How different is the very atmosphere of it from America. The great open common about this house smacked of English individuality, leisure, order, stratification—anything you will. The atmosphere was mistily damp, the sun at best a golden haze. All the bare trees were covered with a thin coating of almost spring-green moss. The ground was springy, dewy. Rooks were in the sky, the trees. Little red houses in the valleys, with combination flues done in quaint individual chimney pots send upward soft spirals of blue smoke. Laborers, their earth-colored trousers strapped just below the knees by a small leather strap, appeared ever and anon; housemaids, spick and span, with black dresses, white aprons, white laces in their hair, becoming streamers of linen made into large trig bows at their backs, appeared at some door or some window of almost every home. The sun glints into such orderly, well-dressed windows; the fields suspire such dewy fragrances. You can encounter hills of sheep, creaking wains, open common land of gorse and wild berries. My little master, smartly clad, dashes by on a pony; my young mistress looks becomingly gay and superior on a Shetland or a cob. A four-year-old has a long-eared white donkey to ride. That is England.
How shall it be said—how described? It is so delicate, so remote, so refined, so smooth, a pleasant land of great verse and great thought.
CHAPTER VII
A GLIMPSE OF LONDON
After a few days I went to London for the first time—I do not count the night of my arrival, for I saw nothing but the railway terminus—and, I confess, I was not impressed as much as I might have been. I could not help thinking on this first morning, as we passed from Paddington, via Hyde Park, Marble Arch, Park Lane, Brook Street, Grosvenor Square, Berkeley Square, Piccadilly and other streets to Regent Street and the neighborhood of the Carlton Hotel, that it was beautiful, spacious, cleanly, dignified and well ordered, but not astonishingly imposing. Fortunately it was a bright and comfortable morning and the air was soft. There was a faint bluish haze over the city, which I took to be smoke; and certainly it smelled as though it were smoky. I had a sense of great life but not of crowded life, if I manage to make myself clear by that. It seemed to me at first blush as if the city might be so vast that no part was important. At every turn Barfleur, who was my ever-present monitor, was explaining, “Now this that we are coming to,” or “This that we are passing,” or “This is so and so;” and so we sped by interesting things, the city impressing me in a vague way but meaning very little at the moment. We must have passed through a long stretch of Piccadilly, for Barfleur pointed out a line of clubs, naming them—the St. James’s Club, the Savile Club, the Lyceum Club, and then St. James’s Palace.
I was duly impressed. I was seeing things which, after all, I thought, did not depend so much upon their exterior beauty or vast presence as upon the import of their lineage and connections. They were beautiful in a low, dark way, and certainly they were tinged with an atmosphere of age and respectability. After all, since life is a figment of the brain, built-up notions of things are really far more impressive in many cases than the things themselves. London is a fanfare of great names; it is a clatter of vast reputations; it is a swirl of memories and celebrated beauties and orders and distinctions. It is almost impossible any more to disassociate the real from the fictitious or, better, spiritual. There is something here which is not of brick and stone at all, but which is purely a matter of thought. It is disembodied poetry; noble ideas; delicious memories of great things; and these, after all, are better than brick and stone. The city is low—universally not more than five stories high, often not more than two, but it is beautiful. And it alternates great spaces with narrow crevices in such a way as to give a splendid variety. You can have at once a sense of being very crowded and of being very free. I can understand now Browning’s desire to include “poor old Camberwell” with Italy in the confines of romance.
The thing that struck me most in so brief a survey—we were surely not more than twenty minutes in reaching our destination—was that the buildings were largely a golden yellow in color, quite as if they had been white and time had stained them. Many other buildings looked as though they had been black originally and had been daubed white in spots. The truth is that it was quite the other way about. They had been snow white and had been sooted by the smoke until they were now nearly coal black. And only here and there had the wind and rain whipped bare white places which looked like scars or the drippings of lime. At first I thought, “How wretched.” Later I thought, “This effect is charming.”
We are so used to the new and shiny and tall in America, particularly in our larger cities, that it is very hard at first to estimate a city of equal or greater rank, which is old and low and, to a certain extent, smoky. In places there was more beauty, more surety, more dignity, more space than most of our cities have to offer. The police had an air of dignity and intelligence such as I have never seen anywhere in America. The streets were beautifully swept and clean; and I saw soldiers here and there in fine uniforms, standing outside palaces and walking in the public ways. That alone was sufficient to differentiate London from any American city. We rarely see our soldiers. They are too few. I think what I felt most of all was that I could not feel anything very definite about so great a city and that there was no use trying.
We were soon at the bank where I was to have my American order for money cashed; and then, after a short walk in a narrow street, we were at the office of Barfleur, where I caught my first glimpse of an English business house. It was very different from an American house of the same kind, for it was in an old and dark building of not more than four stories—and set down in a narrow angle off the Strand and lighted by small lead-paned windows, which in America would smack strongly of Revolutionary days. In fact we have scarcely any such buildings left. Barfleur’s private offices were on the second floor, up a small dingy staircase, and the room itself was so small that it surprised me by its coziness. I could not call it dingy. It was quaint rather, Georgian in its atmosphere, with a small open fire glowing in one corner, a great rolltop desk entirely out of keeping with the place in another, a table, a book-case, a number of photographs of celebrities framed, and the rest books. I think he apologized for, or explained the difference between, this and the average American business house, but I do not think explanations are in order. London is London. I should be sorry if it were exactly like New York, as it may yet become. The smallness and quaintness appealed to me as a fit atmosphere for a healthy business.
I should say here that this preliminary trip to London from Bridgely Level, so far as Barfleur was concerned, was intended to accomplish three things: first, to give me a preliminary glimpse of London; second, to see that I was measured and examined for certain articles of clothing in which I was, according to Barfleur, woefully lacking; and third, to see that I attended the concert of a certain Austrian singer whose singing he thought I might enjoy. It was most important that I should go, because he had to go; and since all that I did or could do was merely grist for my mill, I was delighted to accompany him.