It may be that long and constant familiarity
with the institution of royalty has bred indifference in the London
mind to the physical presence of dukes and princes and things; but
I am inclined to think a good share of it should be attributed to
the inborn and ingrown British faculty for letting other folks be.
One morning as I was walking at random through the aristocratic
district, of which St. James is the solar plexus and Park Lane
the spinal cord, I came to a big mansion where foot-guards stood
sentry at the wall gates. This house was further distinguished
from its neighbors by the presence of a policeman pacing alongside
it, and a newspaper photographer setting up his tripod and camera
in the road, and a small knot of passers-by lingering on the
opposite side of the way, as though waiting for somebody to come
along or something to happen. I waited too. In a minute a handsome
old man and a well-set-up young man turned the corner afoot. The
younger man was leading a beautiful stag hound. The photographer
touched his hat and said something, and the younger man smiling a
good-natured smile, obligingly posed in the street for a picture.
At this precise moment a dirigible balloon came careening over
the chimneypots on a cross-London air jaunt; and at the sight of
it the little crowd left the young man and the photographer and
set off at a run to follow, as far as they might, the course of
the balloon. Now in America this could not have occurred, for the
balloon man would not have been aloft at such an hour. He would
have been on the earth; moreover he would have been outside the
walls of that mansion house, along with half a million, more or
less, of his patriotic fellow countrymen, tearing his own clothes
off and their clothes off, trampling the weak and sickly underfoot,
bucking the doubled and tripled police lines in a mad, vain effort
to see the flagpole on the roof or a corner of the rear garden
wall. For that house was Clarence House, and the young man who
posed so accommodatingly for the photographer was none other than
Prince Arthur of Connaught, who was getting himself married the
very next day.
The next day I beheld from a short distance the passing of the
bridal procession. Though there were crowds all along the route
followed by the wedding party, there was no scrouging, no shoving,
no fighting, no disorderly scramble, no unseemly congestion about
the chapel where the ceremony took place. It reminded me vividly
of that which inevitably happens when a millionaire's daughter is
being married to a duke in a fashionable Fifth Avenue church - it
reminded me of that because it was so different.
Fortunately for us we were so placed that we saw quite distinctly
the entrance of the wedding party into the chapel inclosure.
Personally I was most concerned with the members of the royal
house. As I recollect, they passed in the following order:
His Majesty, King George the Fifth.
Her Majesty, Queen Mary, the Other Four Fifths.
Small fractional royalties to the number of a dozen or more.
I got a clear view of the side face of the queen. As one looked
on her profile, which was what you might call firm, and saw the
mild-looking little king, who seemed quite eclipsed by her presence,
one understood - or anyway one thought one understood - why an English
assemblage, when standing to chant the national anthem these times,
always puts such fervor and meaning into the first line of it.
Only one untoward incident occurred: The inevitable militant lady
broke through the lines as the imperial carriage passed and threw
a Votes for Women handbill into His Majesty's lap. She was removed
thence by the police with the skill and dexterity of long practice.
The police were competently on the job. They always are - which
brings me round to the subject of the London bobby and leads me
to venture the assertion that individually and collectively,
personally and officially, he is a splendid piece of work. The
finest thing in London is the London policeman and the worst thing
is the shamefully small and shabby pay he gets. He is majestic
because he represents the majesty of the English law; he is humble
and obliging because, as a servant, he serves the people who make
the law. And always he knows his business.
In Charing Cross, where all roads meet and snarl up in the bewildering
semblance of many fishing worms in a can, I ventured out into the
roadway to ask a policeman the best route for reaching a place in
a somewhat obscure quarter. He threw up his arm, semaphore fashion,
first to this point of the compass and then to that, and traffic
halted instantly. As far as the eye might reach it halted; and
it stayed halted, too, while he searched his mind and gave me
carefully and painstakingly the directions for which I sought. In
that packed mass of cabs and taxis and buses and carriages there
were probably dukes and archbishops - dukes and archbishops are
always fussing about in London - but they waited until he was through
directing me. It flattered me so that I went back to the hotel
and put on a larger hat. I sincerely hope there was at least one
archbishop.
Another time we went to Paddington to take a train for somewhere.
Following the custom of the country we took along our trunks and
traps on top of the taxicab.
