at last the train was started and we were off. the track was not so wide, if i am not mistaken, as ours, and the little freight or goods cars were positively ridiculous—mere wheelbarrows, by comparison with the american type. as for the passenger cars, when i came to examine them, they reminded me of some of our fine street cars that run from, say schenectady to gloversville, or from muncie to marion, indiana. they were the first-class cars, too—the english pullmans! the train started out briskly and you could feel that it did not have the powerful weight to it which the american train has. an american pullman creaks audibly, just as a great ship does when it begins to move. an american engine begins to pull slowly because it has something to pull—like a team with a heavy load. i didn’t feel that i was in a train half so much as i did that i was in a string of baby carriages.
miss x. and her lover, miss e. and her maid, barfleur and i comfortably filled one little compartment; and now we were actually moving, and i began to look out at once to see what english scenery was really like. it was not at all strange to me, for in books and pictures i had seen it all my life. but here were the actual hills and valleys, the actual thatched cottages, and the actual castles or moors or lovely country vistas, and i was seeing them!
as i think of it now i can never be quite sufficiently grateful to barfleur for a certain affectionate, thoughtful, sympathetic regard for my every possible mood on this occasion. this was my first trip to this england of which,38 of course, he was intensely proud. he was so humanly anxious that i should not miss any of its charms or, if need be, defects. he wanted me to be able to judge it fairly and humanly and to see the eventual result sieved through my temperament. the soul of attention; the soul of courtesy; patient, long-suffering, humane, gentle. how i have tried the patience of that man at times! an iron mood he has on occasion; a stoic one, always. gentle, even, smiling, living a rule and a standard. every thought of him produces a grateful smile. yet he has his defects—plenty of them. here he was at my elbow, all the way to london, momentarily suggesting that i should not miss the point, whatever the point might be, at the moment. he was helpful, really interested, and above all and at all times, warmly human.
we had been just two hours getting from the boat to the train. it was three-thirty when the train began to move, and from the lovely misty sunshine of the morning the sky had become overcast with low, gray—almost black—rain clouds. i looked at the hills and valleys. they told me we were in wales. and, curiously, as we sped along first came wordsworth into my mind, and then thomas hardy. i thought of wordsworth first because these smooth, kempt hills, wet with the rain and static with deep gray shadows, suggested him. england owes so much to william wordsworth, i think. so far as i can see, he epitomized in his verses this sweet, simple hominess that tugs at the heart-strings like some old call that one has heard before. my father was a german, my mother of pennsylvania dutch extraction, and yet there is a pull here in this shakespearian-wordsworthian-hardyesque world which is precisely like the call of a tender mother to a child. i can’t resist it. i love it; and i am not english but radically american.
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i understand that hardy is not so well thought of in england as he might be—that, somehow, some large conservative class thinks that his books are immoral or destructive. i should say the english would better make much of thomas hardy while he is alive. he is one of their great traditions. his works are beautiful. the spirit of all the things he has done or attempted is lovely. he is a master mind, simple, noble, dignified, serene. he is as fine as any of the english cathedrals. st. paul’s or canterbury has no more significance to me than thomas hardy. i saw st. paul’s. i wish i could see the spirit of thomas hardy indicated in some such definite way. and yet i do not. monuments do not indicate great men. but the fields and valleys of a country suggest them.
at twenty or thirty miles from fishguard we came to some open water—an arm of the sea, i understood—the bay of bristol, where boats were, and tall, rain-gutted hills that looked like tumbled-down castles. then came more open country—moorland, i suppose—with some sheep, once a flock of black ones; and then the lovely alternating hues of this rain-washed world. the water under these dark clouds took on a peculiar luster. it looked at times like burnished steel—at times like muddy lead. i felt my heart leap up as i thought of our own george inness and what he would have done with these scenes and what the english turner has done, though he preferred, as a rule, another key.
at four-thirty one of the charming english trainmen came and asked if we would have tea in the dining-car. we would. we arose and in a few moments were entering one of those dainty little basket cars. the tables were covered with white linen and simple, pretty china and a silver tea-service. it wasn’t as if you were traveling at all. i felt as though i were stopping at the house40 of a friend; or as though i were in the cozy corner of some well-known and friendly inn. tea was served. we ate toast and talked cheerfully.
