There Is A
Street Running From Shaftesbury Avenue Into Oxford Street, Which Was
Once The Village Of St. Giles, One Of The Dozens Of Hamlets
Swallowed Up By The Great Maw Of London, And It Still Looks Like A
Hamlet, Although It Has Been Absorbed For Many Years.
We constantly
happen on these absorbed villages, from which, not a century ago,
people drove up to town in their coaches.
If you wish to see another phase of life, go out on a Saturday
evening, from nine o'clock on to eleven, starting on a Beecham's
Pill 'bus, and keep to the poorer districts, alighting occasionally
to stand with the crowd in the narrower thoroughfares.
It is a market night, and the streets will be a moving mass of men
and women buying at the hucksters' stalls. Everything that can be
sold at a stall is there: fruit, vegetables, meat, fish, crockery,
tin-ware, children's clothing, cheap toys, boots, shoes, and sun-
bonnets, all in reckless confusion. The vendors cry their wares in
stentorian tones, vying with one another to produce excitement and
induce patronage, while gas-jets are streaming into the air from the
roofs and flaring from the sides of the stalls; children crying,
children dancing to the strains of an accordion, children
quarrelling, children scrambling for the refuse fruit. In the midst
of this spectacle, this din and uproar, the women are chaffering and
bargaining quite calmly, watching the scales to see that they get
their full pennyworth or sixpennyworth of this or that. To the
student of faces, of manners, of voices, of gestures; to the person
who sees unwritten and unwritable stories in all these groups of
men, women, and children, the scene reveals many things: some
comedies, many tragedies, a few plain narratives (thank God!) and
now and then - only now and then - a romance. As to the dark alleys
and tenements on the fringe of this glare and brilliant confusion,
this Babel of sound and ant-bed of moving life, one can only surmise
and pity and shudder; close one's eyes and ears to it a little, or
one could never sleep for thinking of it, yet not too tightly lest
one sleep too soundly, and forget altogether the seamy side of
things. One can hardly believe that there is a seamy side when one
descends from his travelling observatory a little later, and stands
on Westminster Bridge, or walks along the Thames Embankment. The
lights of Parliament House gleam from a hundred windows, and in the
dark shadows by the banks thousands of coloured discs of light
twinkle and dance and glow like fairy lamps, and are reflected in
the silver surface of the river. That river, as full of mystery and
contrast in its course as London itself - where is such another? It
has ever been a river of pageants, a river of sighs; a river into
whose placid depths kings and queens, princes and cardinals, have
whispered state secrets, and poets have breathed immortal lines; a
stream of pleasure, bearing daily on its bosom such a freight of
youth and mirth and colour and music as no other river in the world
can boast.
Sometimes we sally forth in search of adventures in the thick of a
'London particular,' Mr. Guppy's phrase for a fog. When you are
once ensconced in your garden seat by the driver, you go lumbering
through a world of bobbing shadows, where all is weird, vague, grey,
dense; and where great objects loom up suddenly in the mist and then
disappear; where the sky, heavy and leaden, seems to descend bodily
upon your head, and the air is full of a kind of luminous yellow
smoke.
A Lipton's Tea 'bus is the only one we can see plainly in this sort
of weather, and so we always take it. I do not wish, however, to be
followed literally in these modest suggestions for omnibus rides,
because I am well aware that they are not sufficiently specific for
the ordinary tourist who wishes to see London systematically and
without any loss of time. If you care to go to any particular
place, or reach that place by any particular time, you must not, of
course, look at the most conspicuous signs on the tops and ends of
the chariots as we do; you must stand quietly at one of the regular
points of departure and try to decipher, in a narrow horizontal
space along the side, certain little words that show the route and
destination of the vehicle. They say that it can be done, and I do
not feel like denying it on my own responsibility. Old Londoners
assert that they are not blinded or confused by Pears' Soap in
letters two feet high, scarlet on a gold ground, but can see below
in fine print, and with the naked eye, such legends as Tottenham
Court Road, Westbourne Grove, St. Pancras, Paddington, or Victoria.
It is certainly reasonable that the omnibuses should be decorated to
suit the inhabitants of the place rather than foreigners, and it is
perhaps better to carry a few hundred stupid souls to the wrong
station daily than to allow them to cleanse their hands with the
wrong soap, or quench their thirst with the wrong (which is to say
the unadvertised) beverage.
The conductors do all in their power to mitigate the lot of unhappy
strangers, and it is only now and again that you hear an absent-
minded or logical one call out, 'Castoria! all the w'y for a penny.'
We claim for our method of travelling, not that it is authoritative,
but that it is simple - suitable to persons whose desires are
flexible and whose plans are not fixed. It has its disadvantages,
which may indeed be said of almost anything. For instance, we had
gone for two successive mornings on a Cadbury's Cocoa 'bus to
Francesca's dressmaker in Kensington. On the third morning,
deceived by the ambitious and unscrupulous Cadbury, we mounted it
and journeyed along comfortably three miles to the east of
Kensington before we discovered our mistake.
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