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Yet, for the alien sojourner in London, there are no such intervals
between sights, or perhaps between engagements, and we found a whole
week-end beyond our grasp, though ever so temptingly entreated to spend
it here or there in the country. That was why we were going down to the
place of a friend one Sunday morning instead of a Friday evening and
coming back the same day instead of the next. But we were glad of our
piece of a week-end, and we had reason to be especially grateful for the
Sunday when we had it, for it was one of the most perfect of its kind.
There used to be such Sundays in America when people were young, and I
suppose there are such Sundays there yet for children; but if you are no
longer so very young you will be more apt to find them in England, where
Sunday has been studying, ever since the Romans began to observe it, in
just what proportion to blend the blue and white in its welkin, and to
unite warmth and coolness in its air.

I have no doubt there were multitudes going to church that morning, but
our third-class compartment was filled with people going into the
country for the day; fathers and grandfathers taking the little ones for
an endless time in the fields and woods, which are often free in that
much-owned England, while the may was yet freshly red and white on the
hawthorns in the first week in June. Among our fellow-passengers that
morning a young mother, not much older than her five children, sat with
her youngest in her arms, while the other four perched at the edge of
the seat, two on each side of her, all one stare of blue eyes, one flare
of red cheeks: very still, very good, very sweet; when it came to
lifting them out of the car after her, the public had to help. One's
heart must go with these holiday-makers as they began to leave the train
after the last suburban stations, where they could feel themselves
fairly in the country, and really enter upon their joy. It was such
motherly looking country, and yet young with springtime, and of a breath
that came balmily in at the open car-windows; and the trees stood about
in the meadows near the hedge-rows as if they knew what a good thing it
was to be meadow-trees in England, where not being much good for fuel
or lumber they could stand for ages and ages, and shelter the sheep and
cattle without danger of the axe.

At our own station we found our host's motor waiting for us, and after
waiting for some one else, who did not come by the next train, it
whisked us much sooner than we could have wished over the nine miles of
smooth road stretching to his house. The English are always telling you,
if you are an American, how the Americans think nothing of distances,
and they apparently derive their belief from the fact that it is a
thousand miles from New York to Chicago, and again some two thousand to
San Francisco. In vain you try to explain that we do not step casually
aboard a train for either of those places, or, indeed, without much
moral and material preparation. But perhaps if you did not mind being
shorn of the sort of fairy glamour which you are aware attaches to you
from our supposed contempt of space, you could make out a very pretty
case against them, in convicting them of an even greater indifference to
distances. The lengths to which they will go in giving and accepting
invitations for week-ends are amazing; and a run from London down to
Ultima Thule for a week is thought nothing of, or much less of than a
journey from New York to Bar Harbor. But the one is much more in the
English social scheme than the other is in ours; and perhaps the
distance at which a gentleman will live from his railroad-station in the
country is still more impressive. The American commuter who drives night
and morning two or three miles after leaving and before getting his
train, thinks he is having quite drive enough; if he drives six miles
the late and early guest feels himself badly used; but apparently such
distances are not minded in England. The motor, indeed, has now come to
devour them; but even when they had to be nibbled away by a public fly,
they seem not to have been regarded as evils.

For the stranger they certainly could not be an evil. Every foot, every
inch of the way was delightful, and we only wished that our motor could
have conceived of our pleasure in the wayside things to which custom had
made it indifferent. There were some villages in the course of that
swift flight where we could have willingly spent a week of such Sundays:
villages with gables and thatches and tiles, and flowery door-yards and
kitchen-gardens, such as could not be had for millionaire money with us,
and villagers in their church-going best, whom, as they lived in the
precious scene, our lightning progress suffered us to behold in a sort
of cinematographic shimmer. Clean white shirt-sleeves are the symbol of
our race's rustic Sunday leisure everywhere; and the main difference
that I could note between our own farmer-folk and these was that at home
they would be sitting on the top of rail-fences or stone-walls, and here
they were hanging over gates; you cannot very well sit on the tops of
hedges.

