XI. Piccadilly Circus and its Environs
A favorite game of mine in London was to walk until I became tired or lost or both, and then take a cab back home.
Oftenest, the bright beckoning of Piccadilly allured me, and I strolled along that Primrose Path from Park Lane to Piccadilly Circus, my mind laid open like a fresh blotting-book, to receive whatever impress London might carelessly leave upon it.
Such delightful people as I would see!
Ladies, tricked out in pink filminess of raiment, ever striving to clutch one more handful of their frou-frou, as it waggishly eluded their grasp, and dawdled along the pavement behind them.
Yet, strange to say, the flapping frilliness rarely becomes muddily bedraggled, as it would on a New York street; it merely achieves that palpable grayness which marks everything in London, from its palaces to its laundry work.
The headgear of these same ladies can be called nothing less than alarming.
During the summer of which I write, it was the whim to wear huge shapes of the mushroom or butter-bowl variety. These shapes, instead of being decorated with flowers or feathers, bore skilfully contrived fruits, that looked so like real ones I was often tempted to pluck them. Cherries and grapes were not so entirely novel, but peaches, pears, and in one instance a banana, seemed, at least, mildly ludicrous. I was rejoiced to learn that these fruits, being stuffed with cotton-wool, were not so weighty as they appeared; but they were indeed bulky, and crowded on to the hat in such quantities that it seemed more sensible to turn the butter-bowl the other side up to hold them.
Owen Seaman calls the English “the misunderstood people,” but how can one understand those who put fly-nets on the tops of their cabs instead of on their horses, and wear peaches on their heads?
As difficult to understand as their own handwriting (and more than that cannot be said!), after the solution is puzzled out the Londoners are the most delightful people in the world.
But you must accept the solution, and take them at their own valuation; for they are unadaptable, and very sure of themselves.
Now, Piccadilly is not like this. It is smiling, affable, charming, and very yielding and adaptable. It will respond to any of your moods and will give you an atmosphere of any sort you desire. On one side, as you walk along, are houses, more or less lately ducal, but all of a greatly worth-while air. Citified, indeed, with a wealthy width of stone pavement, and a noble height of stone frontage.
On the other side is Green Park, with its shining, softly-waving trees, its birds, and its grass.
But, passing the Hotel Ritz, both sides suddenly give way to shops and restaurants which rank among the most pretentious in all the world.
Many of the tradesmen are “purveyors to the King,” which magic phrase adds a charm to the humblest sorts of wares.
The book shops and the fruiterers’ shops are, to me, most enticing of all. It is a delight to make inquiries concerning a book that is, perhaps, not very well known, and, instead of the blank ignorance or the substitutive impulse often found in American book-shop clerks, to receive an intelligent opinion, quickly backed, if necessary, by intelligent reference to tabulated facts.
The unostentatious, yet almost invariably trustworthy, knowledge of London booksellers is a thing to be sighed for in our own country. Not even in Boston (outside of the Athenæum) is one sure of receiving bookish information when desired. But in London the bookseller takes a personal interest in your wants, and feels a personal pride in being able to gratify them.
And the heaps of second-hand books are mines of joy.
Among them you may find, as I did, real treasures at the price of trash.
I chanced upon an early edition of Byron’s poems – four little volumes, bound in soft, shiny green, with exquisite hand-tooling, and containing steel engraved book plates of old, scrolled design, which bore the name of somebody Gordon, whom I chose to imagine a near and dear relative of the late George Noel.
Also, I found a paper-covered copy of an Indian edition of Kipling’s early tales, and many such pleasant wares.
The fruit shops, too, have treasures both new and second-hand. This seemed strange to me, at first, and I learned of it by hearing a fellow-customer ask to hire a few pines.
After her departure I inquired of the shopman the meaning of it all.
He obligingly told me that many of his finest specimens of pineapples, canteloupes, Hamburg grapes, and other spectacular fruits, could be rented out for banquets night after night, with but slight wear and tear on their beauty and bloom. One enormous bunch of black grapes, as perfect as the colour studies of fruit that used to appear as supplements to the Art Amateur, he caressed fondly, as he told me it had been rented out for the last nine nights, and was yet good for another week’s work.
I then remembered the architectural triumphs of fruits that had graced many of the dinner tables I had smiled at, and I marvelled afresh at the English thrift.
All shops, streets, theatres, and traffic merge and congest in a perfect orgy of noise, motion, and color at Piccadilly Circus.
The first humorous story I heard in London was of the man who, returning from a festal function, inquired of the policeman, “Is this Piccadilly Circus, or is it Tuesday?” That story seems to me the epitome of London humor, and also a complete description of Piccadilly Circus.
The first few times I visited it I found it bewildering, but after I had learned to look upon it as a local habitation and a name, I learned to love it.
By day or by night, it is a great, crazy, beautiful whirl. Everybody in it is trying to get out of it, and everybody out is trying to get in. This causes a merry game of odds, and the elegant policemen send glances of mild reproof after the newsboys who hurtle through the crowd, yelling “Dily Mile!”
The rush of traffic here is considered a sure road to battle, murder, or sudden death, and the Londoner who crosses Piccadilly Circus rarely expects to get through alive.
But to me London traffic seems child’s play compared to ours in New York. I sauntered safely through Piccadilly Circus, without one tenth part of the trepidation that always seizes me when I try to scurry across Broadway. The lumbering ’buses have no such desire to run over people, as that which burns in the hearts of our trolley-cars. The pedestrians are too deliberate of speed, and the traffic too gentle of motion, to inspire fear of jostlement.
