Chapter 56
Thursday the first of May was fine and warm—English-warm, which no one could mistake for hot. And to show it was an English summer, a light sprinkling of rain fell, enough to keep down the dust as the queen and Prince Albert left Buckingham Palace in the state coach, accompanied by a troop of the Life Guards and half a dozen other royal carriages. Since early morning, the bells of all the churches in London had been ringing; it sounded like a vast beehive in swarm. Since early morning the enterprising had been out, hammering together the timber shoring on which they would rent staging and benches to those who had failed to get a kerbside vantage point. Since early morning too, East Enders had trudged west with their street barrows piled high with ginger beer, fatty cakes, gingerbread, and tins of brandy balls, the girls and women carrying wicker sieves laden with pyramids of oranges. Others carried trays spread with snow-white linen and laden with pigs' trotters, cow heel, and paper-thin sandwiches of ham. Near the park gates, every other man seemed to bear a tray filled with bright medallions of the Crystal Palace, and Crystal Palace charms and mementoes.
No one needed to ask the way—simply follow that irresistible tide of carefree lads and gaily dressed lasses, of fathers and wives and jaunty children—skipping and bowling hoops, flouncing shawls, fluttering ribbons, munching apples, cracking nuts, laughing and chattering their ten thousand ways to the park.
On the calm waters of the Serpentine floated the miniature frigate Prince of Wales, its cannon ready charged to salute the queen's arrival. The intrepid aeronaut Charles Spencer stood by the basket of his balloon, ready to enter and rise up into the air the moment she declared the Exhibition open. At half-past ten, John and Nora had descended from their carriage on the north side of the park and walked under the trees, all in new leaf and bright green in the sparkling sun, over the Serpentine Bridge and Rotten Row and in by one of the back entrances—not, of course, the one the queen was to use. People eyed them curiously. Distinguished visitors did not arrive on foot. But at least they had avoided the thousand state coaches and the three and a half thousand broughams, clarences, post chaises, cabs, and other vehicles that stretched in lines back through Knightsbridge, through the toll gate at Hyde Park Corner, along Piccadilly, down Haymarket, through Trafalgar Square, all the way to the Strand.
When they were up in their places, on the balcony overlooking the royal dais, and had a chance to look around, even John, who had seen the building grow from its marker pegs up, was awed. Already about thirty thousand people were there and thousands more were still to come. The murmur that arose from so many was like the distant chatter of a vast colony of birds, or rushing waters heard from afar. It seemed to charge the air with a special kind of iridescence in which distance was both magnified and lost. The elms enclosed within the Palace had burst early into leaf and now spread luxuriant high-summer branches to shade the courts below. Along all the galleries that overlooked the nave grew a profusion of tropical flowers and foliage, their colours set off perfectly against the gorgeous hues of the carpets and the richly dyed fabrics—the choice of the finest weavers and producers from the four corners of the Empire. Detail was lost in that infinite variety; in its place came an almost mystical awareness of the tens of thousands of unseen hands—of inventors, labourers, proprietors, and managers—whose collaboration on this unprecedented work had now, at last, on this great day, borne fruit.
Greatest of all was the building itself. Intended as no more than a cheap and ultimately demountable shell against the weather, it gave a thrill of surprise and delight to everyone who entered it—especially beneath the great curves of the transept soaring up over a hundred feet—and made to seem even loftier by the ease and grace with which they arched over the huge elms, giants of the park. Never before had people stood in a building of that size where the play of light and air was so free. To enter and be still and then to lift one's gaze to the skies induced a sense of wonder and mystery that was as close to a religious experience as a secular occasion could get. On this day, with the massed choirs and organ and the presence of the archbishop of Canterbury, the two were, in any case, merging.
About half an hour before the royal party arrived, the court began to assemble. It was the most gorgeous scene that London had ever beheld. In the magical light that fell from all around, the gold braid and glittering medals and ornaments were like a coloured fire. The silken sashes and garters, the turbans and fez caps, the embroidered waistcoats of white silk and the rich brown court suits of the ambassadors were all set off against the uniforms of the functionaries—the gentlemen at arms with long white plumes cascading over golden helmets, the trumpeters with their silver trumpets held against cloaks of gold, the beefeaters in their black and scarlet tunics and black velvet caps, the aldermen of the City in crimson and ermine, the heralds in their blue silk crested with golden lions and other devices, Garter King-at-Arms sumptuous in red velvet emblazoned with gold, the archbishop in cope and mitre with full lawn sleeves, and, ringing them all, the red and yellow uniforms of the miners and sappers and the dark blue of the police.
At a few minutes to noon, the royal carriages and the bright livery of coachmen and postillions flashed through the entrance court and passed on around the building. They were swiftly followed by the troop of Life Guards, their burnished steel helmets and breastplates sparkling in the sun. An awed hush fell upon the entire assembly as every head craned toward the entrance from Rotten Row.
