Letters from England/The Pilgrim Observes the People
The Pilgrim Observes the People
IN England I should like to be a cow or a baby; but being a grown-up man I viewed the people of this country. Well, it is not true that the English wear loud check suits, with pipe and whiskers; as regards the latter, the only true Englishman is Dr. Bouček in Prague. Every Englishman wears a mackintosh, and has a cap on his head and a newspaper in his hand. As for the Englishwoman, she carries a mackintosh or a tennis racket. Nature here has a propensity for unusual shagginess, excrescences, woolliness, spikiness, and all kinds of hair; English horses, for example, have regular tufts and tassels of hair on their legs, and English dogs are nothing more nor less than absurd bundles of forelocks. Only the English lawn and the English gentleman are shaved every day.
What an English gentleman is cannot be stated concisely; you would have to be acquainted, firstly, with an English club-waiter, or with a booking-clerk at a railway station, or, above all, with a policeman. 
A gentleman, that is a measured combination of silence, courtesy, dignity, sport, newspapers and honesty. The man sitting opposite you in the train will anger you for two hours by not regarding you as worthy of a glance; suddenly he gets up and hands you your bag which you are unable to reach. Here the people always manage to help each other, but they never have anything to say to each other, except about the weather. That is probably why Englishmen have invented all games, and why they do not speak during their games. Their taciturnity is such that they do not even publicly abuse the Government, the trains or the taxes; on the whole, a joyless and reticent people. In the place of taverns, where one can sit, drink and talk, they have invented bars, where one can stand, drink and hold one’s peace. The more talkative people (like Lloyd George) take to politics, or to authorship; an English book must have at least four hundred pages.
It is perhaps through sheer taciturnity that the English swallow half of every word, and then the second half they somehow squash; so it is difficult to understand them. I used to travel every day to Ladbroke Grove; the conductor would come and I would say: “Ledbruk Grröv.” “. . .?? Eh?” “Ledbhuk Ghöv!” “. . .??? Eh?” “Hevhuv Hev!” “Aa, Hevhuv Hov!” The conductor would rejoice and give me a ticket to Ladbroke Grove. I shall never learn this as long as I live.
But if you get to know them closer, they are very kind and gentle; they never speak much because they never speak about themselves. They enjoy themselves like children, but with the most solemn leathery expression; they have lots of ingrained etiquette, but at the same time they are as free-and-easy as young whelps. They are hard as flint, incapable of adapting themselves, conservative, loyal, rather shallow and always uncommunicative; they cannot get out of their skin, but it is a solid and, in every respect, excellent skin. You cannot speak to them without being invited to lunch or dinner; they are as hospitable as St. Julian, but they can never overstep the distance between man and man. Sometimes you have a sense of uneasiness at feeling so solitary in the midst of these kind and courteous people; but if you were a little boy, you would know that you can trust them more than yourself, and you would be free and respected here more than anywhere else in the world; the policeman would puff out his cheeks to make you laugh, an old gentleman would play at ball with you, and a white-haired lady would lay aside her four-hundred-page novel to gaze at you winsomely with her grey and still youthful eyes.