Crowds Part 1

Crowds.

by Gerald Stanley Lee.

BOOK ONE

CROWDS AND MACHINES

TO CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS

_"A battered, wrecked old man Thrown on this savage sh.o.r.e far, far from home, Pent by the sea and dark rebellious brows twelve dreary months ... The end I know not, it is all in Thee, Or small or great I know not--haply what broad fields, what lands!...

And these things I see suddenly, what mean they As if some miracle, some hand divine unsealed my eyes, Shadowy vast shapes smile through the air and sky, And on the distant waves sail countless ships, And anthems in new tongues I hear saluting me."_

CHAPTER I

WHERE ARE WE GOING?

The best picture I know of my religion is Ludgate Hill as one sees it going down the foot of Fleet Street. It would seem to many perhaps like a rather strange half-heathen altar, but it has in it the three things with which I worship most my Maker in this present world--the three things which it would be the breath of religion to me to offer to a G.o.d together--Cathedrals, Crowds, and Machines.

With the railway bridge reaching over, all the little still locomotives in the din whispering across the street; with the wide black crowd streaming up and streaming down, and the big, faraway, other-worldly church above, I am strangely glad. It is like having a picture of one's whole world taken up deftly, and done in miniature and hung up for one against the sky--the white steam which is the breath of modern life, the vast hurrying of our feet, and that Great Finger pointing toward heaven day and night for us all....

I never tire of walking out a moment from my nook in Clifford's Inn and stealing a glimpse and coming back to my fireplace. I sit still a moment before going to work and look in the flames and think. The great roar outside the Court gathers it all up--that huge, boundless, tiny, summed-up world out there; flings it faintly against my quiet windows while I sit and think.

And when one thinks of it a minute, it sends one half-fearfully, half-triumphantly back to one's work--the very thought of it. The Crowd hurrying, the Crowd's flurrying Machines, and the Crowd's G.o.d, send one back to one's work!

In the afternoon I go out again, slip my way through the crowds along the Strand, toward Charing Cross.

I never tire of watching the drays, the horses, the streaming taxis, all these little, fearful, gliding crowds of men and women, when a little s.p.a.ce of street is left, flowing swiftly, flowing like globules, like mercury, between the cabs.

But most of all I like looking up at that vast second story of the street, coming in over one like waves, like seas--all these happy, curious tops of 'buses; these dear, funny, way-up people on benches; these world-worshippers, sight-worshippers, and Americans--all these little scurrying congregations, hundreds of them, rolling past.

I sit on the front seat of a horse 'bus elbow to elbow with the driver, staring down over the brink of the abyss upon ears and necks--that low, distant s.p.a.ce where the horses look so tiny and so ineffectual and so gone-by below.

The street is the true path of the spirit. To walk through it, or roll or swing on top of a 'bus through it--the miles of faces, all these tottering, toddling, swinging miles of legs and stomachs; and on all sides of you, and in the windows and along the walks, the things they wear, and the things they eat, and the things they pour down their little throats, and the things they pray to and curse and worship and swindle in! It is like being out in the middle of a great ocean of living, or like climbing up some great mountain-height of people, their abysses and their clouds about them, their precipices and jungles and heavens, the great high roads of their souls reaching off.... I can never say why, but so strange is it, so full of awe is it, and of splendour and pity, that there are times when, rolling and swinging along on top of a 'bus, with all this strange, fearful joy of life about me, within me ... it is as if on top of my 'bus I had been far away in some infinite place, and had felt Heaven and h.e.l.l sweep past.

One of the first things that strikes an American when he slips over from New York, and finds himself, almost before he had thought of it--walking down the Strand, suddenly, instead of Broadway, is the way things--thousands of things at once; begin happening to him.

Of course, with all the things that are happening to him--the 'buses, the taxis, the Wren steeples, the great streams of new sights in the streets, the things that happen to his eyes and to his ears, to his feet and his hands, and to his body lunging through the ground and swimming up in s.p.a.ce on top of a 'bus through this huge, glorious, yellow mist of people ... there are all the things besides that begin happening to his mind.

In New York, of course, he rushes along through the city, in a kind of tunnel of his own thoughts, of his own affairs, and drives on to his point, and New York does not--at least it does not very often--make things happen to his mind. He is not in London five minutes before he begins to notice how London does his thinking for him. The streets of the city set him to thinking, mile after mile, miles of comparing, miles of expecting.

And above the streets that he walks through and drives through he finds in London another complete set of streets that interest him: the greater, silenter streets of England--the streets of people's thoughts.

And he reads the great newspapers, those huge highways on which the English people are really going somewhere.... "_Where are they going?_"

He goes through the editorials, he stumbles through the news, "_Where are the English people going?_"

An American thinks of the English people in the third person--at first, of course.

After three days or so, he begins, half-unconsciously, slipping over every now and then into what seems to be a vague, loose first person plural.

Then the first person plural grows.

He finds at last that his thinking has settled down into a kind of happy, easy-going, international, editorial "We." New York and London, Chicago and Sheffield, go drifting together through his thoughts, and even Paris, glimmering faintly over there, and a dim round world, and he asks, as the people of a world stream by, "_Where are WE going?_"

Thus it is that London, looming, teeming, world-suggesting, gets its grip upon a man, a fresh American, and stretches him, stretches him before his own eyes, makes him cosmopolitan, does his thinking for him.

There was a great sea to still his soul and lay down upon his spirit that big, quiet roundness of the earth.

Nothing is quite the same after that wide strip of sea--sleeping out there alone night by night--the gentle round earth sloping away down from under one on both sides, in the midst of s.p.a.ce.... Then, suddenly, almost before one knows, that quiet s.p.a.ce still lingering round one, perhaps one finds oneself thrust up out of the ground in the night into that big yellow roar of Trafalgar Square.

And here are the swift sudden crowds of people, one's own fellow-men hurrying past. One looks into the faces of the people hurrying past: "_Where are we going?_" One looks at the stars: "WHERE ARE WE GOING?"

That night, when I was thrust up out of the ground and stood dazed in the Square, I was told in a minute that this London where I was was a besieged and conquered city. Some men had risen up in a day and said to London: "No one shall go in. No one shall go out."

I was in the great proud city at last, the capital of the world, her big, new, self-a.s.sured inventions all about her, all around her, and soldiers camping out with her locomotives!

With her long trains for endless belts of people going in and coming out, with her air-brakes, electric lights, and motor-cars and aerial mails, it seemed pa.s.sing strange to be told that her great stations were all choked up with a queer, funny, old, gone-by, clanky piece of machinery, an invention for making people good, like soldiers!

And I stood in the middle of the roar of Trafalgar Square and asked, as all England was asking that night: "Where are we going?"

And I looked in the faces of the people hurrying past.

And n.o.body knew.

And the next day I went through the silenter streets of the city, the great crowded dailies where all the world troops through, and then the more quiet weeklies, then the monthlies, more dignified and like private parks; and the quarterlies, too, thoughtful, high-minded, a little absent, now and then a footfall pa.s.sing through.

And I found them all full of the same strange questioning: "Where are we going?"

And n.o.body knew.

It was the same questioning I had just left in New York, going up all about me, out of the skysc.r.a.pers.

New York did not know.

Now London did not know.