Part 9

Being independent and alone in her own room, she could cry out her lone cry without any one interfering with unwelcome comforting. Then, pale-faced and red-eyed, she got up, the sobs still coming in little gasps. She looked in the glass as she pushed the black hair back from her blue-veined forehead. With one of those strange revelations of reality that come to people in life when in solitude they look at their own reflection in a mirror--she thought--spoke. "It is too late--too late--for me to be the mother of a boy-child."

Then she went and set her alarm-clock to a quarter to seven in the morning.

XVII

THE HOU-MEN OF THE DINGY CITY

How they call with different voices, these cities of men--from the Maxim-gun-like rattle of New York, with its chorus of strenuous steamers calling from the water, on over the gamut of different capitals to Tokio, where the city voice is the tinkling of stilted wooden shoes; not "Twinkle, twinkle, little star," but "Tinkle, tinkle, little feet," go the small wooden shoes on the wide firmament of pavement.

Most strident are the American cities; the most sweet-sounding are those of Japan, except in those few streets raided by tram-cars.

What is the voice of London? Is it not the plod, plod, dumping plod of the horses' hoofs and the jangling rattle of harness and bells, which last we hardly hear, so close is the sound to our ears, like things we cannot see because they are so close to our eyes? As it is a murmurous and noisy city in comparison with those of Japan, so it is peaceful and quiet in comparison with Chicago or New York. A friend of mine from that City of Unrest says that the sound of the London streets has a soothing, lulling effect on him, and makes him sleepy, like the sound of falling water.

As I went up to Euston to-day to meet an Oriental visitor, I fell to speculating how the city might look to him. A very cultured, intellectual fellow he is, who looks into the backs of the eyes of things. A Chinaman born, he had been through college in America, and knew American cities; he had also been studying in Paris, but this was his first visit to London. A wet, drizzling day was not the most propitious for his first impressions. Slopping along in a cab through the muddy streets, as I went under the portico of Euston Station I was forcefully reminded of one of the big gates of Pekin. There is a suggestion of the same massiveness; but the massiveness is only make-face, like the painted cannon on a Chinese city gate. It was an imposing portico to a shamble of sheds.

The railway terminus is the real gate of the modern city.

Yet what absurdly incongruous things these London city gates are--a salad jumble of architecture and machinery with a mayonnaise of train-oil and soot!

As I waited for my friend long trains came rumbling in under a canopy of smoke that hung about the grim iron rafters of this labyrinth. Fifteen minutes ago these trains had been spinning along through the green fields and across the shady lanes of what looked like "Merrie England," although now shaved down and trimmed to intense respectability of cultivation. The heavens darkened and the air thickened as they came close to their journey's end, until they slow down as if gropingly finding their way into the cavernous gateway of the great dingy city.

What a strange conglomeration of people was waiting on each platform! There was a train leaving to catch the steamer for New York, there was a line of people waiting to take tickets for a close-by station, there was a line of soldiers waiting to be entrained; an American girl was standing on an automatic machine, and getting the railway porter to translate from stones into pounds how much she weighed after her visit to Europe. A couple of Oriental servants seemed to have lost themselves in the labyrinthine station, and were wandering round with Oriental indifference. Porters, with hands and faces and uniforms toned down to the universal greyness of things, trundled their hand-lorries to the monotonous calling of "B' your leave, b' your leave"; and variegated specimens of humanity were looking around after their luggage as one might imagine disembodied souls looking for their bodies in the Valley of Jehoshaphat on the Last Day. There were not a few touches of cosmopolitanism suggestive of that gathering.

My Oriental alighted from the train. As his Japanese servant was quite capable of looking after his luggage and bringing it to his hotel, his master was left free to come right on with me and exercise his industrious curiosity--a curiosity that seemed never to be surprised at anything he saw, but took everything as a matter of course. He was a man of the world in his own estimation. Nevertheless, what an important part of it he had not yet seen! Was it not a great epoch in his life, this arrival of his in London?

"This is our North Gate."

"Ah, yes, Hou-Men," he said. "A very dark day, is it not?"

We drove away in a cab under that sepulchral prison-like portico; we had the glass down, it was raining so hard, and even he, whose Westernisation was principally confined to New York, noticed the absurdly asphyxiating arrangement of the London cab, which hermetically seals its frame-bound occupants. The New Yorkers got their idea of the cab from us, but they have improved upon the window by having it slanting outwards, so that, while protecting people from the rain, it admits air. For Londoners there is no alternative between spatteration and suffocation. In the New York cabs they can have shelter and fresh air.

It was not an inspiriting entrance through these first streets outside Euston into London. The pavement of Melton Street was little better than that of Pekin, and from each side those dreary-looking small hotels blinked out of their closed windows on the muddy street as if wondering when a God-forsaken guest would come and occupy them. And then on through grimy Gower Street, looking like the empty bottom of a drained canal.

It's not very inspiriting, this entrance into London from this North Gate of ours.

The people we passed there were not an interesting lot; they seemed all to belong to the two-storeyed houses. They were two-storeyed people, apparently keeping themselves moderately busy making a moderate amount of money, but hampered in the money-making by the mud and rain. We passed a little square carpeted with fresh grass, but the trees on the other side were vague in mist, and the square and its vegetation gave the suggestion of a tank with seaweeds in it. It was a day for studying men and women by their umbrellas and boots. Boots tell confessions for the most Low Church Protestants, and the umbrellas above them generally corroborate the sins of the boots.

My Oriental friend was gazing out gravely.

It was on a warm evening in a tea-garden that he had talked about his coming visit to London. I recollect his enthusing over the phrase

"Beneath the rule of men supremely great The pen is mightier than the sword."

A great motto for a great country, he then said it was. He professed an anxiety to see or meet some of the great English writers, our literati, as he called them. He liked the honesty of Englishmen in business, and wanted to see them at work. He had helped to show me something of the life of the East--that part of the life most difficult to see, the life of the home--and in return I promised to show him something of the life of the West, how and where people work and play, and pray--when they do so.

"Show me the house of one of your literati if we pass one," he said. "Is that one, there?" pointing to a gorgeous public-house, as we passed a street corner.

I saw the probable toppling of an ideal. We passed a couple of quick-driving vans with a green placard of an evening paper, and I explained to him what a reading public we were, and how many editions of the papers were quickly distributed during the afternoon, how the appetite for them had grown, like the craving for cheap cigarettes, as a relief from being obliged to inhale pure literary air. The newspaper habit and the cigarette habit are about on a par after all.

We passed a church with closed doors, and he seemed surprised. I explained to him that the churches were open on Sunday, on which day the more numerous temples of Bacchus were closed for a while.

We reached the Strand, where he was greatly interested in a line of 'buses. "Have you no street cars like in New York?" I submitted that these were kept on chiefly in order to have a supply of artillery horses in times of war.

"And have you no high buildings either?"