I walked slowly back through the tenements toward the new home among them that Eleanore had made.
In the summer's night the city streets were still alive with people. I passed brightly lighted thoroughfares where I saw them in crowds, and I knew that this tide of people flowed endlessly through the hundreds of miles of streets that made up the port of New York. Hurrying, idling, talking and laughing, quarreling, fighting, here stopping to look at displays in shop windows, there pouring into "Movies"—and walking, walking, walking on. Going up into their tenement homes to eat and drink, love, breed and sleep, to wake up and come down to another day.
So the crowd moved on and on, while the great harbor surrounding their lives and shaping their lives, went on with its changes unheeded.
I tried to think of this harbor as being run by this common crowd—of the railroads, mines and factories, of the colleges, hospitals and all institutions of research, and the theaters and concert halls, the picture galleries, all the books—all in the power of the crowd.
"It will be a long time," I thought. "Before it comes the crowd must change. But they will change—and fast or slow, I belong with them while they're changing."
Something Joe had once said came into my mind:
"They're the ones who get shot down in wars and worked like dogs in time of peace."
And I thought of the crowds across the sea—of men being rushed over Europe on trains, or marching along starlit roads, or tramping across meadows. And I thought of long lines of fire at dawn spurting from the mouths of guns—from mountainsides, from out of woods, from trenches in fast blackening fields—and of men in endless multitudes pitching on their faces as the fire mowed them down.
And with those men, it seemed to me, went all the great gods I had known—gods of civilization and peace—the kind god in my mother's church and the smiling goddess in Paris, the clear-eyed god of efficiency and the awakening god of the crowd—all plunging into this furnace of war with the men in whose spirits all gods dwell—to shrivel and melt in seething flame and emerge at last in strange new forms. What would come out of the furnace?
I thought of Joe and his comrades going about in towns and camps, speaking low and watching, waiting, hoping to bring a new dawn, a new order, out of this chaotic night.