If one part of England can be said to be more charming than another, and
I suppose that there are odds in its loveliness, I think there can be no
doubt but we were that day in one of the most beautiful regions within
an hour's reach of London. We were pretty constantly mounting in our
motor-flight from the station; the uplands opened round us, and began
to roll far away towards the liberal horizon, in undulations that were
very stately. There is something, indeed, in the sufficiency of English
downs which satisfies without surfeiting, and this we had from the
windows and gardened levels of our friends' house even more than from
the highroad, which we suddenly left to approach the place by a way of
its own. Mountains would have been out of key with the landscape; downs
were just right.

I do not know why the house was the more agreeable for being new, and
for being the effect of our friends' immediate and not their ancestral
fancy, quite as it would have been with most of our friends'
country-houses at home. We certainly had not come to England for newness
of any kind, but we liked the gardens and the shrubberies being new; and
my content was absolute when I heard from our friends that they had at
one time thought of building their house of wood: the fact seemed to
restore me from a homesick exile to the wood-built continent which I had
so willingly forsaken only a few weeks before.

But what better do we ever ask of a strange land than that it shall
render us some fleeting image of the nearest and dearest things of home?
What I had reasonably or logically come to England for was nature tamed
to the hand of man; but whenever I came upon a bit of something wild,
something savage-looking, gaunt, huge, rugged, I rejoiced with an
insensate pleasure in its likeness to the roughest aspect of America
that association could conjure up. I dare say that was very stupid, but
it is best to be honest in such matters as well as in some others, and I
will own that when our friends took us the walk over the downs which
they had promised us, nothing could have gladdened me so much as to
enter a secret and solemn wood of immemorial yews by a cart-track
growing fainter and fainter as it left the fields, and finally
forgetting itself altogether in the sombre depths of shade. Then I said
to my soul that it might have been a wood-road in the White Mountains,
mouldering out of memory of the clearing where the young pines and
birches had grown into good-sized trees since the giants of the primeval
forest were slain and dragged out over its snows and mosses.

The masses of the red may and the white may which stood here and there
in the border of the yews, might have been the blossom of the wilding
apple-trees which often guard the approaches to our woods; the parent
hawthorns were as large and of the same lovely tints, but I could recall
nothing that was quite American when once we had plunged into the shadow
of these great yews, and I could not even find their like in the English
literature which is the companion of American nature. I could think only
of the weird tree-shapes which an artist once greatly acclaimed, and
then so mocked that I am almost ashamed to say Gustave Doré, used to
draw; but that is the truth, and I felt as if we were walking through
any of the loneliest of his illustrations. He knew how to be true to
such mediaeval moods of the great mother, and we owe it to his fame to
bear what witness we can to the fact.

The yew-tree's shade in Gray's Elegy had not prepared me for a whole
forest of yews, and I had never imagined them of the vastness I beheld.
The place had its peculiar gloom through the church-yard associations of
the trees, but there was a rich, Thomas Hardyish flavor in the lawless
fact that in times when it was less protected than now, or when its wood
was more employed in furniture-making, predatory emissaries from London
used to come out to the forest by night and lop away great limbs of the
yews, to be sold to the shyer sort of timber-merchants. From time to
time my host put his hand on a broad sawn or chopped surface where a
tree had been so mutilated and had remained in a dry decay without that
endeavor some other trees make to cover the stump with a new growth. The
down, he told us, was a common, and any one might pasture his horse or
his cow or his goose on its grass, and I do not know whose forest
rights, if any one's, were especially violated in these cruel midnight
outrages on the yews; but some one must have had the interest to stop
it.

I would not try to say how far the common extended, or how far its
privileges; but the land about is mostly held in great estates, like
most of the land in England, and no doubt there are signorial rights
which overlie the popular privileges. I fancied a symbol of these in the
game keeper--whom we met coming out of the wood, brown-clad, with a
scarcely touched hat, silently sweeping through the gorse, furtive as
one of the pheasants or hares to which he must have grown akin in his
custody of them. He was the first game-keeper I met in England, and, as
it happened, the last, but he now seems to me to have been so perfect in
his way that I would not for the sake of the books where I have known so
many of his sort, have him the least different from what he was.

