And now the Horse Guards, a glimpse of beautiful cream ponies, and a golden panoply, a hurricane of cheers, the crashing of bands- ‘The King! the King! God save the King!’ Everybody has gone mad. The contagion is sweeping me off my feet. I, too, want to shout, ‘The King! God save the King!’ Ragged men about me, tears in their eyes, are tossing up their hats and crying ecstatically, ‘Bless ‘em! Bless ‘em! Bless ‘em!’ See, there he is, in that wondrous golden coach, the great crown flashing on his head, the woman in white beside him likewise crowned.
And I check myself with a rush, striving to convince myself that it is all real and rational, and not some glimpse of fairyland. This I cannot succeed in doing, and it is better so. I much prefer to believe that all this pomp, and vanity, and show, and mumbo-jumbo foolery has come from fairlyand, than to believe it the performance of sane and sensible people who have mastered matter, and solved the secrets of the stars.
Princes and princelings, dukes, duchesses, and all manner of coroneted folk of the royal train are flashing past; more warriors, and lackeys, and conquered peoples, and the pageant is over. I drift with the crowd out of the square into a tangle of narrow streets, where the public houses are a-roar with drunkenness, men, women, and children mixed together in colossal debauch. And on every side is rising the favorite song of the Coronation:
Oh! on Coronation Day, on Coronation Day,
We’ll have a spree, a jubilee, and shout, Hip, hip, hooray,
For we’ll all be merry, drinking whiskey, wine, and sherry.
We’ll be merry on Coronation Day.
The rain is pouring down in torrents. Up the street come troops of the auxiliaries, black Africans and yellow Asiatics, beturbaned and befezed, and coolies swinging along with machine guns and mountain batteries on their heads, and the bare feet of all, in quick rhythm, going slish, slish, through the pavement mud. The public houses empty by magic, and the swarthy allegiants are cheered by their British brothers, who return at once to the carouse.
‘And how did you like the procession, mate?’ I asked an old man on a bench in Green Park.
”Ow did I like it? A bloody good chawnce, sez I to myself, for a sleep, wi’ all the coppers aw’y, so I turned into the corner there, along wi’ fifty others. But I couldn’t sleep, a-lyin’ there ‘ungry an’ thinkin’ ‘ow I’d worked all the years o’ my life an’ now ‘ad no plyce to rest my ‘ead; an’ the music comin’ to me, an’ the cheers an’ cannon, till I got almost a hanarchist an’ wanted to blow out the brains o’ the Lord Chamberlain.’
Why the Lord Chamberlain, I could not precisely see, nor could he, but that was the way he felt, he said conclusively, and there was no more discussion.
As night drew on, the city became a blaze of light. Splashes of color, green, amber, and ruby, caught the eye at every point, and ‘E. R.,’ in great cut-crystal letters and backed by flaming gas, was everywhere. The crowds in the streets increased by hundreds of thousands, and though the police sternly put down mafficking, drunkenness and rough play abounded. The tired workers seemed to have gone mad with the relaxation and excitement, and they surged and danced down the streets, men and women, old and young, with linked arms and in long rows, singing, ‘I may be crazy, but I love you,’ ‘Dolly Gray,’ and ‘The Honeysuckle and the Bee,’- the last rendered something like this:
Yew aw the enny, ennyseckle, Oi em ther bee,
Oi’d like ter sip ther enny from those red lips, yew see.
I sat on a bench on the Thames Embankment, looking across the illuminated water. It was approaching midnight, and before me poured the better class of merrymakers, shunning the more riotous streets and returning home. On the bench beside me sat two ragged creatures, a man and a woman, nodding and dozing. The woman sat with her arms clasped across the breast, holding tightly, her body in constant play,- now dropping forward till it seemed its balance would be overcome and she would fall to the pavement; now inclining to the left, sideways, till her head rested on the man’s shoulder; and now to the right, stretched and strained, till the pain of it awoke her and she sat bolt upright. Whereupon the dropping forward would begin again and go through its cycle till she was aroused by the strain and stretch.
