Crowds | Page 3

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 space 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 space.... Then, suddenly, almost before one knows, that quiet Space 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-assured 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 passing 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 nobody 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 passing through.
And I found them all full of the same strange questioning: "Where are we going?"
And nobody knew.
It was the same questioning I had just left in New York, going up all about me, out of the skyscrapers.
New York did not know.
Now London did not know.
* * * * *
And after I had tried the journals and the magazines, I thought of books.
I could not but look about--how could I do otherwise than look about?--a lonely