this whole trip—the landscape, the dining-car, this cozy tea, miss x. and her lover, miss e. and barfleur—finally enveloped my emotional fancy like a dream. i realized that i was experiencing a novel situation which would not soon come again. the idea of this pretty mistress coming to england to join her lover, and so frankly admitting her history and her purpose, rather took my mind as an intellectual treat. you really don’t often get to see this sort of thing. i don’t. it’s gallic in its flavor, to me. barfleur, being a man of the world, took it as a matter of course—his sole idea being, i fancy, that the refinement of personality and thought involved in the situation were sufficient to permit him to tolerate it. i always judge his emotion by that one gleaming eye behind the monocle. the other does not take my attention so much. i knew from his attitude that ethics and morals and things like that had nothing to do with his selection of what he would consider interesting personal companionship. were they interesting? could they tell him something new? would they amuse him? were they nice—socially, in their clothing, in their manners, in the hundred little material refinements which make up a fashionable lady or gentleman? if so, welcome. if not, hence. and talent! oh, yes, he had a keen eye for talent. and he loves the exceptional and will obviously do anything and everything within his power to foster it.
having started so late, it grew nearly dark after tea and the distant landscapes were not so easy to descry. we came presently, in the mist, to a place called carmarthen, i think, where were great black stacks and41 flaming forges and lights burning wistfully in the dark; and then to another similar place, swansea, and finally to a third, cardiff—great centers of manufacture, i should judge, for there were flaming lights from forges (great, golden gleams from open furnaces) and dark blue smoke, visible even at this hour, from tall stacks overhead, and gleaming electric lights like bright, lucent diamonds.
i never see this sort of place but i think of pittsburgh and youngstown and the coke ovens of western pennsylvania along the line of the pennsylvania railroad. i shall never forget the first time i saw pittsburgh and youngstown and saw how coke was fired. it was on my way to new york. i had never seen any mountains before and suddenly, after the low, flat plains of indiana and ohio, with their pretty little wooden villages so suggestive of the new life of the new world, we rushed into youngstown and then the mountains of western pennsylvania (the alleghanies). it was somewhat like this night coming from fishguard, only it was not so rainy. the hills rose tall and green; the forge stacks of pittsburgh flamed with a red gleam, mile after mile, until i thought it was the most wonderful sight i had ever seen. and then came the coke ovens, beyond pittsburgh mile after mile of them, glowing ruddily down in the low valleys between the tall hills, where our train was following a stream-bed. it seemed a great, sad, heroic thing then, to me,—plain day labor. those common, ignorant men, working before flaming forges, stripped to the waist in some instances, fascinated my imagination. i have always marveled at the inequalities of nature—the way it will give one man a low brow and a narrow mind, a narrow round of thought, and make a slave or horse of him, and another a light, nimble mind, a quick wit and42 air and make a gentleman of him. no human being can solve either the question of ability or utility. is your gentleman useful? yes and no, perhaps. is your laborer useful? yes and no, perhaps. i should say obviously yes. but see the differences in the reward of labor—physical labor. one eats his hard-earned crust in the sweat of his face; the other picks at his surfeit of courses and wonders why this or that doesn’t taste better. i did not make my mind. i did not make my art. i cannot choose my taste except by predestined instinct, and yet here i am sitting in a comfortable english home, as i write, commiserating the poor working man. i indict nature here and now, as i always do and always shall do, as being aimless, pointless, unfair, unjust. i see in the whole thing no scheme but an accidental one—no justice save accidental justice. now and then, in a way, some justice is done, but it is accidental; no individual man seems to will it. he can’t. he doesn’t know how. he can’t think how. and there’s an end of it.
but these queer, weird, hard, sad, drab manufacturing cities—what great writer has yet sung the song of them? truly i do not recall one at present clearly. dickens gives some suggestion of what he considered the misery of the poor; and in “les miserables” there is a touch of grim poverty and want here and there. but this is something still different. this is creative toil on a vast scale, and it is a lean, hungry, savage, animal to contemplate. i know it is because i have studied personally fall river, patterson and pittsburgh, and i know what i’m talking about. life runs at a gaunt level in those places. it’s a rough, hurtling world of fact. i suppose it is not any different in england. i looked at the manufacturing towns as we flashed by in the night and got the same feeling of sad commiseration43 and unrest. the homes looked poor and they had a deadly sameness; the streets were narrow and poorly lighted. i was eager to walk over one of these towns foot by foot. i have the feeling that the poor and the ignorant and the savage are somehow great artistically. i have always had it. millet saw it when he painted “the man with the hoe.” these drab towns are grimly wonderful to me. they sing a great diapason of misery. i feel hunger and misery there; i feel lust and murder and life, sick of itself, stewing in its own juice; i feel women struck in the face by brutal men; and sodden lives too low and weak to be roused by any storm of woe. i fancy there are hungry babies and dying mothers and indifferent bosses and noble directors somewhere, not caring, not knowing, not being able to do anything about it, perhaps, if they did. i could weep just at the sight of a large, drab, hungry manufacturing town. i feel sorry for ignorant humanity. i wish i knew how to raise the low foreheads; to put the clear light of intellect into sad, sodden eyes. i wish there weren’t any blows, any hunger, any tears. i wish people didn’t have to long bitterly for just the little thin, bare necessities of this world. but i know, also, that life wouldn’t be as vastly dramatic and marvelous without them. perhaps i’m wrong. i’ve seen some real longing in my time, though. i’ve longed myself and i’ve seen others die longing.
