The Emily Emmins Papers

“Yes,” I said, with dignity and decision, “if you will keep away from me for two days, and do all you can to keep others away.”

She promised, and it was more of a task than it might seem, for as I sat in my deck-chair, or, oftener, at a table in the library, surrounded by Baedekers, time-tables, maps, guide-books, and Hare’s Walks in London, many of the socially inclined or curious-minded paused to make a tentative remark. My replies were so coolly polite that they rarely ventured on a second observation, but I soon discovered that my laughing friend had told her comrades what I was doing, and they awaited the result.

It is strange what trivialities will interest the idle minds of those who dawdle about in the library of an ocean steamer.

Jane would occasionally come and stand by me, saying wisely, “Are you still making your itinnery?”

When I said yes, she sighed and smiled and ran away, being desirous not to bother.

The first morning I engaged in this work, I read interestedly of picture-galleries and architectural specialties. That afternoon my interest waned, and I studied time-tables and statistical information. The next morning I grew sick of the whole performance and, bundling the books and maps away, I went out to my deck-chair, and idled away the hours in waking dreams that never were on sea or land.

That afternoon the Bold-Faced Jig approached me.

“It’s all over,” I said. “I’ve capitulated. I make no plans while I’m on this blessed ocean. It’s wicked to do anything at all but to do nothing.”

“And don’t you want my advice?” she asked, laughing still.

“I don’t care,” I answered. “You can voice your advice if you choose. I sha’n’t listen to it, much less follow it.”

Her girlish laughter rang out again. “That was my advice,” she said. “I was going to tell you not to plan any trip while you are at sea. Just enjoy the days as they come and go; don’t count them; don’t do anything at all but just be.

“I’m not through yet,” she went on. “Don’t write any letters or read any books. Don’t study human nature, and of all things don’t voluntarily make acquaintances. If they happen along, as I did, chat a bit if you choose, and when they pass on, forget them.”

And so I took advice after all. I made no plans, I made no abstruse diagnoses of human character, I made no acquaintances save such as casually happened of themselves. And the days passed in a sort of rose-colored haze, as indefinite as a foggy sunrise, and as satisfying as a painted nocturne of Whistler’s. And so, my first impressions of my first ocean crossing are indeed enviable.

III

“In England – Now!”

The trip from Liverpool to London I found to be a green glimpse of England in the shape of a biograph. But the word green, as we say it in our haste, is utterly inadequate to apply to the color of the English landscape. Though of varying shades, it is always green to the nth power; it is a saturated solution of green; it is a green that sinks into the eye with a sensation of indelibility. And as this green flew by me, I watched it from the window of a car most disappointingly like our own Pullmans.

I had hoped for the humorous absurdities of the compartmented English trains. I had almost expected to see sitting opposite me a gentleman dressed in white paper, and I involuntarily watched for a guard who should look at me through a telescope, and say “You’re travelling the wrong way.”

For my most definite impressions of English railway carriages had been gained from my “Alice,” and I was annoyed to find myself booked for a large arm-chair seat in a parlor car, with my luggage checked to its London destination on “the American plan”!

What, pray, was the use of coming abroad, if one was to have all the comforts of home?

As if to add to the unsatisfactoriness of my first impressions of English travel, I found myself sitting opposite a young American woman.

We faced each other across a small table, covered with what seemed to be green baize, but was more likely the reflection of the insistent landscape.

The lady was one of those hopeless, helpless, newly rich, that affect so strongly the standing of Americans in Europe.

She was blatantly pretty, and began to talk at once, apparently quite oblivious of the self-evident fact that I wanted to absorb in silence that flying green, to which her own nature was evidently quite impervious.

“Your first trip?” she said, though I never knew how she guessed it. “My! it must be quite an event in your life. Now it’s only an incident in mine.”

“You come often, then?” said I, not specially interested.

