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.
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