Europe Revised — 35 - Ch. XVII: Britain in Twenty Minutes, pt. 1

Britain in Twenty Minutes To a greater degree, I take it, than any other race the English have mastered the difficult art of minding their own affairs.

The average Englishman is tremendously knowledgable about his own concerns and monumentally ignorant about all other things.

If an Englishman's business requires that he shall learn the habits and customs of the Patagonians or the Chicagoans or any other race which, because it is not British, he naturally regards as barbaric, he goes and learns them--and learns them well.

Otherwise your Britisher does not bother himself with what the outlander may or may not do.

An Englishman cannot understand an American's instinctive desire to know about things; we do not understand his lack of curiosity in that direction.

Both of us forget what I think must be the underlying reasons--that we are a race which, until comparatively recently, lived wide distances apart in sparsely settled lands, and were dependent on the passing stranger for news of the rest of the world, where he belongs to a people who all these centuries have been packed together in their little island like oats in a bin.

London itself is so crowded that the noses of most of the lower classes turn up--there is not room for them to point straight ahead without causing a great and bitter confusion of noses; but whether it points upward or outward or downward the owner of the nose pretty generally refrains from ramming it into other folks' business.

If he and all his fellows did not do this; if they had not learned to keep their voices down and to muffle unnecessary noises;

if they had not built tight covers of reserve about themselves, as the oyster builds a shell to protect his tender tissues from irritation--they would long ago have become a race of nervous wrecks instead of being what they are, the most stolid beings alive.

In London even royalty is mercifully vouchsafed a reasonable amount of privacy from the intrusion of the gimlet eye and the chisel nose.

Royalty may ride in Rotten Row of a morning, promenade on the Mall at noon, and shop in the Regent Street shops in the afternoon, and at all times go unguarded and unbothered--I had almost said unnoticed.

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.

At the moment of our arrival there were no porters handy, so a policeman on post outside the station jumped forward on the instant and helped our chauffeur to wrestle the luggage down on the bricks.

When I, rallying somewhat from the shock of this, thanked him and slipped a coin into his palm, he said in effect that, though he was obliged for the shilling, I must not feel that I had to give him anything--that it was part of his duty to aid the public in these small matters.

I shut my eyes and tried to imagine a New York policeman doing as much for an unknown alien; but the effort gave me a severe headache.

It gave me darting pains across the top of the skull--at about the spot where he would probably have belted me with his club had I even dared to ask him to bear a hand with my baggage.

I had a peep into the workings of the system of which the London bobby is a spoke when I went to what is the very hub of the wheel of the common law--a police court.

I understood then what gave the policeman in the street his authority and his dignity--and his humility--when I saw how carefully the magistrate on the bench weighed each trifling cause and each petty case; how surely he winnowed out the small grain of truth from the gross and tare of surmise and fiction; how particular he was to give of the abundant store of his patience to any whining ragpicker or street beggar who faced him, whether as defendant at the bar, or accuser, or witness.

It was the very body of the law, though, we saw a few days after this when by invitation we witnessed the procession at the opening of the high courts.

Considered from the stand-points of picturesqueness and impressiveness it made one's pulses tingle when those thirty or forty men of the wig and ermine marched in single and double file down the loftily vaulted hall, with the Lord Chancellor in wig and robes of state leading, and Sir Rufus Isaacs, knee-breeched and sword-belted, a pace or two behind him; and then, in turn, the justices; and, going on ahead of them and following on behind them, knight escorts and ushers and clerks and all the other human cogs of the great machine.

What struck into me deepest, however, was the look of nearly every one of the judges.

Had they been dressed as longshoremen, one would still have known them for possessors of the judicial temperament--men born to hold the balances and fitted and trained to winnow out the wheat from the chaff.

So many eagle-beaked noses, so many hawk-keen eyes, so many smooth-chopped, long-jowled faces, seen here together, made me think of what we are prone to regard as the highwater period of American statesmanship--the Clay-Calhoun-Benton-Webster period.