“Yes; that is, we shall come every summer now. You see, he made a lot of money in copper, – that’s my husband over there, the one with the plaid travelling-cap, – so we can travel as much as we like. We’ve planned a long trip for this year, and we’ve got to hustle, I can tell you. I’m awfully systematic. I’ve bought all the Baedekers, and this year I’m going to see everything that’s marked with a double star. You know those are the ‘sights which should on no account be omitted.’ Then next year we’ll do up the single stars, and after that we can take things more leisurely.”

“You’ve never been over before, then?” I observed.

“No,” she admitted, a little reluctantly; “I went to California last year. I think Americans ought to see their own country first.”

I couldn’t help wishing she had chosen this year for her California trip, but the accumulation of green vision had somehow magicked me into a mood of cooing amiability, and I good-naturedly assisted her to prattle on, by offering an encouraging word now and then.

“He’s so good to me,” she said, nodding toward her husband. “He says he welcomes the coming and speeds the parting dollar. Isn’t that cute? He’s an awfully witty man.”

She described the home he had just built for her in Chicago, and it seemed to be a sort of Liberal Arts Building set in the last scene of a comic opera.

For a moment, I left the green to itself, while I looked at my unrefractive countrywoman with an emotion evenly divided between pity and envy. For had she not reached the ultimate happiness, the apotheosis of content only possible to the wealthy Nitro-Bromide? And what was I that I should depreciate such soul-filling satisfaction? And why should my carping analysis dub it ignorance? Why, indeed!

After a few more green miles, an important-mannered guard, who proved to be also guide, philosopher, and friend, piloted me to a dining-car which might have been a part of the rolling-stock of the Pennsylvania Railroad.

Nothing about it suggested the anticipated English discomfort, unless it might be the racks for the glasses, which, after all, relieved one of certain vague apprehensions.

But at dinner it was my good luck to sit in a quartet, the other three members of which were typical English people.

I suppose it is a sort of reflex nervous action that makes people who eat together chummy at once. The fact of doing the same thing at the same time creates an involuntary sympathy which expands with the effects of physical refreshment.

I patted myself on my mental shoulder as I looked at the three pleasant English faces, and I suddenly became aware that, though of a different color, they affected me with exactly the same sensation as the clean, green English scenery.

This, I conclude, was because English people are so essentially a part of their landscape, a statement true of no Americans save the aboriginal Indian tribes.

My table-mates were a perfect specimen of the British matron, her husband, and her daughter. I should describe them as well-bred, but that term seems to imply an effect of acquisition by means of outside influences. They were, rather, well-born, in a sense that implies congenital good-breeding.

Their name was Travers, and we slid into conversation as easily as a launching ship slides down into the water. Naturally I asked them to tell me of London, explaining that it was my first visit there, and I wished to know how to manage it.

“What London do you want to use?” asked Mr. Travers, interestedly. “You know there are many Londons for the entertainment of visitors. We can give you the Baedeker London, or Dickens’s London, or Stevenson’s London, or Bernard Shaw’s London, or Whistler’s London – ”

“Or our own W. D. Howells’s London,” I finished, as he paused in his catalogue.

“I think,” I went on, “the London I want is a composite affair, and I shall compile it as I go along. You know Browning says ‘The world is made for each of us,’ and so I think there’s a London made for each of us, and we have only to pick it out from among the myriad others.”

“That’s quite true,” said Mrs. Travers. “You’ll be using, do you see, many bits of those Londons mentioned, but combining them in such a way as to make an individual London all your own.”

The prospect delighted me, and I mentally resolved to build up such a London as never was on land or sea.

“But,” I observed, “aside from an individually theorized London, there must be a practical side that is an inevitable accompaniment. There must be facts as well as opinions. I should be most glad of any hints or advices from experienced and kind-hearted Londoners.”

“Without doubt,” said Mr. Travers, “the question trembling on the tip of your tongue is the one that trembles on the tip of every American tongue that lands on our shores – ‘What fee shall I give a cabman?’”

I laughed outright at this, for it was indeed one of my collection of tongue-tipped questions.

