Part 12

Of course, “let-up” is meant in a comparative sense only, for in the bright lexicon of London there is properly no such word; but there comes at seven o’clock at least as much of a lull as is ever to be looked for here. The savage roar of the streets is dulled to a deep growl, the crowds become shuffling and idle and their relative depletion and the proportionate activity and congestion in restaurants, _pensions_, and hotel dining-rooms are eloquent of the fact that the great city is now engaged in solemn rites before the Roast Beef of Old England. Nor does the altered complexion of things come amiss to the distracted foreign visitors who, though at odds in everything else, are of one opinion in this, that, without reservation on the part of humor, during the greater part of the day they cannot see London for the people. By that they mean that the life of the streets is so intense and so varied that it proves a serious distraction from taking adequate note of the appearance and significance of the city itself. It is, therefore, with profound satisfaction that they welcome an hour in which they may devote a portion of their energy to something more edifying than jostling pedestrians or escaping sudden and sordid destruction by motor-car, hansom, or bus. It is now that the town throws off the yoke of its drivers and the very buildings become instinct with individuality and character. Every little dim and noiseless square, each broad and lordly park, the massive mansions of the great whose names have been in history for ages, business blocks of Old-World charm to which trade seems the merest incident, blackened pavements and Wren’s slender steeples, every memory-haunted nook and corner, all wrought by smoke and fog to a blood-brotherhood of neutral tones, are joining the song Father Thames is singing of dignity, power, and grandeur,—all breathe the common exultation of being London. It is more than Self-Assertion. It is Apotheosis!

If this may seem an extravagant idea to some, it is certain there can be but one mind as to the relief that comes with the “let-up.” It gives a man a chance to find himself after being lost and daunted and disheartened all day, and to square off and give the giant a good look between the eyes and happily attain to some just impression. “Some just impression” is doubtless within the possibilities, but any complete one is not. London is so vast in territory, interests, activities, and history—such a “monstrous tuberosity of civilized life,” as Carlyle observed—that it effectually defies comprehension. It cannot be taken in. Look south on it from Hornsey or Primrose Hill, or west on it from Blackwell or the Greenwich Observatory, or east from the top of the opera house at Hammersmith, or north from Crystal Palace, and you may see a vast prairie of house-tops and sharp, aspiring steeples and irregular, twisting streets, but you also observe quite the same kind of prairies rolling away under the horizon beyond your ken. If one were to try such an experiment right at the heart of things, futility would still be obvious, for either the Victoria Tower of Parliament or the slightly higher dome of St. Paul’s lifts you only four hundred feet above the pavement to hang like a lookout in midocean. There might be hope of a completer impression if you tried an aëroplane; in which case prostrate London-town would take the seeming of some fabulous “questing beste” of the “Morte d’Arthur,” in format the traditional lion, rotund, monstrous, and oddly marked, half-reclining and gazing fixedly seaward down the Thames. A monster, indeed, fourteen miles by ten, and of a vitality so expansive that his nebulous aura pervades an area of seven hundred square miles! Along his grim, grimy side the Thames draws a crawling blue band with a deep _U_ for the convenience of his paws as it swings around the Isle of Dogs, the Regent’s Canal marks him lightly up the shoulder and clear across the upper body, and along the profile of the head meanders the marshy River Lea. Odd green patches would stand for the parks—Regent’s on his back, Hyde, Green, and St. James’s on his flank, and on his right ear, Victoria. At the present hour he is speckled with a myriad of lights from the tip of his tail to his chin-whisker, and doubtless in all respects looks wild enough to daunt Sir Launcelot himself.

To the average visitor London is the Strand, Fleet Street, Regent Street, the Embankment, Piccadilly Circus, Trafalgar Square, the British Museum, and the Tower. But tastes differ in this as in other things, and Boswell was doubtless justified in amusing himself by noting how different London was to different people. Opinions on the subject have always been very decided but hopelessly conflicting. “Sir,” quoth Dr. Johnson to Boswell at the Mitre Tavern, “the happiness of London is not to be conceived but by those who have been in it.” Note Heinrich Heine, on the other hand, observing in his “English Fragments”: “Do not send a philosopher to London, and, for Heaven’s sake, do not send a poet. The grim seriousness of all things; the colossal monotony; the engine-like activity; the moroseness even of pleasure; and the whole of this exaggerated London will break his heart.” There is wisdom, as always, in a happy mean; and one might do worse than to go about his sight-seeing with the whetted curiosity and flaming imagination of those country children once described by Leigh Hunt as fancying they see “the Duke of Wellington standing with his sword drawn in Apsley House, and the Queen, sitting with her crown on, eating barley-sugar in Buckingham Palace.”

