The City of Comrades

by Basil King

That to which I was not accustomed struck me soon as shimmering, shining, radiant. That it was not an outward radiance goes without saying. New York on that November day was as dreary and bleak a port as one could easily land at. A leaden sky cloaked the streets in a leaden, lifeless atmosphere. The tops of steeples and the roofs of the tall buildings were wreathed in a leaden mist. Patches of befouled snow on the ground, with the drifts of paper, rags, and refuse to which the New York eye is so inured that it doesn’t see them, lent to the side-streets through which we clattered an air of being so hopelessly sunk in dirt that it is no use trying to be any other way. Drays rumbled, motor-trucks honked, ferry-boats shrieked, tram-cars clanked, trains overhead crashed with a noise like that of the shell that had struck the Assiniboia, while our taxicab creaked and squeaked and spluttered like an old man putting on a speed he has long outlived. On the pavements a strange, strange motley of men and women—Hebrew, Slavic, Mongolian, negro, negroid—carried on trades as outlandish as themselves. Here and there an outlandish child shivered its way to an outlandish school. Only now and then one saw a Caucasian face, either clean, alert, superior, or brutalized and repulsive beyond anything to be seen among the yearning, industrious aliens.

And yet to me all was lit by an inner light of which I couldn’t at first see the lamp. I caught the rays without detecting the source that emitted them. In and through and above this squalid New York, with its tumult, its filth, its seeming indifference to the individual, there was a celestial property born of the kingdom of heaven. It shone in the sky; it quivered in the air; it lay restfully on the hoary graveyards nestling at the feet of prodigious cubes, like eld at the base of Time. All faces glowed with it; all tasks translated it; all the clamor of feet and wheels and whistles sang it like a song.

The name of it came to me with a cry of joy and a pang of grief simultaneously. It was peace. I was in a country that was not at war.

I had forgotten the experience. I had forgotten the sensation it produces. I had forgotten that there was a world in which men and women were free to go and come without let or hindrance. And here were people doing it. The day’s work claimed them, and nothing beyond the day’s work. To earn a living was an end in itself. The living earned, a man could enjoy it. The money he made he could spend; the house he built he could occupy; the motor he bought he could ride in; the wife he married he could abide with; the children he begot he could bring up. He could go on in this routine till he sickened and died and was buried in it. There was no terrific overruling motive to which all other motives had become subsidiary, and into which they merged.

In the countries I had been living in war was the sky overhead and the ground beneath the feet. One dreamed it at night, and one woke to it in the morning. It made everything its adjunct, every one its slave. Duty, wealth, love, devotion, had no other object on which to pour themselves out. It commanded, absorbed, monopolized. There was no home it didn’t visit, no pocket it didn’t rifle, no face it didn’t haunt, no heart it didn’t search and sift and strengthen and wrench upward—the process was always a hard, dragging, compulsive one—till the most wilful had become submissive and the most selfish had given all. Prayer was war; worship was war; art, science, philosophy, sport were war. Nothing else walked in the streets or labored in the fields or bought and sold in the shops. It was the next Universal after God.

And here, after God, a man was his own Universal. With no standard to which everything had to be referred he seemed unutterably care-free. Care-free was not a term I should have used of New York, of America, in the old days; but it was now the only one that applied. The people I saw going by on the sidewalks had nothing but themselves and their families to think of. Their only struggle was the struggle for food and shelter. Safe people, happy people, dwelling in an Eden out of the reach of cannon and gas and bomb!

“I came not to bring peace, but a sword!”

Sacrilegiously, perhaps, I was applying those words to myself as we jolted homeward. But I was applying them with a query. I was asking if it could possibly be worth while. All at once my mission became unreal, fantastic.

To begin with, it was beyond my powers. Among these hundreds of thousands of strangers I knew but a handful. Even on that handful I should make no impression. I could see at a glance, from the few words I had exchanged with people on the dock, that each man’s cup was full. You couldn’t pour another drop into it. I had subconsciously taken it for granted that my friends would be, as it were, waiting for me; and already it was evident that in their minds there would not be a vacant spot. I had not the will-power to force myself in on so much hurry and preoccupation.