“But, sadly enough,” went on the Englishman, “it is a question that it is useless for me to answer you at present. An American must be in London for four years before he can believe the true solution of the cab-fee problem. The correct procedure is to give the cabby nothing beyond his legal fare. If you give him tuppence, he looks at you reproachfully; if you give him fourpence, he scowls at you fearfully; if you give him sixpence, he treats you to his verbal opinion of you in choice Billingsgate. Whereas, if you give him no gratuity, he assumes that you have lived here for four years, and lifts his hat to you with the greatest respect.”

“Why can’t I follow your rule at once?” I demanded.

“I do not know,” returned Mr. Travers. “Nobody knows; but the fact remains that you cannot. You think you believe the theory now, because you hear me set it forth with an air of authority; but it will take you at least four years to attain a true working knowledge of it. Moreover, you will ask every Englishman you meet regarding cab-fees, and so conflicting will be their advices that you will change your tactics with every hansom you ride in.”

“Then,” said I, with an air of independence, “I shall keep out of hansom-cabs, until I am fully determined what course to pursue in this regard.”

“But you can’t, my dear lady,” continued my instructor. “To be in London is to be in a hansom. They are inevitable.”

“Why not omnibuses?” I asked, eager for general information. “I have long wanted to ride in or on a London ’bus.”

Mr. Travers’s eyes twinkled.

“You have an American joke,” he said, “which cautions people against going into the water before they learn how to swim. I will give you an infallible rule for ’buses: never get on a London ’bus until you have learned to get on and off of them while they are in motion.”

“What waggery!” observed Mrs. Travers, in a calm, unamused tone, and I suddenly realized that I was in the midst of an English sense of humor.

The dinner progressed methodically through a series of specified courses, and when we had reached the vegetable marrow I had ceased to regard the green distance outside and gave my full attention to my lucky find of the Real Thing in English people.

Mr. Travers’s advice was always excellent and practical, though usually hidden in a jest of somewhat heavy persiflage.

We discussed the English tendency to elide letters or syllables from their proper names, falling back on the time-worn example of the American who complained that Englishmen spell a name B-e-a-u-c-h-a-m-p and pronounce it Chumley.

“But it’s better for an American,” said Mr. Travers, “to pronounce a name as it is spelled than to elide at his own sweet will. I met a Chicagoan last summer, who said he intended to run out to Win’c’s’le.”

“What did he mean?” I asked, in my ignorance.

“Windsor Castle,” replied Mr. Travers, gravely.

The mention of Chicago made me remember my companion in the parlor car, and I spoke of her as one type of the American tourist.

“I saw her,” said Mrs. Travers, with that inimitable air of separateness that belongs to the true Londoner; “she is not interesting. Merely a smart party who wears a hat.”

As this so competently described the lady from Chicago, I began to suspect, what I later came thoroughly to realize, that the English are wonderfully adept in the making of picturesque phrases.

During our animated conversation, Miss Travers had said almost nothing.

I had read of the mental blankness of the British Young Person, and was not altogether surprised at this.

But the girl was a delight to look at. By no means of the pink-cheeked, red-lipped variety immortalized in English novels, she was of a delicate build, with a face of transparent whiteness. Her soft light brown hair was carelessly arranged, and her violet eyes would have been pathetic but for a flashing, merry twinkle when she occasionally raised their heavy, creamy lids.

Remembering Mrs. Travers’s aptness in coining phrases of description, I tried to put Rosalind Travers into a few words, but was obliged to borrow from the Master-Coiner, and I called her “The Person of Moonshine.”

By the time I was having my first interview with real Cheddar cheese, the Traverses were inviting me to visit them, and I was gladly accepting their delightfully hospitable and unmistakably sincere invitation.

Scrupulously careful to bid good-bye to my Chicago friend before we reached London, alone I stepped from the train at Euston Station with a feeling of infinite anticipation.

Owing probably to an over-excited imagination, the mere physical atmosphere of the city impressed me as something quite different from any city I had ever seen. I felt as if I had at last come into my own, and had far more the attitude of a returning wanderer than a visiting stranger.

The hansom-cabs did not appear any different from the New York vehicles of the same name, but I climbed into one without that vague wonder as to whether it wouldn’t be cheaper to buy the outfit than to pay my fare.

