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. There is a street running from Shaftesbury Avenue into Oxford Street, which was once the village of St. Giles, one of the dozens of hamlets swallowed up by the great maw of London, and it still looks like a hamlet, although it has been absorbed for many years. We constantly happen on these absorbed villages, from which, not a century ago, people drove up to town in their coaches.
If you wish to see another phase of life, go out on a Saturday evening, from nine o'clock on to eleven, starting on a Beecham's Pill 'bus, and keep to the poorer districts, alighting occasionally to stand with the crowd in the narrower thoroughfares.