To such a mood as this, evening impressions are fresh and vivid, and the goggle-eyed stranger, suddenly set down at seven o’clock before the Shaftesbury Fountain in the centre of Piccadilly Circus,—“feeling in heart and soul the shock of the huge town’s first presence,”—would probably have his own opinion of any intimation that there was really very little doing at that time in view of the hour and the absence of Londoners in the country. He would rather incline to the view of the Chinese prince who took one look at the wave of humanity sweeping across London Bridge and went back to his hotel and wrote home that he had reached the spot where all human life originates. Certainly the stranger at Piccadilly Circus would need but one wild glance at the glare and blaze of lights, the excitement around the “Cri,” the beckoning bill-boards of the Pavilion, the dazzle of shop windows in the sweeping curve of the Regent Street quadrant and the tremendous interweaving of carriages, swift hansoms, delivery bicycles, lumbering busses, “taxis,” “flys,” and “growlers,” to start him shouting to the nearest “Bobby” through the roar of the wild surge for safe passage to the sidewalk—which would be readily and obligingly accomplished by that calmest and most tranquil of officials, the mere lift of whose hand is as miraculously effective as the presence of a regiment at “charge.”

And yet the intimation to the stranger would be entirely within the facts, for a good proportion of Londoners are too far away to hear the seven o’clock bells ring in town. The Briton’s passion for out of doors leads him far afield. Thousands are at this hour in the surf at Brighton or strolling on the terraced streets of the chalk cliffs there; hundreds are at Harrow enjoying the wide prospect beloved by the boy Byron; others in the pleasant villages of Hatfield and St. Albans; some are spying for deer in Epping Forest; and a happy multitude is turning from the “Maze” and Dutch Gardens of Hampton Court to roll homeward by brake and motor-car along the incomparable chestnut avenue of Bushy Park, among the placid deer of Richmond, and the manifold delights of Kew Gardens. For hours the “tubes,” surface cars, and busses have been working to capacity to get business men home, and loaded trains have been groaning out of Charing Cross, Euston, Paddington, St. Pancras, Victoria, and Waterloo. They have all arrived by now at their various destinations—around the picturesque Common of Clapham, the breezy heights of Highgate, the river greens of Hammersmith, the lush meadows of Dulwich, the stuccoed villas of Islington, the quietude of Bethnal Green, or the wooded gardens of Brixton Road. Fancy residential property, in every guise of architectural surprises, is drowsing in the shade of elm and oak and poplar and humming to the contented chatter of reunited families. The fortunate stranger whom Sir Launcelot has “asked down” to “Joyous Garde” is reveling in the generous roast that makes its august appearance between courses of Scotch salmon and Surrey fowl, and presently there will be politics and Havanas after the ladies have left, and later on a general assembling in a serene walled garden with light laughter and low-voiced talk and mild discussion of water-parties, dinners, and dances.

The London parks are in full revelry now, with bands at play and tens of thousands of loiterers crowding the benches and moving along broad, graveled walks under the deep shadows of old elms and in the fragrance of trim flowerbeds. At Hampstead Heath, for example, not so much as the ghost of a highwayman haunts the bracken-carpeted hills, and East-Enders are out there in force along “Judge’s Walk,” and in the “Vale of Health” that Keats and Leigh Hunt admired, or up at the “Flagstaff” inspecting “Jack Straw’s Castle,” as Dickens so often did, or speculating upon the sources of the ponds with as much aplomb as ever did Mr. Pickwick himself.

Down on rugged and untamed Blackheath the band is playing at “The Point,” and in all that region where Wat Tyler and Jack Cade stirred Kent to rebellion the talk is now of London docks and the latest scores of the golfers.

Up at airy Victoria Park the swans in the ponds and the chaffinches in the hawthorn bushes are performing to enthusiastic audiences, and the Gothic Temple of the Victoria Fountain is rimmed with rough gallants and the “Sallies of their Alleys” who betray no inclination to “attempt from Love’s sickness to fly.”

The cyclists are foregathered at picturesque Battersea Park and chatting with their sweethearts over tea in the refreshment rooms, while hundreds of unemployed who can afford neither bicycle, sweetheart, nor tea gaze gloomily on the gorgeous blooms of the sub-tropical garden, loll over the balustrade of the long Thames embankment, and end up by sprawling face down on the grass or dozing fitfully on the benches.