My destination was a club in Piccadilly – a woman’s club, which I had joined for the sole purpose of using its house as an abiding-place.

The cab-driver was cordial, even solicitous about my comfort, but finally myself and my hand-luggage were carefully stowed away, the glass was put down, and we started.

It was after dark, and it was raining, two conditions which might appall an unescorted woman in a strange city. The rain was of that ridiculous English sort, where the drops do not fall, but play around in the air, now and then whisking into the faces of passers-by, but never spoiling their clothes. It was enough, though, to wet the asphalt, and when we swung into Piccadilly, and the flashing lights from everywhere dived down into the street, and rippled themselves across the wet blackness of the pavement, I suddenly realized that I was driving over one of the most beautiful things in the world.

I looked out through my hansom-glass darkly, at London. Unknown, mysterious, silent, but enticing with its twinkling eyes, it was like a masked beauty at a ball. Yet, beneath that mocking, elusive witchery, I was conscious of an implied promise, that my London would yet unmask, and I should know and love her face to face.

IV

Mayfair in the Fair Month of May

I suppose that the earliest thing that happens anywhere is the London dawn. In all my life, my waking hours had never reached three o’clock A.M., from either direction, and when, on the first morning after my arrival in London, I was awakened at that hour by a gently intrusive daybreak, I felt as if I had received a personal and intentional affront.

I rose, and stalked to the window, with an air of haughty reproach, intending to close the shutters tightly until a more seemly hour.

As there are only six window-shutters in the whole city of London, it is not surprising that none of these was attached to my window; but it really didn’t matter, for after reaching the window that morning I never thought of a shutter again until I returned to America.

My window, which was a large French affair in three parts, looked out upon Piccadilly. It opened on a small stone-railed balcony, and as I looked out three pigeons looked in. They were of the fat and pompous kind and they strutted along the railing, with a frankly sociable air, cocking their heads pertly in an endeavor to draw my attention to the glistening iridescence of their neck-feathers.

I liked the pigeons, and I told them so, but even better I liked the sight across the street.

Green Park at dawn is as solemnly impressive as the interior of Westminster Abbey. The trees sway and quiver, giving an occasional glimpse of the Clock Tower of Parliament House. From the throats of myriad birds comes a sound as of one blended twitter, and a strange, unreal radiance pervades the whole scene. With the rapidly increasing daylight definiteness ensues, and railings, benches, roadway, and other details of the Park add strength to the picture.

Having seen three o’clock in Green Park, I promptly forgot my errand with the shutters, and, hastily donning conventional morning costume, I prepared to watch four o’clock, and five, and six appear from the same direction.

As outlines became clearer I noticed a park bench directly opposite my window, on which sat four old women. All were garbed in black, and all were sleeping soundly. I was then unaware of the large proportion of the elderly feminine in London’s seamy side of population, and so casual was the aspect of the quartet that it did not occur to me they were occupying the only earthly home they possessed.

They seemed to me more like duplicate Mrs. Lecks and Mrs. Aleshines, who had paused for a time in Green Park instead of in mid-ocean.

But after I had seen the same women there at three o’clock on a dozen consecutive mornings I began to realize that they were part of the landscape.

Nor was I unduly sorry for them. They sat on that bench with the same air of voluntary appropriation that marked the birds in the trees, or the pigeons on the railing. And as the days went on I became accustomed to seeing them there, and ceased to feel any inclination to go out and try to persuade them to enter an old ladies’ home.

At about seven o’clock the omnibuses began to ply. I had never known before what was indicated by the verb to ply. But I saw at once that it is the only word that properly expresses the peculiar gait of an omnibus, which is a cross between a rolling lurch and a lumbering wobble. Fascination is a mild term for the effect these things had on me.

One omnibus might not so enthrall me. I don’t know; I have never seen one omnibus alone. But the procession of them along Piccadilly is the one thing on earth of which I cannot conceive myself becoming tired.

Their color, form, motion, and sound all partake of the primeval, and their continuity of effect is eternal.