The English sun, if you do not walk much in it, is usually cool and
pleasant, but you must not take liberties. By the time we got back to
lunch we could have believed, with no homesick yearning, that we had
been in an American heat. But after lunch, and after the talk filling
the afternoon till afternoon tea-time, which we were to take at a famous
house in the neighborhood, the temperature was all right again; it was
more than all right in the cold current of air which the motor created.
In the course of that post-luncheon talk our host brought out a small
porcelain bust of Washington, in very Continental blue, which he said
was one of great numbers made in that neighborhood at the time of our
Revolution to express the feeling of our English sympathizers in the
struggle which gave English liberty a new lease. One reads of this
sympathy, how wide and high it was, and one knows of it in a way, but
till then, with that witness, I had to own I had not realized it. The
miniature father-of-his-country smiled at our ignorance with his
accustomed blandness, and I hope he will never regret being given to one
of us as a testimony of the amity which had largely endured for our
nation from and through the most difficult times. The gift lent our day
a unique grace, and I could only hope that it might be without a
surprise too painful that our English Washington would look upon the
American Republic of his creation when we got home with him; I doubted
if he would find it altogether his ideal.

The motor-spin was over the high crest of the down to the house where we
were going, I do not know how many miles, for our afternoon tea. The
house was famous, for being the most perfect Tudor house in existence;
but I am not going to transfer the burden of my slight knowledge of its
past to the mind of the reader. I will only say that it came into the
hands of the jovial Henry VIII. through the loss of several of its
owners' heads, a means of acquisition not so distasteful to him as to
them, and after its restitution to the much decapitated family it
continued in their possession till a few years ago. It remains with me a
vision of turrets and gables, perfect in their Tudor kind, rising upon a
gentle level of fields and meadows, with nothing dramatically
picturesque in the view from its straight-browed windows. The present
owner, who showed me through its rooms and gardens hurriedly in
consideration of our early train, has the generous passion of leaving
the old place as nearly as he can in the keeping of its past; and I was
glad to have him to agree with me that the Tudor period was that in
which English domestic comfort had been most effectually studied. But my
satisfaction in this was much heightened by my approval of what he was
simultaneously saying about the prevalent newspaper unwisdom of not
publishing serial fiction: in his own newspaper, he said, he had a story
running all the time.

The old and the new kiss each other constantly in England, and I
perceived that this vividly modern possessor of the most perfect Tudor
house existing was, with the intense actuality of his interests and
ambitions, as English as the most feudal presence in the kingdom. When
we came out of the house and walked towards the group we had left under
a spreading oak (or it might have been an elm; the two are much of the
same habit in England) on the long, wide lawn, one might have fancied
one's self in any most picturesque period of the past, if it had not
been for the informality of the men's dress. Women are always of the
past in the beauty of their attire, and those whom the low sun, striking
across the velvet of the grass, now lighted up in their pretty gowns of
our day, could easily have stepped out of an old picture, or continued
in it as they sat in their wicker chairs around the afternoon tea-table.




XV

FISHING FOR WHITEBAIT


An incident of the great midsummer heat, was an excursion down the
Thames which took us far from the society atmosphere so relaxing to the
moral fibre of the mere witness of the London season. The change was not
to the cooler air which had been imagined, but it immersed us for the
space of the boat's voyage to and from Greenwich among those social
inferiors who are probably the moral betters of their superiors, but
whose company does not always seem the spiritual baptism it doubtless
is. Our fellow-passengers were distinctly of the classes which are lower
as well as middle, and the sole worldly advantage they had of us was
that they were going where they wished, and we were going where we must.
We had started for Richmond, but as there proved to be no boat for
Richmond, we decided to take the boat which was for Greenwich, and
consoled ourselves with visions of whitebait, in memory and honor of
many parliamentary and literary feasts which that fish has furnished. A
whitebait dinner, what would not one suffer of human contiguity for it,
even though it could be only a whitebait lunch, owing to the early hour?