Dawdling along, I paused to look in at Swan and Edgar’s windows. Rather, I attempted to look in; for, with a peculiar sort of short-sightedness, these drapers choose to be-plaster their window panes with large posters which comment favorably upon the wares that are presumably behind them, but which cannot be seen by peeping through the small spaces left between the posters.
Then across to the Criterion for tea. All of the great restaurants present a gay scene at tea hour, and the Criterion, with its “decorative painting by eminent artists,” and its crowds of guests both eminent and decorative is among the gayest.
But it is a gayety of correct and subdued tone. The ladies, in their flashing finery of raiment, are of a cool, reserved deportment, and the men drink their tea and munch sweet cakes with a gravity born of the seriousness of the occasion.
If one notices any conspicuous action or effect in a London restaurant, one may be sure it is perpetrated by a stranger, – probably a visiting American.
I recently saw in one of our finest Fifth Avenue restaurants a most attractive young woman, who came in accompanied by a well-set-up, and moreover an exceedingly sensible looking, young man.
With absolute savoir faire, and no trace of self-consciousness, the girl carried in her arm a large brown “Teddy bear.”
The couple sat at a table and ordered some luncheon, and the bear was also given a seat, a napkin was tucked about his neck, and a plate placed before him. The girl’s face was sweet and refined; the man’s face was intelligent and dignified, and the bear’s face was coy and alluring. There was no attempt to attract attention, and, luncheon over, the young woman, who was at least twenty years old, tucked her pet under her arm, and they walked calmly out.
But such things are not done in London restaurants. And yet, these also have their peculiarities. At one small, but very desirable, restaurant in Old Compton Street it is the custom to steal the saltspoons as souvenirs. Not to possess one or more of these tiny pewter affairs, which are shaped like coal-shovels, is to be benighted indeed. So I stole one.
After my tea, I would, perhaps, trail along toward Trafalgar Square, by way of Regent Street and Pall Mall. After a long look at the black and white grayness of the National Gallery, I would slowly mount its steps, and from there take a long look at the wonderful façade of St. Martin’s-in-the-Field. Trafalgar Square is full of out-of-door delights, but if the mood served I would go into the National Gallery, and walk delicately, like Agag, among the pictures. I went always alone, for I did not care to look at certain pictures which I owned (by right of adoption of them into my London), in danger of hearing a companion say, “Note the delicate precision of the flesh tones,” or, “Observe the gradations of aerial perspective.” Nor did I want a “Hand-book,” that would assert, “Without a prolonged examination of this picture it is impossible to form an idea of the art with which it has been executed.”
Unhampered by mortal suggestion, I paused before the pictures that belonged to me, prolonging my examination or not, as I chose, and for my own reasons.
Some pictures I should have loved, but for an ineradicable memory of their narrowly black-framed reproductions that crowd the wall spaces of friends at home, who “just love Art.”
Other pictures I might have appropriated, but that a prolonged examination of them was impossible by reason of the massing in front of them of people who go out by the day sight-seeing.
And so I took my own where I found it, and happily wandered by A man with Fair Hair or Clouds at Twilight in a very bliss of art ignorance.
Then out-of-door London would call me again, and back I would go to Trafalgar Square, one of the lightest, brightest-colored bits of all England. From the asphalt to the welkin, from the Column to the Church, from the National Gallery to Morley’s Hotel, are the most beautiful blues, and greens, and whites, and reds, and grays that can be supplied by the combined efforts of Nature, Time, and modern pigments. A sudden impulse, perhaps, would make me think that I had immediate need of the Elgin Marbles, and, with a farewell nod to the northeast lion (which is my favorite of the four), I would jump into a hansom and jog over to the British Museum. But often the approach was so clogged by pompous and overbearing pigeons that I would make no attempt to enter. Instead, I would find another hansom, and take a long ride over to the Tate Gallery.
As I bounced happily along, I would note many landmarks of historic interest. Some of these were real, and others made up by myself on the spur of the moment, to fit a passing thought.
For, if I saw an old building of picturesque interest, I could make myself more decently emotional toward the antiquity of it by assuring myself that that was where Sterne died, or where Pepys “made mighty merry.”
And, after all, facts are of little importance compared with “those things which really are – the eternal inner world of the imagination.”
It was from the outlook of a hansom cab that I could get some of the best views of my London. Every turn would bring new sorts of motion, sound, and color. And, birdseyed thus, it was all so beautiful that I wondered what Shelley meant by saying “Hell is a city very much like London,” – if, indeed, he did say it.
Once in the Tate Gallery, I would fall afresh under the spell of the lonely wistfulness of G. F. Watts’ Minotaur.
Then I would go to gaze long on Whistler’s wonderful notion of Battersea Bridge on a blue night, and then betake myself to the Turner collection.
Here I could spend hours, floundering in unintelligent delight among the pictures, sensitive to each apotheosis of color and beauty, and not caring whether its title might be Waves Breaking on a Flat Beach, or River Scene with Cattle.
But too much Turner was apt to go to my head, and just in time I would tear myself away, hop into a hansom, and make for the Wallace Collection to be brought back to a sense of human reality by a short interview with the Laughing Cavalier.
What a city it is, where cabs and picture-galleries are within the reach of all who desire them!