My Baedeker tells me that the first omnibuses plying in London were “much heavier and clumsier than those now in use.” But of course this is a mistake, for they couldn’t have been.

I have heard that tucked away among the gay-colored advertisements that are patchworked all over these moving Mammoth Caves are small and neatly-lettered signs designating destinations. I do not know this. I have never been able to find them. But it doesn’t matter. To get to Hampstead Heath, you take a Bovril; to go to the City, take Carter’s Ink; and to get anywhere in a hurry, jump on a Horlick’s Malted Milk. There is also a graceful serpentine legend lettered down the back of each ’bus, but as this usually says “Liverpool Street,” I think it can’t mean much.

Personally, I never patronize one of the things. They are too uncanny for me, and their ways are more devious than those of our Seventeenth Street horse-cars.

Besides, I always feared that, if I got in or on one, I couldn’t see the rest of them as a whole. And it is the unbroken continuity that, after the coloring, is their greatest charm. I have spent many hours watching the Piccadilly procession of them, “like a wounded snake drag its slow length along,” and look forward to many hours more of the same delight. But the dawn, the daybreak, and the early morning slipped away, and all too soon my first day in London had begun.

My mail brought me difficulties of all sorts. There were invitations from people, whom well-meaning mutual friends had advised of my arrival. There were offers from friends or would-be friends to escort me about on shopping or sight-seeing tours. There were cards for functions of more or less formality, and there were circulars from tradesmen and professional people.

With a Gordian-knot-cutting impulse, I tossed the whole collection into my desk, and started out alone for a morning walk.

Nor shall I ever forget that walk. Not only because it was a “first impression,” but because it was the most beautiful piece of pedestrianism that ever fell to my lot.

My clubhouse home was almost at the corner of Hamilton Place, and as I stepped from its portal out into Piccadilly I seemed to breathe the quintessence of London, past, present, and to come.

Meteorologically speaking, the atmosphere was perfect. The reputation for fogginess, that London has somehow acquired, is a base libel. Its air is marked by a dazzling clearness of haze that, more than anything else, “life’s leaden metal into gold transmutes.”

Thus exhilarated at the start, I began my stroll down Piccadilly, and at every step I added to my glowing sense of satisfied well-being. I turned north into Berkeley Street, and thus started on my first sight-seeing tour. And was it not well that I was by myself?

For the most kind and well-meaning cicerone would probably have said,

“Do you not want to see the house where Carlyle died?”

And how embarrassed would I have been to be obliged to make reply:

“No, not especially. But I do want to see where Tomlinson gave up the ghost in his house in Berkeley Square.”

Nor would my guide have been able to point out that perhaps mythical residence. But I had no trouble in finding it. Unerring instinct guided me along Berkeley Square, till I reached what I felt sure was the very house, and since I was satisfied, what mattered it to any one else?

This being accomplished, I next proceeded in a desultory and inconsequent fashion to explore Mayfair.

Aided, like John Gay, by the goddess Trivia, I knew I could

                              securely strayWhere winding alleys lead the doubtful way;The silent court and opening square explore,And long perplexing lanes untrod before.

And as I trod, I suddenly found myself in Curzon Street. This was a pleasant sensation, for did I not well know the name of Curzon Street from all the English novels I had ever read? Moreover, I knew that in one of its houses Lord Beaconsfield died, and in another the Duke of Marlborough lived. The detail of knowing which house was which possessed no interest for me.

I rambled on, marvelling at the suddenness with which streets met each other, and their calm disregard of all method or symmetry, till I began to feel like “the crooked man who walked a crooked mile.”

Attracted by the name of Half-Moon Street, I left Curzon Street for it. Shelley once lived in this street, and I selected three houses any one of which might have been his home. I went back, I traversed some delightful mewses (what is the plural of mews?), crossed Berkeley Square, and then, somehow or other, I found myself in Bond Street, and my mood changed. At first the shops seemed unattractive and I felt disappointment edging itself into my soul.

But like an ugly woman, possessed of charm, the crammed-full windows began to fascinate me, and I forgot the inadequate sidewalks and unpretentious façades in the absorbing displays of wares.