Perhaps the largest outpouring of all is at ever popular Regent’s Park, preferred by the substantial middle-class,—long noted, like George I, for virtues rather than accomplishments. Doubtless they are now rambling through the Zoo, exploring the Botanic Gardens where flowered borders and large stone urns are spilling over with brilliant color, watching the driving in the “Outer Circle,” or swelling the throng on the long Board Walk. Hundreds on these shady acres are taking their ease with all the unction of Arden:—

“Under the greenwood tree Who loves to lie with me, And tune his merry note, Unto the sweet bird’s throat.”

In all probability tremendous admiration is being expressed at aristocratic Hyde Park, as usual, for the broad reaches of velvety turf and the venerable oaks and elms. More than one will indulge a pleasant reverie over the dead and gone who have braved it there—Pepys in his new yellow coach, dainty ladies in powder and patches flashing sparkling eyes on the gallants, and the scented, unhappy beaux who have sighed with Shenstone along these _allées_:

“When forced from dear Hebe to go What anguish I felt at my heart.”

Across the Serpentine in the children’s paradise of Kensington Gardens we should find that the Board Walk and the “Round Pond” lose none of their drawing-power with the years and that the fountains and flowers are as beautiful and as highly prized as ever. There is the additional attraction of having a chance, by keeping a sharp eye on the tops of the tall ash-trees, of catching a glimpse of Peter Pan preparing to fly home to his mother’s window.

The exclusive shades of Green Park and St. James’s have a convenient nearness that entices hundreds from the roaring thoroughfares of the neighborhood, and at this hour their old elms and graceful bowers give impartially of their repose and peace to hearts that are heavy and hearts that are gay. It would seem inevitable that thoughts must come of the royal and princely companies that once trod these ways—of Charles II, at least, strolling in St. James’s surrounded by his dogs, pausing a while to feed his ducks and then tripping gayly up the “Green Walk” for a chat with Nell Gwynn over the garden wall, while scandalized John Evelyn hurries home to make note in his journal of “a very familiar discourse between the King and Mrs. Nelly.”

The London social season being at its height during May, June, and July, while Parliament is in session, belated clerks wending homeward between seven and eight o’clock find the great houses occupied and dinner-parties in progress with as much universality as a New York clerk, under like circumstances at home, would expect to see in December. All Mayfair, Belgravia, and Pimlico is indulging in feasting and merriment, and the austere aloofness of their retired squares, with central parks high-fenced in iron from contact with the “ordinary person,” is broken by the whirl of the carriages and motors of arriving guests. The sudden flood of soft lights from the reception hall as Hawkins throws open the door, and the quick and noiseless disappearance of the conveyances, is all of a moment and our clerk finds himself disconsolately gazing at the frowning front of some solid, ivy-grown, and altogether charming old mansion, through whose carefully-drawn window draperies only the slightest of beams dares venture forth to him. Were he to indulge such a passion for walking as characterized Lord Macaulay,—said to have passed through every street of London in his day,—he would find the same thing in progress at this hour in all the exclusive region that lies in the purlieus of Buckingham Palace. Dignity, riches, elegance, and power would be his in hasty, grudging glimpses—and then the dim square again and the high iron fence. The London square, indeed, seems decorative only—trees, turf, flowers, and the fence, and the surrounding houses playing dog-in-the-manager. This is not always without its bewilderment to foreigners; and so confirmed a traveler as Théophile Gautier puzzled over the matter considerably before he dismissed it with the conclusion that it is probably satisfaction enough to the owners to have kept other people out.

