To the untraveled American, who knows only the saloons of his own country, it may seem incredible that a common bar-room should ever feel like home. But there is a passage in Ruskin which poetically explains this possibility. In his second lecture in "Sesame and Lilies," he has been saying that a true woman, wherever she goes, carries with her the sense of home; and he adds, with a fine poetic flourish:--
The stars only may be over her head; the glow-worm in the night-cold grass may be the only fire at her foot: but home is yet wherever she is; and for a noble woman it stretches far round her, better than ceiled with cedar or painted with vermilion, shedding its quiet light far, for those who else were homeless.
Even if Ruskin in this passage, as all too often in his writings, may be accused of an excess of sentiment [one wonders, for instance, if he has ever actually slept upon "the night-cold grass" and arisen without rheumatism to write eloquent prose about it], we may yet discern beneath his ecstasy of phrasing the existence of a solid and indisputable truth. Merely to meet a woman who personifies the sense of homeliness is to feel yourself at home.
And this comfortable sense of homeliness you may find in many an English bar-maid. If you wish to investigate upon your own account, you might try Bolland's Restaurant in Chester, or the Yates Wine Cellar in Manchester, or the Nelson in Gloucester, or the Crown in Salisbury, or--but I am not writing a guide-book to the bars of England, and, besides, every traveler is likely to fare best if he is left to his own devices. Of all the English bar-maids I have known, one (as is but natural) recurs preeminent in my recollections. I think that I shall tell you her name, because so many poems echo in it; but I shall not tell you more precisely where she may be found than to say that she is one of many who serve drinks in the bar of one of the great hotels that are clustered near Trafalgar Square. I think it was I who discovered Eileen; but I introduced her very soon to several of my friends in London, and thereafter (forsaking the clubs to which we had formerly reverted for a talk and a night-cap after the theatre) we formed a habit of gathering at midnight to meet Eileen and to chat amicably within the range of her most hospitable smile until the bar closed at half past twelve. Assuredly, in that alien metropolis, she made us feel at home; and we escaped out of the cacophonous reverberation of the Strand into the quietude of her presence like men who relax to slippered ease within the halo of a hearth. "She had a weary little way with her that made you think of quiet, intimate things,"--as one of us said at the outset of one of the many sonnets she inspired. There is a sweet weariness that reminds you of lullabying mothers and the drooping eyelids of little children drifting into dreams; and this was, I think, the essence of her. Her voice was like the soothing of a cool hand upon a tired brow. She was very simple in her dark dress and dark hair; and there was something maiden-motherly in her smile. You saw her most clearly when her frank eyes looked directly at you and deepened with a gleam of gentleness, and her lips parted tenderly to answer to the light within her eyes. Her hand, when she gave it to you in good-night, was like a memory of her voice; it had the same softness as of a whisper, it suggested the same sense of insuperable peace. I grew to know her very well, and could tell you her history if I would,--how she was brought up in the country, one of many children; how, when her sisters married and she did not (because the men who came were none of them the right one), she had to earn her living and began as a bar-maid in a railway station in the Midlands; how she came up to London and grew to be (though this she won't admit) a light in her particular occupation; of the long hours and the scanty leisure of her labor; of the compensation in the occasional people who come in and make an hour live with talk that is illumined and sincere, and in the occasional half-holiday rambles with a married sister over Hampstead Heath; of what is worth while in such a life and what is not; and of how it is that the eyes, though weary, can still sincerely smile with that glow as of a fireside, and the voice will evermore grow gentler through the years.