age, that John buttoned his coat and took his hat. He felt that ‘they’ (though he had not the least notion who they might be) would not have an easy bargain of him.
He went out without even being remarked. No ‘Where are you going?’ ‘When will you come back?’ to impede his liberty. That fact also went to his heart a little. He had felt his loneliness very forlorn—now he felt it exciting, exhilarating. He set his hat firmly on his head, and drew a long breath when he felt the fresh air of the night, so different from that of any parlour, encircle him with its coolness and vastness. That, too, has an intoxication in it which everything that is young acknowledges. The air may be sober in the morning—it is like wine at night. The darkness has a mystery, a magic in it—the lights twinkling through it—the world made into something ideal, in which miracles are. John stood still for a moment at the door, realising that he was there, that he was unshackled—his own master—and then, drawn by the great voice that called and called him, he turned his face towards the distant blazing of the lights, and set out—to discover that new world.
To discover London! how many do it every day, with hearts beating high, with hopes immeasurable, which so often collapse and come to nothing; but this is not the time for moralising. John set out. His way began in the darkness of this little street, with its little houses, faced by the great sombre shadow of the hospital, which shut out the air from it and the sky. He plunged into the darkness at first, making his way between rows of insignificant buildings, with a feeble shop here and there flashing its faint illumination, and then, with a great sweep of fresh air seizing him, came out upon the bridge. The sky was full of the clearness of spring, though there was no moon. The river flowed dark and silent below, faintly visible further up the stream in pale streaks of reflection, across which would rise a dark and ghostly shadow of something floating, a barge, a heavy blackness in the middle of the faint light; but lamps blazing overhead, the glare of gas, and here and there the chill contradictory artificial moon of the electric light ‘swearing’ horribly, as the French say, with all the yellow lamps around. The murmur of sound grew and grew as the boy went on; it was a rhythmic roar as of waves beating against a shore, or the rush of a prodigious waterfall, a great moral Niagara, bigger than any physical falls, however gigantic. It was made up of the sounds of carriages of every description, of voices, the hum of the crowd constantly broken by some shrill interruption of a cry or shout, which gave emphasis to the general continual, unfailing current of sound. He hurried along, quickening his pace, led by it as if it had been a syren’s song.
On the other side of the river a noble mass of walls and towers rose against the night. He guessed what it was, and his heart beat high. Then suddenly he was over the bridge, he was in it, in the very crowd itself, among the thunder of the carriages, the perpetual movement of the passengers, the very heart of London—he thought even, in awe, holding his breath—of the world. Was that Parliament? He got as near as he could and watched the carriages, the heads appearing at the windows, men in whose hands was the fate of the world. John felt as if he had some hand in it all as he watched them dashing up to the doorway, sometimes cheered, with a running fire of remark volleying about from the voices of the crowd. It was all so unusual, that he could scarcely make out at first what the people about him said; and, when he understood the words, he did not understand the allusions, not knowing who the members were or anything but that they were members, and therefore surrounded with a halo of wonder and interest. Presently one of the men standing near began to perceive his ignorance and curiosity, and to offer explanations. But John was not so simple as that, he said to himself. He knew that the danger of London was to listen to people who expressed themselves benevolently towards you, and wanted to give you information. He withdrew accordingly from that spot, and by-and-by, feeling that there were still other worlds beyond, left this scene of overwhelming interest altogether, promising himself that he would look up all the prints in the shop windows, and so learn to identify the members of parliament himself.
The dark shadow to his right hand was that of the Abbey. He held his breath with awe, but he was in no mood for the silence and darkness. He followed the roar and crush of the crowd through a dark, broad, vacant street or two until he emerged into another kind of blaze and din, into the tumult and bustle and noise and commotion of the Strand. Here the shops, the lights, the wild confusion of traffic, the hoarse cries, the flare and glare and riot, the wild medley of life, the wretched figures in squalid groups, the gentlemen passing with evening dress under their overcoats, the ragged and shouting vendors of the newspapers, the crowds rushing to the theatres, the other crowds that hung upon their steps and importuned them with unnecessary services, ended in turning altogether John’s young and unaccustomed brain. He was hustled by the ceaseless stream of people rushing past him in both ways, coming and going, and after a while felt himself like a straw upon a river, carried along without knowing where he was going, tossed into a corner, seized again by the stream, swept away breathless, with a strange pleasure and wonder and disgust and incomprehension. He was doing nothing but gazing, looking on wondering where they were all going, what they all meant, what need there was to hurry so, to shout so; and yet he felt as if he too were living, as he never before had lived all his life.
Strange illusion; an older man perhaps would have concluded that here was no real life at all, but only a fantastic, half-conscious dream. Half the people streaming along were doing it by no will of their own, but only because of the treadmill action of habit, which made them fancy this way of spending the evening the natural thing to do—and that to go somewhere, to do something, as they said—that is to frequent noisy places in which the depth of dulness was touched, yet where rampant folly extracted a strained laugh—or to bustle out and in of swinging doors, and exchange jests at bars, and rub shoulders with crowds, coming and going—was life. It was life indeed for the poor hangers-on greedy for pence or sixpences, to the poor hawkers of miserable merchandises, to the servants of the crowd. To them it was fatigue, cold, disappointment, weary waiting, miserable snatches at recompense, eager greed, and accumulation and gain; bread, perhaps to poor little children in squalid rooms somewhere about, or whisky at the street corners—at all events, a real yet possible existence, the only one of which they were conscious or capable. The more wretched in such scenes have the advantage of the less. The newspaper boy, the girl with her poor basket of faded flowers, the hundred other vassals of the crowd are real in their poor work and competition. It is their masters, the lords of unrule, who are the ghosts.
John, driven hither and thither by the currents of passengers, happily was as unaware as a woman of the darker and more horrible dangers of the streets. No squalid siren smiled for him; he did not understand these profounder depths. But the confusion and the noise, and the strange contrast of pleasure and wretchedness, the carriages passing, with pretty glimpses of white figures bound for the theatres, the groups of the ragged and miserable on the pavement, the whole resounding, conflicting, moving world gave him a sort of intoxication, so that he scarcely knew what he was about, or where he was.