Gliding when once you
have left behind smoky London and its interminable environs; for
now you are in a land that was finished and plenished five hundred
years ago and since then has not been altered in any material
aspect whatsoever. Every blade of grass is in its right place;
every wayside shrub seemingly has been restrained and trained to
grow in exactly the right and the proper way. Streaming by your
car window goes a tastefully arranged succession of the thatched
cottages, the huddled little towns, the meandering brooks, the
ancient inns, the fine old country places, the high-hedged estates
of the landed gentry, with rose-covered lodges at the gates and
robust children in the doorways - just as you have always seen them
in the picture books. There are fields that are velvet lawns, and
lawns that are carpets of green cut-plush. England is the only
country I know of that lives up - exactly and precisely - to its
storybook descriptions and its storybook illustrations.
Eventually you come to your stopping point; at least you have
reason to believe it may be your stopping point. As well as you
may judge by the signs that plaster the front, the sides, and even
the top of the station, the place is either a beef extract or a
washing compound. Nor may you count on any travelers who may be
sharing your compartment with you to set you right by a timely
word or two. Your fellow passengers may pity you for your ignorance
and your perplexity, but they would not speak; they could not, not
having been introduced. A German or a Frenchman would be giving
you gladly what aid he might; but a well-born Englishman who had
not been introduced would ride for nine years with you and not
speak. I found the best way of solving the puzzle was to consult
the timecard. If the timecard said our train would reach a given
point at a given hour, and this was the given hour, then we might
be pretty sure this was the given point. Timetables in England
are written by realists, not by gifted fiction writers of the
impressionistic school, as is frequently the case in America.
So, if this timecard says it is time for you to get off you get
off, with your ticket still in your possession; and if it be a
small station you go yourself and look up the station master, who
is tucked away in a secluded cubbyhole somewhere absorbing tea,
or else is in the luggage room fussing with baby carriages and
patentchurns. Having ferreted him out in his hiding-place you
hand over your ticket to him and he touches his cap brim and says
"Kew" very politely, which concludes the ceremony so far as you
are concerned.
Then, if you have brought any heavy baggage with you in the baggage
car - pardon, I meant the luggage van - you go back to the platform
and pick it out from the heap of luggage that has been dumped there
by the train hands. With ordinary luck and forethought you could
easily pick out and claim and carry off some other person's trunk,
provided you fancied it more than your own trunk, only you do not.
You do not do this any more than, having purchased a second-class
ticket, or a third-class, you ride first-class; though, so far as
I could tell, there is no check to prevent a person from so doing.
At least an Englishman never does. It never seems to occur to
him to do so. The English have no imagination.
I have a suspicion that if one of our railroads tried to operate
its train service on such a basis of confidence in the general
public there would be a most deceitful hiatus in the receipts from
passenger traffic to be reported to a distressed group of stockholders
at the end of the fiscal year. This, however, is merely a supposition
on my part. I may be wrong.
Chapter XVII
Britain in Twenty Minutes
To a greater degree, I take it, than any other race the English
have mastered the difficult art of minding their own affairs. The
average Englishman is tremendously knowledgable about his own
concerns and monumentally ignorant about all other things. If an
Englishman's business requires that he shall learn the habits and
customs of the Patagonians or the Chicagoans or any other race
which, because it is not British, he naturally regards as barbaric,
he goes and learns them - and learns them well. Otherwise your
Britisher does not bother himself with what the outlander may or
may not do.
An Englishman cannot understand an American's instinctive desire
to know about things; we do not understand his lack of curiosity
in that direction. Both of us forget what I think must be the
underlying reasons - that we are a race which, until comparatively
recently, lived wide distances apart in sparsely settled lands,
and were dependent on the passing stranger for news of the rest
of the world, where he belongs to a people who all these centuries
have been packed together in their little island like oats in a
bin. London itself is so crowded that the noses of most of the
lower classes turn up - there is not room for them to point straight
ahead without causing a great and bitter confusion of noses; but
whether it points upward or outward or downward the owner of the
nose pretty generally refrains from ramming it into other folks'
business. If he and all his fellows did not do this; if they had
not learned to keep their voices down and to muffle unnecessary
noises; if they had not built tight covers of reserve about
themselves, as the oyster builds a shell to protect his tender
tissues from irritation - they would long ago have become a race
of nervous wrecks instead of being what they are, the most stolid
beings alive.
