Drawing near the Great Grey City—how I had looked forward to this moment as, alert to every impression, I stared from the window of the train! Yet at its very threshold I shrank appalled. Could I believe my eyes? There confronting me was street after street of tiny houses all built in the same way. Nay, I do not exaggerate. They were as alike as ninepins, dirty, drab cubes, each with the same oblong of sordid back-yard, the same fringe of abortive front garden. Oh what a welter of architectural crime! Could it be wondered at that the bricks of which they were composed seemed to blush with shame?
Then the roofs closed in till they formed a veritable plain, on which regiments of chimneys seemed to stand at attention amid saffron fog. Then great, gloomy corrugations, down which I could see ant-like armies moving hither and thither: then an arrest in a place of steam and smoke and skurrying and shouting: Charing Cross Station.
How it was spitefully cold! Autos squattered through the tar-black mud. A fine drizzle of rain was falling, yet save myself no one seemed to mind it—so cheery and comfortable seemed those red-faced Islanders in their City of Soot. Soot, at that moment, was to me all-dominant. Eagerly it overlaid the buildings of brick; joyfully it grimed those of stone. It swathed the monuments, and it achieved on the churches daring effects in black and grey. After all, it had undoubted artistic value. Then a smudge of it settled on my nose, and with every breath I seemed to inhale it. Finally a skittish motor bus bespattered me with that tar-like mud and I felt dirtier than ever.
But what amount of drizzle could damp my romantic ardour as suitcase in hand I stood in Trafalgar Square? Here was another occasion for that sentimental reverie which was my specialty, so I began:
“Alone in London, in the seething centre of its canorous immensity. Around me swirl the swift, incurious crowds. Oh, City of a million sorrows! here do I come to thee poor, friendless, unknown, yet oh! so rich in hope. Shall I then knock at thy countless doors in vain? Shall I then—”
A sneeze interrupted me at this point. It is hard to sneeze and be sentimental; besides, I recognised in the words I had just spoken those I had put into the mouth of Harold Cleaveshaw, hero of my novel, The Handicap. But then Harold had posed in the centre of Madison Square and addressed his remarks to the Flatiron Building, while I was addressing the Nelson Monument and a fountain whose water seemed saturated with soot.
Do not think the moment was wasted, however. Far from it. The likeness suggested an article comparing the two cities. For instance: New York, a concretion; London, an accretion; New York, an uplift; London, an outspread; New York, blatant; London, smug; New York, a city on tiptoe, raw, bright, wind-besomed; London, the nightmare of a dyspeptic chimney-sweep; New York, a city born, organic, spontaneous; London, an accident, a patchwork, a piecing on; and so on.
Pondering these and other points of contrast, I wandered up Charing Cross Road into Oxford Street. In a bookshop I saw, with a curious feeling of detachment, a sixpenny edition of my novel, The Red Corpuscle. Somehow at that moment I could scarcely associate myself with it. So absorbed was I becoming in my new part that the previous one was already unreal to me. I took up the book with positive dislike, and was turning it over when an officious shop-boy suggested:
“Don’t you want to read it, mister?”
“Heaven forbid!” I replied; “I wrote it.”