It was the flaming heart of the forenoon when the Greenwich boat puffed
up to her landing at Westminster Bridge, and the lower middle classes
streamed aboard.

She looked very lower middle class herself, poor boat, and she was of a
failing line which the London County Council is about to replace by a
line of municipal boats, without apparently alarming, in the English,
the sensibilities so apprehensive of anarchy with us when there is any
talk of government transportation. The official who sold me tickets
might have been training himself for a position on the municipal line,
he was so civilly explanatory as to my voyage; so far from treating my
inquiries with the sardonic irony which meets question in American
ticket-offices, he all but caressed me aboard. He had scarcely ceased
reassuring me when the boat struck out on the thin solution of dark mud
which passes for water in the Thames, and scuttled down the tide towards
Greenwich.

Her course lay between the shabbiness of Southwark and the grandeur of
the Westminster shore, which is probably the noblest water-front in the
world. Near and far the great imperial and municipal and palatial masses
of architecture lifted themselves, and, as we passed, varied their
grouping with one another, and with the leafy domes and spires which
everywhere enrich and soften the London outlook. Their great succession
ought to culminate in the Tower, and so it does to the mind's eye, but
to the body's eye, the Tower is rather histrionic than historic. It is
like a scenic reproduction of itself, like a London Tower on the stage;
and if ever, in a moment of Anglo-Saxon expansion, the County Council
should think of selling it to Chicago, to be set up somewhere between
the Illinois Central and the Lake, New York need not hopelessly envy her
the purchase: New York could easily build a London Tower that would look
worthier of its memories than the real one, without even making it a
sky-scraper.

[Illustration: WESTMINSTER BRIDGE AND CLOCK TOWER.]

So it seems at the moment, but I am not sure that it is so true as it is
that after passing the Tower the one shore of the Thames begins to lose
its dignity and beauty, and to be of like effect with the other, which
is the Southwark side, and like all the American river-sides that I
remember. Grimy business piles, sagging sheds, and frowsy wharves and
docks grieve the eye, which the shipping in the stream does little to
console. That is mostly of dingy tramp-steamers, or inferior Dutch
liners, clumsy barges, and here and there a stately brig or shapely
schooner; but it gathers nowhere into the forest of masts and chimneys
that fringe the North River and East River. The foul tide rises and
falls between low shores where, when it ebbs, are seen oozy shoals of
slime, and every keel or paddle that stirs the surface of the river
brings up the loathsomeness of the bottom.

Coming back we saw a gang of half-grown boys bathing from the slimy
shoals, running down to the water on planks laid over them, and
splashing joyously into the filthy solution with the inextinguishable
gladness of their years. They looked like boys out of the purlieus of
Dickens's poverty-world, and all London waterside apparitions are more
or less from his pages. The elderly waiter of the forlorn out-dated
hotel to which we went for our whitebait lunch at Greenwich was as much
of his invention as if he had created him from the dust of the place,
and breathed his elderly-waiter-soul into him. He had a queer
pseudo-respectful shuffle and a sidelong approach, with a dawning
baldness at the back of his head, which seemed of one quality with these
characteristics: his dress-coat was lustrous with the greasiness of long
serving. Asked for whitebait, he destroyed the illusion in which we had
come at a blow. He said he could send out and get us some whitebait if
we could wait twenty minutes, but they never had any call for it now,
and they did not keep it. Then he smiled down upon us out of an
apparently humorous face in which there was no real fun, and added that
we could have salmon mayonnaise at once. Salmon mayonnaise was therefore
what we had, and except that it was not whitebait, it was not very
disappointing; we had not expected much of it. After we had eaten it, we
were put in relations with the landlord, regarding a fly which we wished
to take for a drive, in the absence of whitebait. But a fly required, in
Greenwich, an interview with a stableman and a negotiation which, though
we were assured it would be fairly conducted, we decided to forego, and
contented ourselves with exploring the old hostelry, close and faint of
atmosphere and of a smell at once mouldy and dusty. The room that was
called Nelson's, for no very definite reason, and the room in which the
ministry used to have their whitebait dinners in the halcyon days before
whitebait was extinct in Greenwich, pretended to some state but no
beauty, and some smaller dining-rooms that overhung the river had the
merit of commanding a full view of the Isle of Dogs, and in the
immediate foreground--it was as much earth as water that lapped the
shore--a small boy wading out to a small boat and providing himself a
sorrowful evening at home with his mother, by soaking his ragged sleeves
and trousers in the solution. Some young men in rowing costume were
vigorously pulling in a heavy row-boat by way of filling in their
outing; a Dutch steamer, whose acquaintance we had made in coming, was
hurrying to get out of the river into the freshness of the sea, and this
was all of Greenwich as a watering-place which we cared to see.

