PENELOPE'S PROGRESS - Complete Series. Kate Douglas Wiggin
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because I know I could trust her not to presume on my defencelessness to enter into conversation with me. But this duke, whose dukedom very likely dates back to the hour of the Norman Conquest, is a very different person, and is to be met under very different circumstances. He may ask me my politics. Of course I can tell him that I am a Mugwump, but what if he asks me why I am a Mugwump?”
“He will not,” Hilda answered. “Englishmen are not wholly devoid of feeling!”
“And how shall I address him?” I went on. “Does one call him ‘your Grace,’ or ‘your Royal Highness’? Oh for a thousandth-part of the unblushing impertinence of that countrywoman of mine who called your future king ‘Tummy’! but she was a beauty, and I am not pretty enough to be anything but discreetly well-mannered. Shall you sit in his presence, or stand and grovel alternately? Does one have to curtsy? Very well, then, make any excuses you like for me, Hilda: say I’m eccentric, say I’m deranged, say I’m a Nihilist. I will hide under the scullery table, fling myself in the moat, lock myself in the keep, let the portcullis fall on me, die any appropriate early English death,—anything rather than curtsy in a tailor-made gown; I can kneel beautifully, Hilda, if that will do: you remember my ancestors were brought up on kneeling, and yours on curtsying, and it makes a great difference in the muscles.”
Hilda smiled benignantly as she wound the coil of russet hair round her shapely head. “He will think whatever you do charming, and whatever you say brilliant,” she said; “that is the advantage in being an American woman.”
Just at this moment Lady Veratrum sent a haughty maid to ask us if we would meet her under the trees in the park which surrounds the house. I hailed this as a welcome reprieve to the dreaded function of tea with the duke, and made up my mind, while descending the marble staircase, that I would slip away and lose myself accidentally in the grounds, appearing only in time for the London train. This happy mode of issue from my difficulties lent a springiness to my step, as we followed a waxwork footman over the velvet sward to a nook under a group of copper beeches. But there, to my dismay, stood a charmingly appointed tea-table glittering with silver and Royal Worcester, with several liveried servants bringing cakes and muffins and berries to Lady Veratrum, who sat behind the steaming urn. I started to retreat, when there appeared, walking towards us, a simple man, with nothing in the least extraordinary about him.
“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. 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.
It is a market night, and the streets will be a moving mass of men and women buying at the hucksters’ stalls. Everything that can be sold at