by George Ade
CHAPTER IV
HOW IT FEELS TO GET INTO LONDON AND THEN BE ENGULFED.
One good thing about London is that, in spite of its enormous size, youare there when you arrive. Take Chicago, by way of contrast. If youarrive in Chicago along about the middle of the afternoon you may be atthe station by night.
The stranger heading into Chicago looks out of the window at a countrystation and sees a policeman standing on the platform. Beyond is asign indicating that the wagon road winding away toward the sunset is287th street, or thereabouts.
"We are now in Chicago," says someone who has been over the road before.
The traveller, surprised to learn that he has arrived at hisdestination, puts his magazine and travelling cap into the valise,shakes out his overcoat, calls on the porter to come and brush him, andthen sits on the end of the seat waiting for the brakeman to announcethe terminal station. After a half-hour of intermittent suburbs andglorious sweeps of virgin prairie he begins to think that there is somemistake, so he opens his valise and takes out the magazine and readsanother story.
Suddenly he looks out of the window and notices that the train hasentered the crowded city. He puts on his overcoat, picks up his valiseand stands in the aisle, so as to be ready to step right off as soon asthe train stops.
The train passes street after street and rattles through grimy yardsand past towering elevators, and in ten minutes the traveller tires ofstanding and goes back to his seat. The porter comes and brushes himagain, and he looks out at several viaducts leading over to a skylineof factories and breweries, and begins to see the masts of ships pokingup in the most unexpected places. At last, when he has looked at whatseems to be one hundred miles of architectural hash floating in smokeand has begun to doubt that there is a terminal station, he hears thewelcome call, "Shuh-kawgo!"
When you are London bound the train leaves the green country (for thecountry is green, even in February), dashes into a region of closelybuilt streets, and you look out from the elevated train across anendless expanse of chimney-pots. Two or three stations, plated withenameled advertising signs, buzz past. The pall of smoky fog becomesheavier and the streets more crowded. Next, the train has come to agrinding stop under a huge vaulted roof. The noise of the wheels giveway to the roar of London town.
You step down and out and fall into the arms of a porter who wishes tocarry your "bags." You are in the midst of parallel tracks andshifting trains. Beyond the platform is a scramble of cabs. Thesounds of the busy station are joined into a deafening monotone. Youshout into the ear of your travelling companion to get a "four-wheeler"while you watch the trunks.
He struggles away to hail a four-wheeler. You push your way with theothers down toward the front of the train to where the baggage is beingthrown out on the platform. You seize a porter and engage him toattend to the handling of the trunks. As you point them out he loadsthem onto a truck. Your companion arrives in a wild-eyed search foryou.
"I've got a four-wheeler," he gasps. "All the baggage here?"
"Yes, yes, yes."
Everybody is excited and hopping about, put into a state of hysteria bythe horrible hubbub and confusion.
"It's number 48."
The porter handling the truck leads the way to the cab platform andhowls "Forty-ite! Forty-ite!"
"'Ere you are," shouts forty-eight, who is wedged in behind two hansoms.
By some miracle of driving he gets over or under or past the hansomsand comes to the platform. The steamer trunks are thrown on top andthe porter, accepting the shilling with a "'k you, sir," slams the doorbehind you.
Then you can hear your driver overhead managing his way out of theblockade.
"Pull a bit forward, cahn't you?" he shouts. Then to someone else,"'Urry up, 'urry up, cahn't you?"
You are in a tangle of wheels and lamps, but you get out of it in someway, and then the rubber tires roll easily along the spatteringpavement of a street which seems heavenly quietude.
This is the time to lean back and try to realise that you are inLondon. The town may be common and time-worn to those people going inand out of the shops, but to you it is a storehouse of novelties, alibrary of things to be learned, a museum of the landmarks of history.
We could read the names on the windows, and they were good homelyAnglo-Saxon names. We didn't have to get out of the four-wheeler andgo into the shops to convince ourselves that Messrs. Brown, Jones,Simpson, Perkins, Jackson, Smith, Thompson, Williams, and the otherswere serious men of deferential habits, who spoke in hollow whispers ofthe king, drank tea at intervals and loved a pipe of tobacco in thegarden of a Sunday morning.
Some people come to London to see the Abbey and the Tower, but I fearthat our trusty little band came to see the shop windows and the crowdsin the streets.
May the weak and imitative traveller resist the temptation to say thatFleet street is full of publishing houses, that the British museumdeserves many visits, that the Cheshire Cheese is one of the ancienttaverns, that the new monument in front of the Courts of Law marks thesite of old Temple Bar, that the chapel of King Henry VII. is a superbexample of its own style of decoration, and that one is well repaid fora trip to Hampton Court. Why seek to corroborate the testimony of somany letter-writers?
Besides, London does not consist of towers, abbeys, and museums. Theseare the remote and infrequent things. After you have left London andtry to call back the huge and restless picture to your mind, the showplaces stand dimly in the background. The London which impressed youand made you feel your own littleness and weakness was an endless swarmof people going and coming, eddying off into dark courts, streamingtoward you along sudden tributaries, whirling in pools at the openplaces, such as Piccadilly Circus and Trafalgar Square. Thousands ofhansom cabs dashed in and out of the street traffic, and the rattlingomnibuses moved along every street in a broken row, and no matter howlong you remained in London you never saw the end of that row.
You go out in London in the morning, and if you have no set programmeto hamper you, you make your way to one of those great chutes alongwhich the herds of humanity are forever driven.
If you follow the guide-book it will lead you to a chair in which aking sat 300 years ago. If you can get up an emotion by straining hardenough and find a real pleasure in looking at the moth-eaten chair,then you should follow the guide-book. If not, escape from the placeand go to the street. The men and women you find there will interestyou. They are on deck. The chair is a dead splinter of history. Allthe people in the street are the embodiment of that history. Forpurposes of actual observation I would rather encounter a live cabmanthan the intangible, atmospheric suggestion of Queen Elizabeth.
After you have been in London once you understand why your friends whohave visited it before were never able to tell you about it so that youcould understand. It is too big to be put under one focus. Thetraveller takes home only a few idiotic details of his stay. He saysthat he had to pay for his programme at the theatre, and that hecouldn't get ice at some of the restaurants.
"But tell us about London," says the insistent friend who hasconstructed a London of his own out of a thousand impressions gatheredfrom books and magazines. Then the traveller says that London islarge, he doesn't remember how many millions, and very busy, and therewasn't as much fog as he had expected, and as for the people they werenot so much different from Americans, although you never had anydifficulty in identifying an American in London. The traveller'sfriends listen in disappointment and agree that he got very little outof his trip, and that when _they_ go to London _they_ will come backand tell people the straight of it.
As a matter of fact, London is principally a sense of dizziness. Thisdizziness comes of trying to keep an intent gaze on too many humanperformances. The mind is in a blur. The impressions come withrolling swiftness. There is no room for them. The traveller overflowswith them. They spill behind him. You could track an American allaround London by the trail of excess information which
he drops in hispathway.
Of course, I have kept a journal, but that doesn't help much. Itsimply says that we went out each day and then came back to the hotelfor dinner. There was not much chance for personal experiences,because in London you are not a person. You are simply a drop of waterin a sea, and any molecular disturbances which may concern you are ofsmall moment compared to the general splash.