But that was a pleasant landlord, and he told us of balls and parties,
which, though not imaginably of the first social quality, must have
given his middle-aging hostelry a gayety in winter that it lacked in
summer. He applauded our resolution to see the pictures in the gallery
of the old naval college on the way back to our boat, and saw us to the
door, and fairly out into the blazing sun. It was truly a grilling heat,
and we utilized every scrap of shade as one does in Italy, running from
tree to tree and wall to wall, and escaping into every available portico
and colonnade. But once inside the great hall where England honors her
naval heroes and their battles, it was deliriously cool. It could not
have been that so many marine pieces tempered the torrid air, for they
all represented the heat of battle, with fire and smoke, and the work of
coming to close quarters, with

"hot gun-lip kissing gun."

The gallery was altogether better in the old admirals and other sea-dogs
of England whose portraits relieved the intolerable spread of the battle
scenes; and it was best of all in the many pictures and effigies and
relics of Nelson, who, next to Napoleon, was the wonder of his great
time. He looked the hero as little as Napoleon; everywhere his face
showed the impassioned dreamer, the poet; and once more gave the lie to
the silly notion that there is a type of this or that kind of great men.
When we had fairly settled the fact to our minds, we perceived that the
whole place we were in was a temple to Nelson, and that whatever minor
marine deities had their shrines there, it was in strict subordination
to him. England had done what she could for them, who had done so much
for her; but they seem consecrated in rather an out-of-the-way place,
now that there is no longer whitebait to allure the traveller to their
worship; and, upon the whole, one might well think twice before choosing
just their apotheosis.

By the time I reached this conclusion, or inconclusion, it was time to
grill forth to our boat, and we escaped from shade to shade, as before,
until we reached the first-class shelter of the awning at her stern.
Even there it was crowded in agonizing disproportion to the small breeze
that was crisping the surface of the solution; and fifteen or twenty
babies developed themselves to testify of the English abhorrence of
race-suicide among the lower middle classes. They were mostly good, poor
things, and evoked no sentiment harsher than pity even when they were
not good. Still it was not just the sort of day when one could have
wished them given the pleasure of an outing to Greenwich. Perhaps they
were only incidentally given it, but it must have been from a specific
generosity that several children in arms were fed by their indulgent
mothers with large slices of sausage. To be sure they had probably had
no whitebait.




XVI

HENLEY DAY


Our invitation to the regatta at Henley, included luncheon in the tent
of an Oxford college, and a view of the races from the college barge,
which, with the barges of other Oxford colleges, had been towed down the
Thames to the scene of the annual rivalry between the crews of the two
great English universities. There may also have been Cambridge barges,
spirited through the air in default of water for towing them to Henley,
but I make sure only of a gay variety of houseboats stretching up and
down the grassy margin of the stream, along the course the rowers were
to take. As their contest was the least important fact of the occasion
for me, and as I had not then, and have not now, a clear notion which
came off winner in any of the events, I will try not to trouble the
reader with my impressions of them, except as they lent a vivid action
and formed a dramatic motive for one of the loveliest spectacles under
the sun. I have hitherto contended that class-day at Harvard was the
fairest flower of civilization, but, having seen the regatta at Henley,
I am no longer so sure of it.

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