between carmarthen and cardiff and some other places where this drab, hungry world seemed to stick its face into the window, i listened to much conversation about the joyous side of living in paris, monte carlo, ostend and elsewhere. i remember once i turned from the contemplation of a dark, sad, shabby world scuttling by in the night and rain to hear miss e. telling of some parisian music-hall favorite—i’ll call her carmen—rivaling44 another parisian music-hall favorite by the name of diane, let us say, at monte carlo. of course it is understood that they were women of loose virtue. of course it is understood that they had fine, white, fascinating bodies and lovely faces and that they were physically ideal. of course it is understood that they were marvelous mistresses and that money was flowing freely from some source or other—perhaps from factory worlds like these—to let them work their idle, sweet wills. anyhow they were gambling, racing, disporting themselves at monte carlo and all at once they decided to rival each other in dress. or perhaps it was that they didn’t decide to, but just began to, which is much more natural and human.
as i caught it, with my nose pressed to the carriage window and the sight of rain and mist in my eyes, carmen would come down one night in splendid white silk, perhaps, her bare arms and perfect neck and hair flashing priceless jewels; and then the fair diane would arrive a little later with her body equally beautifully arrayed in some gorgeous material, her white arms and neck and hair equally resplendent. then the next night the gowns would be of still more marvelous material and artistry, and more jewels—every night lovelier gowns and more costly jewels, until one of these women took all her jewels, to the extent of millions of francs, i presume, and, arraying her maid gorgeously, put all the jewels on her and sent her into the casino or the ballroom or the dining-room—wherever it was—and she herself followed, in—let us hope—plain, jewelless black silk, with her lovely flesh showing voluptuously against it. and the other lady was there, oh, much to her chagrin and despair now, of course, decked with all her own splendid jewels to the extent of an45 equally large number of millions of francs, and so the rivalry was ended.
it was a very pretty story of pride and vanity and i liked it. but just at this interesting moment, one of those great blast furnaces, which i have been telling you about and which seemed to stretch for miles beside the track, flashed past in the night, its open red furnace doors looking like rubies, and the frosted windows of its lighted shops looking like opals, and the fluttering street lamps and glittering arc lights looking like pearls and diamonds; and i said: behold! these are the only jewels of the poor and from these come the others. and to a certain extent, in the last analysis and barring that unearned gift of brain which some have without asking and others have not at all, so they do.
it was seven or eight when we reached paddington. for one moment, when i stepped out of the car, the thought came to me with a tingle of vanity—i have come by land and sea, three thousand miles to london! then it was gone again. it was strange—this scene. i recognized at once the various london types caricatured in punch, and pick me up, and the sketch, and elsewhere. i saw a world of cabs and ‘busses, of porters, gentlemen, policemen, and citizens generally. i saw characters—strange ones—that brought back dickens and du maurier and w. w. jacobs. the words “booking office” and the typical london policeman took my eye. i strolled about, watching the crowd till it was time for us to board our train for the country; and eagerly i nosed about, trying to sense london from this vague, noisy touch of it. i can’t indicate how the peculiar-looking trains made me feel. humanity is so very different in so many little unessential things—so utterly the same in all the large ones. i46 could see that it might be just as well or better to call a ticket office a booking office; or to have three classes of carriages instead of two, as with us; or to have carriages instead of cars; or trams instead of street railways; or lifts instead of elevators. what difference does it make? life is the same old thing. nevertheless there was a tremendous difference between the london and the new york atmosphere—that i could see and feel.
“a few days at my place in the country will be just the thing for you,” barfleur was saying. “i sent a wireless to dora to have a fire in the hall and in your room. you might as well see a bit of rural england first.”
he gleamed on me with his monocled eye in a very encouraging manner.
we waited about quite awhile for a local or suburban which would take us to bridgely level, and having ensconced ourselves first class—as fitting my arrival—barfleur fell promptly to sleep and i mused with my window open, enjoying the country and the cool night air.