Moments later, the queen and her entourage entered, glimpsed as yet only fleetingly through the bars of the great bronze gates behind the dais. With that flair for dramatic but unflustered ceremonial that is uniquely English, the beefeaters drew wide the gates at the perfect moment to reveal the young queen, in pink satin shimmering with diamonds and silver, wearing a light tiara of diamonds and feathers, on the arm of Prince Albert, resplendent in the full scarlet dress of a field marshal. Hand-in-hand with them came the Prince of Wales in Highland dress and the princess royal in white lace, with a garland of wild roses in her hair.
Trumpets flourished and the cheers of the thirty-three thousand within mingled with the earth-shaking roar of hundreds of thousands outside—for the park was now one sea of faces as far as the eye could reach. The gunfire of the little frigate on the Serpentine was quite drowned.
When the queen was upon the dais, the great organ struck the opening chord of the national anthem. Suddenly, it was both marvellous and incredible simply to be there—at the heart and soul, it seemed, of a world at peace, united in the productive rivalry of industry and endeavour. Not once in the long tide of human history had that world been so drawn together. And there, in the persons of the prince and of the committee ranged behind him, were those who had caused it to happen. It made John and Nora feel both proud and humble to have earned their place at the centre of it all.
A brief ceremony followed, with an address from the prince to the queen and a blessing from the archbishop. Their speeches were swallowed in their own echoes but, like words snatched from a half-heard ritual in a great cathedral, they had a meaning beyond their literal import. Then the organ, an orchestra of two hundred players, and the massed choirs of six hundred voices broke into the Hallelujah Chorus. For such a day in such a place, no other work of the human spirit could have seemed half so sublime. On every side, men and women could be seen openly weeping, their faces marked not by sorrow or embarrassment but aglow with joy.
For half an hour, the queen and her court walked the full length of the main aisle and the transept, led by Paxton and Fox. As they passed below the point where John and Nora stood, Nora moved her lacegloved hand over his.
"Aye," he said into her ear, not wishing to shout above the cheers and huzzahs that followed the queen everywhere. "Now I could wish it had been otherwise." But his eyes were looking up at the ribs and arches, wishing he had put all that vast and delicate tracery between earth and sky—not down, wishing it was he who, with Paxton, led the great assembly.
Whe
n the procession returned to the dais, Lord Breadalbane, as high steward, declared the Exhibition open in the queen's name. And again the cheers echoed and resounded inside and were taken up across the park; and in moments, Charles Spencer and his balloon were drifting upward and away over the sea of people, nine hundred thousand some said, thronging the walks and rides and grassy spaces and the streets that led to them. All their lives they would say of that day, "I was there."
And in a sense it was their day, more than the Exhibition's or the queen's. A day that set so many precedents set one which was to endure long after memories of it began to fade. The best part of a million people had swarmed into Hyde Park, Green Park, and the Crystal Palace. The queen walked among thirty thousand of them as if they and she were in a vast drawing room—with the same degree of safety and decorum. She had driven among the rest to cheers that spread before and lingered behind, making her route one brushfire of sound. These were the crowds who ten years earlier had stoned her coach; many of the people within the Exhibition must have been among those who booed and jeered at her at the opera. Those ten years had seen hungry harvests, wicked speculation, disastrous bankruptcies, and trade as depressed as any could remember it. Yet the entire day passed off without a single disorder. The police made few arrests anywhere in London that Thursday; not one of them had any connection with the Exhibition or its crowds.
You did not have to wait for the later reports and statistics to tell you this. You could see it as you walked among the people in the streets of London that day. There was no Great Cause to bind them, no speeches were made to induce a sense of purpose; but quite spontaneously, to their own surprise as much as anyone else's, people were taken unawares by a sense of suddenly belonging, one to another, and so to all. Men and women and children too, who came jauntily down to the parks to enjoy a bit of an extra holiday, went homeward weary and contented, each in some degree aware of that new sense of belonging. Their nation had that day renewed herself, and they had played their part. The miseries of the hungry forties were behind them; the long-promised future, made bright and splendid by industry and endeavour, was now at hand.
Chapter 57
The following day, the first day on which the Exhibition was open to the public, admission was a pound. So the "public" came almost exclusively from the West End. John and Nora brought Winifred, now ten years old, Young John, two days short of his ninth birthday, and Caspar, who would be eight in November; all came knowing exactly what they wanted to see, having heard their father talk and having read nothing all that week except the Exhibition catalogues.
Fashion had not yet decided whether it was proper to be seen among the machinery exhibits (the queen had not yet visited there and Albert didn't count), so the haute monde stayed safely among the statues and tapestries and tut-tutted at the undisguised papism of Pugin's Medieval Court. The Stevensons had the machinery almost to themselves. On their way up, they heard a man staring at the glass roof and saying, "It doesn't look very novel to me. To my own certain knowledge, Aldriges in St. Martin's Lane have had half an acre of cast iron and glass over the auction ring since eighteen forty-four—and no one's made any fuss about that."
Nora smiled at John. "So you didn't invent it either," she said.
"No" he agreed ruefully. "It was probably the Romans, in fact. It usually is!"
