It belongs still to the neuter
gender. New York is not even a noun - it's a verb transitive; but
its voice is a female voice, just as Paris' voice is. New York,
like Paris, is full of strident, shrieking sounds, shrill outcries,
hysterical babblings - a women's bridge-whist club at the hour of
casting up the score; but London now is different. London at all
hours speaks with a sustained, sullen, steady, grinding tone, never
entirely sinking into quietude, never rising to acute discords.
The sound of London rolls on like a river - a river that ebbs
sometimes, but rarely floods above its normal banks; it impresses
one as the necessary breathing of a grunting and burdened monster
who has a mighty job on his hands and is taking his own good time
about doing it.
In London, mind you, the newsboys do not shout their extras. They
bear in their hands placards with black-typed announcements of the
big news story of the day; and even these headings seem designed
to soothe rather than to excite - saying, for example, such things
as Special From Liner, in referring to a disaster at sea, and
Meeting in Ulster, when meaning that the northern part of Ireland
has gone on record as favoring civil war before home rule.
The street venders do not bray on noisy trumpets or ring with bells
or utter loud cries to advertise their wares. The policeman does
not shout his orders out; he holds aloft the stripe-sleeved arm
of authority and all London obeys. I think the reason why the
Londoners turned so viciously on the suffragettes was not because
of the things the suffragettes clamored for, but because they
clamored for them so loudly. They jarred the public peace - that
must have been it.
I can understand why an adult American might go to Paris and stay
in Paris and be satisfied with Paris, if he were a lover of art
and millinery in all their branches; or why he might go to Berlin
if he were studying music and municipal control; or to Amsterdam
if he cared for cleanliness and new cheese; or to Vienna if he
were concerned with surgery, light opera, and the effect on the
human lungs of doing without fresh air for long periods of time;
or to Rome if he were an antiquarian and interested in ancient
life; or to Naples if he were an entomologist and interested in
insect life; or to Venice if he liked ruins with water round them;
or to Padua if he liked ruins with no water anywhere near them.
No: I'm blessed if I can think of a single good reason why a sane
man should go to Padua if he could go anywhere else.
But I think I know, good and well, why a man might spend his whole
vacation in London and enjoy every minute of it. For this old
fogy, old foggy town of London is a man-sized town, and a man-run
town; and it has a fascination of its own that is as much a part
of it as London's grime is; or London's vastness and London's
pettiness; or London's wealth and its stark poverty; or its atrocious
suburbs; or its dirty, trade-fretted river; or its dismal back
streets; or its still more dismal slums - or anything that is London's.
To a man hailing from a land where everything is so new that quite
a good deal of it has not even happened yet, it is a joyful thing
to turn off a main-traveled road into one of the crooked byways
in which the older parts of London abound, and suddenly to come,
full face, on a house or a court or a pump which figured in epochal
history or epochal literature of the English-speaking race. It
is a still greater joy to find it - house or court or pump or what
not - looking now pretty much as it must have looked when good Queen
Bess, or little Dick Whittington, or Chaucer the scribe, or Shakspere
the player, came this way. It is fine to be riding through the
country and pass a peaceful green meadow and inquire its name of
your driver and be told, most offhandedly, that it is a place
called Runnymede. Each time this happened to me I felt the thrill
of a discoverer; as though I had been the first traveler to find
these spots.
I remember that through an open door I was marveling at the domestic
economies of an English barber shop. I use the word economies in
this connection advisedly; for, compared with the average
high-polished, sterilized and antiseptic barber shop of an American
city, this shop seemed a torture cave. In London, pubs are like
that, and some dentists' establishments and law offices - musty,
fusty dens very unlike their Yankee counterparts. In this particular
shop now the chairs were hard, wooden chairs; the looking-glass
- you could not rightly call it a mirror - was cracked and bleary;
and an apprentice boy went from one patron to another, lathering
each face; and then the master followed after him, razor in hand,
and shaved the waiting countenances in turn. Flies that looked
as though they properly belonged in a livery stable were buzzing
about; and there was a prevalent odor which made me think that all
the sick pomade in the world had come hither to spend its last
declining hours. I said to myself that this place would bear
further study; that some day, when I felt particularly hardy and
daring, I would come here and be shaved, and afterward would write
a piece about it and sell it for money. So, the better to fix its
location in my mind, I glanced up at the street sign and, behold!
I was hard by Drury Lane, where Sweet Nelly once on a time held
her court.