If our clerk were to take the “tube” at Brompton Road and come out at Whitechapel Station in the East End, he would see the other side of the story with a vengeance. To quote Gautier again, “to be poor in London is one of the tortures forgotten by Dante.” Here the air is stifling with dirty dust, and thousands of miserable, unkempt creatures with wan and pasty faces feed, when they can muster a penny, on a choice of “black puddings,” pork-pies, “sheep-trotters,” or the mysterious, smoking “faggots.” In old Ratcliffe Highway, which is now St. George Street, they make out by munching kippers carried in hand as they go their devious ways. An occasional stale fish from Billingsgate is that much better than nothing. Yiddish seems to be the prevailing national tongue east of Aldgate Pump, and if you understand it there will be no trouble over the signs and announcements. With characteristic Hebrew thrift it is always “open season” for buyers. Each product has its special habitat. Toys or other sweatshop articles come from Houndsditch, shoes from Spitalfields, leather goods from Bermondsey, beef remnants from Smithfield, left-over poultry from Leadenhall, vegetable “seconds” from Covent Garden, birds are to be had in Club Row, meat and clothing in Brick Lane, and a general outfitting in Petticoat Lane which the reformers have rechristened Middlesex Street. As for a “screw o’ baccy” or a “mug o’ bitter,” the “pub” of any corner will answer. The University Settlement workers of Toynbee Hall are doing what men can to better conditions, but so have others tried for ages—yet here is the malodorous East End practically as unwashed and unregenerate as of old. The glimpses one catches of squalor and filth up narrow passages and of the damp and grimy “closes” that remind you of Hogarth’s drawings are apt to content the most curious, unless he be an insatiable investigator, indeed, and is willing to take his chances of being “burked.” Hand on pocket you thread narrow alleys where people are said to have been offered attractive bargains on their own watches when they reached the other end. Here after the day’s work is over and the “moke” and barrow safely stabled for the night, with a “Wot cher, chummy; ’ow yer ’oppin’ up?” our industrious coster friends, ’Arry and ’Arriet, make merry among pals at a “Free and Easy,” or lay out a couple of “thri’-p’ny bits” for seats in a local theatre, whence they emerge between acts for a “’arf-en’-’arf” or a “pot-o’-porter” with instant and painfully frank opinions if “it ’yn’t fustryte.” Dinner at “The Three Nuns,” of course, is only for state occasions. They are the people, just the same, to get most out of Hampstead Heath on a Bank Holiday or a picnic at Epping Forest any time. With them originated in days gone most of the catchy street-cries for which London was long curiously noted. But one hears no more “Bellows to Mend!” or “Three Rows a Penny Pins!” or “Cockles and Mussels, Alive, Alive oh!” or “Sweet Blooming Lavender, Six Bunches a Penny!” or “One a Penny, two a Penny, Hot Cross Buns!” or the traditional tune of “Buy a Broom!” or the barrow-woman’s “Ripe Cherries!” and “Green Rushes O!” You may, however, have a chance at “’Taters, all ’ot!” or “Three a Penny, Yarmouth Bloaters; ’ere’s yer Bloaters!” After all, it takes a very limited inspection of the East End to wish them all in Hyde Park, as the flag falls at seven-thirty, to join the hundreds of men and boys there who are out of their clothes before the signal is barely given and taking an evening plunge in the Serpentine.

Between the truffles of Mayfair and the “faggots” of Whitechapel lies the region of the menu with which the average Londoner is most familiar and which he is now exploring with profound earnestness according to his lights and shillings. Dining, as every one knows, is an important expression of the British conscience, a solemn rite of well-nigh religious momentousness. The traditional fate of the uninvited guest is his in double measure who ventures to intrude between the Briton and his beef. One might “try it on,” perhaps, on the Surrey Side where they incline to “dining from the joint” around six o’clock—though nothing short of compulsion should take a sight-seer to South London after nightfall. The shabby Southwark shore of dingy wharves and grimy sheds is half concealed in drifting shadows raised by the uncertain light of flickering gas jets and the net results are not worth the trouble of walking London Bridge, unless we except the picture of quiet dignity and mellow beauty presented by the ancient church of St. Saviour. This rare old survivor finely expresses by night the subtle sense of a long-continued veneration and the finger-touches of the passing years. And to think that St. Saviour’s was doing parish duty and was a delight to look upon long before the Globe Theatre of Shakespearean fame had reared a neighboring head! But the gloom of the Surrey Side is thicker and more discomforting than the fog. Long, monotonous, cheerless streets, poorly lighted and scantily employed after dark, emerge from drab perspectives of gloaming and fade sullenly away into others. The scattered pedestrians one encounters reflect by solemn countenance the prevailing depression and seem able to take but little heart of courage as they go their melancholy ways. The whole region appears given over to breweries, potteries, factories, and hospitals. By night Lambeth Palace itself takes on the universal brewery aspect. You even detect a vatish look to the Greenwich Observatory and mistrust some trace of beer in the famous meridian. And then the tarry hotels of Greenwich must add their quota to the general dejection by offering everything in the world in the way of fish excepting its celebrated whitebait, which was, of course, the one thing you had come for. The lights of St. George’s Circus—the Leicester Square of South London—may be few in point of fact, but they seem highly exhilarating down there; nor are you to scorn the good cheer of the comfortable old tavern hard by that rejoices in the extraordinary name of “The Elephant and Castle.” There may also be a kindly feeling for the Old Kent Road where Chevalier’s coster “knock’d ’em,” but otherwise the breweries win. There is one on the sacred site of the old Globe Theatre, something like one where stood the Tabard Inn whence Chaucer started his immortal Pilgrims for Canterbury, and you will find a brazen gin palace if you search for “The White Hart Inn,” of “Henry VI” and “Pickwick Papers.” Poor old Southwark! Her glorious days of light have passed!

“And ‘she’ shakes ‘her’ feeble head, That it seems as if ‘she’ said, ‘They are gone.’”