The first thing they wanted to see was the scale model of the tubular bridge and the actual great hydraulic ram. John also showed them the Jacquard punching machine that put the rivet holes in the plates. Caspar had the satisfaction here of saying, "Ours is bigger, isn't it, Papa?"—meaning the one John had just installed at Stevenstown. About the Nasmyth's steam forging hammer he was not able to say theirs was bigger; instead he said, "We've got two, haven't we, Papa?"
After an hour among the heavy machinery and then the moving machinery, they went, at Young John's request, to see the Krupp cannon and the Colt firearms, in the German and American sections. That was when Nora and Winifred went off with Mademoiselle Nanette to look at the Oriental sections. They met again for luncheon at the Schweppes' café in the central area. No hot meals were served in the Exhibition, but there was a good selection of sandwiches, pastries, patties, fruit, ices, tea, coffee, chocolate, and—naturally—lemonade, soda water, and seltzer. After luncheon, they separated again, the men to the agricultural machinery and the minerals, the ladies to the European section to look at the glass and silver and furniture and porcelain. They met up again at teatime and all went to look at the sculpture and models.
The models were of all kinds, real and projected. There was a model of Niagara by George Catlin, showing every house, bridge, tree, rock, factory, and island in a square mile around the falls. There was a model in cast iron of a date palm got up as a German Christmas tree, which the catalogue claimed was a new custom brought in by Prince Albert. "We've had Christmas trees all our lives, haven't we, Mama?" Caspar said. There was a model of a suspension bridge to cross the Dover Strait to France…a model of a ship canal through the Suez isthmus…a model in cardboard of Her Majesty's Theatre…two models in cardboard of York Minister…a model railway that laid its own track before it and took it up again behind…Count Dunin's model man made of seven thousand sliding plates and springs and levers and looking like armour, so cunningly arranged that at the turn of a crank the plates slid over one another and the homunculus would expand from the size of a dwarf to that of a giant…a model by Mr. Ryles of Cobridge to show that the Earth is a living mollusk whose surface is its shell—the tides being evidence of its heart beat…a model of a building system that conducted smoke from the chimneys directly down into the sewers…and, best of all, a forty-foot-long model of Liverpool docks at a scale of eight feet to the mile. The sea was of green glass, silvered underneath so that it shimmered like real water. Upon it floated sixteen hundred perfectly detailed, fully rigged ships—the usual number of vessels in and around the port. Everything was there, all three hundred acres of the harbour and about a third of the city, including all three railway stations, correct down to the slates on the roofs.
"It's almost better than being there yourself," Young John said.
The model was in a great glass case, towering eight feet above the floor and approachable on all four sides. It was while they were around the back, peering at the details of the city, that they looked through the case and saw the queen. She was walking around the building with very few attendants, just like any other visitor, and had come upon them completely unawares. The men took off their hats and caps and the ladies and girls made little curtseys. It was a wonderful ending to their visit. On the way out, they had their handkerchiefs passed through the Maria Farina fountain of eau de cologne and they gazed in disappointment at the rather glassy Koh-i-Noor diamond, whose 186 carats refused to sparkle even though illuminated by a dozen tiny gas jets.
In the train on the way home—John now had his own carriage on the Great Northern—Winifred sniffed her scented kerchief and said: "I've been to India, and America and France and Jersey and…"
The boys took her up, gabbling their lists at first and then petering out with New Brunswick and Montserrat and St. Kitts. In all they remembered over forty places between them.
"You're very lucky to be alive at such a time," Nora told them. "There were no such things when I was your age."
"What did you have instead, Mama?" Winifred asked.
"There was a sailor who used to come to Briggate once a year and he'd been with Captain Cook. He'd painted about eight scenes of the South Sea Islands and he would tell their tales for money, like a Punch-and-Judy man. That's all I knew about the world until I married your father. I thought the South Seas were a little way past London!"
And now, she thought, on the days when entrance was free, even the poorest children in London would be able to see the wonders of the entire civilized world spread out before them. Was it making things too easy? Could one make enlightenment too easy? John had once said to her, "There's no learning
without bewilderment." She had come to believe it profoundly.
It was the first of many visits they paid to the Crystal Palace that summer. They came back with the younger children, Clement, now six, Abigail, four (who was sure there was a story attached to each exhibit and wanted to be told it rather than just look at the object), and Hester, now three. They even brought young Mather, barely one, just to touch the glass and be held up to see the building and its gaily fluttering pennants—so that in later years he could claim he had been there and done these things.
He also saw—and giggled at—the "pig organ," a sort of fairground sideshow in which a dozen pigs, each chosen for squealing in a different key, were penned with their tails connected to a simple keyboard. They could squeal "God Save the Queen," "Three Blind Mice," and other elementary pieces—if you listened with a charitable ear.
Another time they brought the older children back too. And once Walter Thornton brought up his three boys and Letty, now seven, to make a party with John and Nora and their three eldest. They saw the queen again that day—which was not surprising, for she paid thirteen visits there during May alone—and she smiled at Caspar and patted Letty on the head as she passed, saying, "Such pretty hair, my dear." Letty had inherited Arabella's blond ringlets.
The Rich Are with You Always Page 60