Every little while, boys and young men stopped long enough to go behind the bench and give vent to sudden and fiendish shouts. This always jerked the man and woman abruptly from their sleep; and at sight of the startled woe upon their faces the crowd would roar with laughter as it flooded past.
This was the most striking thing, the general heartlessness exhibited on every hand. It is a commonplace, the homeless on the benches, the poor miserable folk who may be teased and are harmless. Fifty thousand people must have passed the bench while I sat upon it, and not one, on such a jubilee occasion as the crowning of the King, felt his heart-strings touched sufficiently to come up and say to the woman: ‘Here’s sixpence; go and get a bed.’ But the women, especially the young women, made witty remarks upon the woman nodding, and invariably set their companions laughing.
To use a Briticism, it was ‘cruel’; the corresponding Americanism was more appropriate-it was ‘fierce.’ I confess I began to grow incensed at this happy crowd streaming by, and to extract a sort of satisfaction from the London statistics which demonstrate that one in every four adults is destined to die on public charity, either in the workhouse, the infirmary, or the asylum.
I talked with the man. He was fifty-four and a broken-down docker. He could only find odd work when there was a large demand for labor, for the younger and stronger men were preferred when times were slack. He had spent a week, now, on the benches of the Embankment; but things looked brighter for next week, and he might possibly get in a few days’ work and have a bed in some doss-house. He had lived all his life in London, save for five years, when, in 1878, he saw foreign service in India.
Of course he would eat; so would the girl. Days like this were uncommon hard on such as they, though the coppers were so busy poor folk could get in more sleep. I awoke the girl, or woman rather, for she was ‘Eyght an’ twenty, sir’; and we started for a coffee-house.
”Wot a lot o’ work, puttin’ up the lights,’ said the man at sight of some building superbly illuminated. This was the keynote of his being. All his life he had worked, and the whole objective universe, as well as his own soul, he could express in terms only of work. ‘Coronations is some good,’ he went on. ‘They give work to men.’
‘But your belly is empty,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘I tried, but there wasn’t any chawnce. My age is against me. Wot do you work at? Seafarin’ chap, eh? I knew it from yer clothes.’
‘I know wot you are,’ said the girl, ‘an Eyetalian.’
‘No ‘e ayn’t,’ the man cried heatedly. ”E’s a Yank, that’s wot ‘e is. I know.’
‘Lord lumme, look a’ that,’ she exclaimed as we debouched upon the Strand, choked with the roaring, reeling Coronation crowd, the men bellowing and the girls singing in high throaty notes:
Oh! on Coronation D’y, on Coronation D’y,
We’ll ‘ave a spree, a jubilee, an’ shout ‘Ip, ‘ip, ‘ooray.
For we’ll all be merry, drinkin’ whiskey, wine, and sherry,
We’ll be merry on Coronation D’y.
”Ow dirty I am, bein’ around the w’y I ‘ave,’ the woman said, as she sat down in a coffee-house, wiping the sleep and grime from the corners of her eyes. ‘An’ the sights I ‘ave seen this d’y, an’ I enjoyed it, though it was lonesome by myself. An’ the duchesses an’ the lydies ‘ad sich gran’ w’ite dresses. They was jest bu’ful, bu’ful.’
‘I’m Irish,’ she said, in answer to a question. ‘My nyme’s Eyethorne.’
‘What?’ I asked.
‘Eyethorne, sir; Eyethorne.’
‘Spell it.’
‘H-a-y-t-h-o-r-n-e, Eyethorne.’
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘Irish Cockney.’
‘Yes, sir, London-born.’
She had lived happily at home till her father died, killed in an accident, when she had found herself on the world. One brother was in the army, and the other brother, engaged in keeping a wife and eight children on twenty shillings a week and unsteady employment, could do nothing for her. She had been out of London once in her life, to a place in Essex, twelve miles away, where she had picked fruit for three weeks- ‘An’ I was as brown as a berry w’en I come back. You won’t b’lieve it, but I was.’