"That cannot be the Duke of Cimicifugas," thought I, "a man in a
corduroy jacket, without a sign of a suite; probably it is a
Banished Duke come from the Forest of Arden for a buttered muffin."
But it was the Duke of Cimicifugas, and no other. Hilda was
presented first, while I tried to fire my courage by thinking of the
Puritan Fathers, and Plymouth Rock, and the Boston Tea-Party, and
the battle of Bunker Hill. Then my turn came. I murmured some
words which might have been anything, and curtsied in a stiff-necked
self-respecting sort of way. Then we talked, - at least the duke and
Lady Veratrum talked. Hilda said a few blameless words, such as
befitted an untitled English virgin in the presence of the nobility;
while I maintained the probationary silence required by Pythagoras
of his first year's pupils. My idea was to observe this first duke
without uttering a word, to talk with the second (if I should ever
meet a second), to chat with the third, and to secure the fourth for
Francesca to take home to America with her.
Of course I know that dukes are very dear, but she could afford any
reasonable sum, if she found one whom she fancied; the principal
obstacle in the path is that tiresome American lawyer with whom she
considers herself in love. I have never gone beyond that first
experience, however, for dukes in England are as rare as snakes in
Ireland. I can't think why they allow them to die out so, - the
dukes, not the snakes. If a country is to have an aristocracy, let
there be enough of it, say I, and make it imposing at the top, where
it shows most, especially since, as I understand it, all that
Victoria has to do is to say, 'Let there be dukes,' and there are
dukes.
Chapter VIII. Tuppenny travels in London.
If one really wants to know London, one must live there for years
and years.
This sounds like a reasonable and sensible statement, yet the moment
it is made I retract it, as quite misleading and altogether too
general.
We have a charming English friend who has not been to the Tower
since he was a small boy, and begs us to conduct him there on the
very next Saturday. Another has not seen Westminster Abbey for
fifteen years, because he attends church at St. Dunstan's-in-the-
East. Another says that he should like to have us 'read up' London
in the red-covered Baedeker, and then show it to him, properly and
systematically. Another, a flower of the nobility, confesses that
he never mounted the top of an omnibus in the evening for the sake
of seeing London after dark, but that he thinks it would be rather
jolly, and that he will join us in such a democratic journey at any
time we like.
We think we get a kind of vague apprehension of what London means
from the top of a 'bus better than anywhere else, and this vague
apprehension is as much as the thoughtful or imaginative observer
will ever arrive at in a lifetime. It is too stupendous to be
comprehended. The mind is dazed by its distances, confused by its
contrasts; tossed from the spectacle of its wealth to the
contemplation of its poverty, the brilliancy of its extravagances to
the stolidity of its miseries, the luxuries that blossom in Mayfair
to the brutalities that lurk in Whitechapel.
We often set out on a fine morning, Salemina and I, and travel
twenty miles in the day, though we have to double our twopenny fee
several times to accomplish that distance.
We never know whither we are going, and indeed it is not a matter of
great moment (I mean to a woman) where everything is new and
strange, and where the driver, if one is fortunate enough to be on a
front seat, tells one everything of interest along the way, and
instructs one regarding a different route back to town.
We have our favourite 'buses, of course; but when one appears, and
we jump on while it is still in motion, as the conductor seems to
prefer, and pull ourselves up the cork-screw stairway, - not a simple
matter in the garments of sophistication, - we have little time to
observe more than the colour of the lumbering vehicle.
We like the Cadbury's Cocoa 'bus very much; it takes you by St.
Mary-le-Strand, Bow-Bells, the Temple, Mansion House, St, Paul's,
and the Bank.
If you want to go and lunch, or dine frugally, at the Cheshire
Cheese, eat black pudding and drink pale ale, sit in Dr. Johnson's
old seat, and put your head against the exact spot on the wall where
his rested, - although the traces of this form of worship are all too
apparent, - then you jump on a Lipton's Tea 'bus, and are deposited
at the very door. All is novel, and all is interesting, whether it
be crowded streets of the East End traversed by the Davies' Pea-Fed
Bacon 'buses, or whether you ride to the very outskirts of London,
through green fields and hedgerows, by the Ridge's Food or Nestle's
Milk route.
There are trams, too, which take one to delightful places, though
the seats on top extend lengthwise, after the old 'knifeboard
pattern,' and one does not get so good a view of the country as from
the 'garden seats' on the roof of the omnibus; still there is
nothing we like better on a warm morning than a good outing on the
Vinolia tram that we pick up in Shaftesbury Avenue.
