Everybody rushes now. London has no more time to spare than New York has. It seems a dream that, when I first entered an English train, the custom was for the railway guards to call, "Take your time, take your time!" But that was their call forty years ago.
Gradually the street cries have lessened in variety, in character, and in interest. The simple trades that announced their wares by a snatch of something that passed for song have disappeared one by one. Even the muffin man is vocal no longer, and his bell is silent. Whatever may have caused the other merchants of the curb to vanish, the war and short rations removed the muffin man. He was almost the last, perhaps actually the last of the creatures who gave to London streets an old-world sound or savour.
When the late seventies were still on the calendar, and for long after, the silk hat was an unrelenting tyrant, and in the City, among stockbrokers, it bore a special gloss. Every male above the age and status of an office boy or a labouring man wore a silk hat. Without that ugly and inconvenient headgear you would not call upon your solicitor, or appear at your banker's, or negotiate a contract, much less intrude upon an official person. The silk hat was a sign of respectability. In the House of Commons it seemed a symbol of the majesty of the British Constitution. There, to this day, the head must be covered, as if the members were in a synagogue. In summer time straw hats were unknown, excepting for the sex that was gentler then, and invariably the sex wore furs with its straws. A man who ventured in a straw hat incurred the risk of obloquy. At any rate, he was as marked and ridiculous an object as Jonas Hanway when, in an earlier century, he raised an umbrella in Oxford Street.
Temple Bar was standing where Fleet Street joins the Strand; the new Law Courts which now overlook its site were in process of construction; the Griffin was undreamed of. Northumberland Avenue had been opened but was incomplete. The modern hotels had yet to be promoted. The Grand was the first of these, but its fortunes were thought hazardous. There was no Metropole, or Victoria, although their walls were going up. Rimmel's perfumery warehouse stood where the Savoy is now, and that sordid adventurer Hobbs (or was it Jabez Balfour?) had not preëmpted the site of the Cecil which was then covered with lodging houses, chambers, and private hotels. There was no Carlton, no Ritz, no Waldorf; even the Great Central was not in being, and the only restaurants of consequence were the Criterion, St. James', Gatti's old Adelaide Gallery, half its present size, the Café Royal, Very's, and the stuffy predecessor of the present Holborn.
The first run of "Pinafore" had not ended, the revival of Old Drury's prosperous days had not begun; "Our Boys" had been running for nearly five thousand nights at the Vaudeville; Sothern was making his last appearances in the last season of the unremodelled Haymarket; there was the Alhambra but no Empire, no Hippodrome, no Coliseum; St. James' Hall, but no Queen's Hall; the Albert Hall was mostly empty, the old-style music halls were mostly full; Mr. Pinero was acting small parts in Irving's company and had not written so much as the scenario of a one-act play; Henry Arthur Jones had not been heard of; Bernard Shaw was unknown, Adelaide Neilson was at the height of her brief career, Forbes Robertson had begun his, and Buckstone's days were ending. The era of the Kendals and John Hare at the St. James' was yet to come, but the happy reign of the Bancrofts, at the old Prince of Wales', behind the Tottenham Court Road, where the Scala now stands, had yet to close.
George Meredith was not only "caviare to the general" but "the general" were a little shocked when they learned that he was still a reader for a publishing house and a writer when he had the time. "The general" found delight in the fiction of Miss Braddon and Mrs. Henry Wood, and, of course, Ouida, as they would delight now if these ladies were spinning copy; Kipling was at school, and Barrie dreaming in the north. We had William Black and Walter Besant and James Rice, but no Society of Authors, and no literary knights. If the world is small now it was very large then, but "sausage and mashed" were cheap at the top of London Bridge, threepence for a pair of hulking sausages and a liberal plate of mashed potato, a penny more for a great hunk of bread, and tu'ppence more for half a tankard of beer.
A certain splendid swagger departed from London Streets when the regiments quartered in town abandoned their gorgeous uniforms and dressed less like magnificos and more like fighting men. They were fighting men though, they and their successors who held back the outnumbering German rush from the Channel ports of France in 1914, as all the world knows, and none know better than the Huns. But they were dandies too, those earlier men, and they filled the eye. Their saucy scarlet, short-waisted jackets, their jaunty fatigue caps, their tight trousers with broad red stripes, on shapely legs which seemed tremendous in length, were at once the admiration of nursemaids and the envy of small boys, lending, as they did, colour and form to these dun streets. Will the glorious colossi who strode thus habited be seen again this side of Charon's ferry; or will their successors lead the simple life in khaki and puttees?
CHAPTER III
A NORMAN INTERLUDE
After a winter in London I went to Paris for a part of the spring, stopping on the way a day in Rochester (I had the Dickens fever then), and another day in Canterbury for the Cathedral's sake. A night boat, the ancient Wave, or the antediluvian Foam, took me to Calais, and through some delay on the line there was a wait of hours. But the night was fine, and I spent it roaming through and beyond the old town, getting forty winks afterward in the station, and a breakfast of hot chocolate and bread at a place facing the harbour where I watched the fishing boats put out on a convenient tide. In Paris I knew only one person, an American friend who was studying art, taking his lessons at Julian's, and slowly, yet certainly, learning that art was not for him. He introduced me to a lot of men who knew their way about, and soon I knew my way about as well as they did, possibly, in some directions, a little better, for, with one or two exceptions, I cannot remember any who were gifted with a faculty for anything but good-fellowship and for spending their allowances from home. They knew the jargon of the studios, but as Paris seemed full of men who could paint as well as they and were threatening to do it, the charming group dissolved in a year or two, one after another, returning to their homes in various parts of the world. Not one that I know of is living now, and nearly all whom I could trace in later years had gone into trade, and flourished there.
But my acquaintance with Paris had begun. It was to be extended in subsequent years. What chiefly remains in my recollection concerning those early days is that for the first time I had the consciousness of being in a foreign country. I never had that in England, no, not for a minute, and no one, then or since, ever tried to make me feel it there. Of course, part of the difference was due to language, but not all the difference. There were subtle differences in France, and some plain, outstanding ones. The English are kindly people, hospitable, and, if I must say so—and I think I must, having lived through three years of the great war with them, to say nothing of many preceding years—they are naïve. The Englishman, if he liked you, took you to his home, but he said that the Frenchman did not. But he did, I found. And I found that the Frenchman, if less kindly, was more polite. The Frenchman had either clearer ideas or none at all about other nationalities; the Englishman—but really, these reflections do not belong in this book, but in another, if anywhere. I will not prolong them here, but say only that