But Orientals would have little to teach us in what the Chinese call "make face," which enters into many of the actions of our daily life quite as much as it does into theirs. How thankful we should be that it does not also enter into our religious life! How thoroughly the Chinese must be impressed with this by their recent experiences of our Latest Crusaders! I was listening the other day to a gentleman descanting "on the darkness that enveloped those Pagan barbarians," and I was thinking of another darkness or blindness which prevented the speaker, and many like him, from seeing the least gleam of light in the East. Yet it does not require much hand-shading of our intellectual eyes to see ex Oriente Lux.
XI
NIGHT IN THE CITY OF UNREST
"How beautiful is night!
A dewy freshness fills the silent air;
No mist obscures, nor cloud, nor speck, nor stain
Breaks the serene of heaven:
In full-orbed glory, yonder moon divine
Rolls through the dark-blue depths.
Beneath her steady ray
The desert-circle spreads
Like the round ocean, girdled with the sky.
How beautiful is night!"
Night really unrobes her beauty only in silence, the silence of the desert. Never can I forget nights spent in Western Australia, far beyond Kalgoorlie, away back in the Never-Never Land, where no rain falls. That is the land of great thirst, where for hundreds of miles one sees no living thing, where no birds sing, not even the mournful call of the jackal echoes across the waste, and not even the chirping ticking of an insect is to be heard to break the utter stillness. Gum trees, whose roots strike down a hundred feet for water, lift up their sparsely-covered branches into the motionless air above, their tongue-like leaves silently saying "I thirst." In that stagnant air they remind one of the giant seaweeds that grow in the depths of the great oceans where the water never moves; and the silence there is the silence of ocean depths, and so has been from the beginning. To-day my horse's tracks made five years ago are probably as fresh as were those which I followed that had been made two years before that time. It must be experienced to be realised, that dead silence; when lying on the ground at night the sound of one's heart-beats or the breathing of one's horse, tethered yards away, alone tells one that the sense of hearing is not lost. It must be experienced to be loved, that wonder of a silent world, where the Spirit of Solitude in his own domain for ever almost palpably seems to brood with finger on pressed lips. It is the contrast with the scene that lies below me that forcibly recalls these nights in the desert. Now, as I write, I am at the Antipodes, and focus points of contrast in every sense to these scenes; the same moon that shines on that far-off desert is the only thing in common.
The city of New York is in the form of a wedge, the point of the wedge being the down-town end, a great black mass that now looks driven into the moonlit water. Down here, as if with sheer weight of pressure of crowding humanity, the houses seem driven upward. There being not enough room on the end of the wedge for the people, they are forced upwards for room, as one would squeeze paint from an artist's tube. They rise up in tall, irregular-shaped shafts of various heights, as a child might stand its long toy bricks on end anyhow. As I write I am looking down from the thirtieth story of one of the highest, feeling as if I had been "set on the pinnacle of the Temple" (of Mammon?). The great city lies below me, but though it is night it does not appear to lie in repose. If it sleeps, it is a restless, troubled sleep. The air is vocal with many noises that come up from below as an exhalation; white flames of steam wave from the tops of buildings below me. Up here on this giddy height a hot wind of the upper air is blowing, and a vibrating, murmurous throbbing pulsates through the building itself. This latter is caused by the elevators, those veins and arteries of the structure, and their motion must never cease or else a clot of humanity would be left marooned in the upper storeys. Across the river on the west side a row of lights are moving in one direction, and alongside them a row moving in the opposite, like ants at work. These are the trolly-cars crossing Brooklyn Bridge. North and south, to the sound of a jangling rattle, the trams on the Elevated are moving, and along the streets the trolly-cars, with their booming note, which crescendoes up the scale with increasing speed and diminuendoes with the slackening of it. Out on the water the red and green lights of the steamers move about in irregular tracks. The booming, mournful call of these steamers, like the lowing of a cow for her lost calf, goes on for ever. There are times in the desert when the coyote and the jackal are silent; on forlorn coasts in the hours before the first of dawn the seagulls cease their screaming; but these voices are never silent, calling, circling, and cawing, calling around the City of Unrest. Different notes they sound—the angry scream of the steam siren, the deep boom of the incoming ocean liner, and the note one hears oftenest—a mournful, lost wail, as of a damned soul calling out, "Custos, quid de nocte?" "Custos, quid de nocte?" The feverish hours pass troublously, but there is no response in the night of the City of Unrest.
Now a great change has come over the scene; the moon has been curtained off by a heavy mass of clouds, and its light is shut off from the water. The lights of the city shine out with increased distinctness; the moonlight that whitened the sides of the buildings now has left them black masses of vague shadow, and all at once one gets the impression of looking down into an inverted firmament studded with countless stars of as various magnitudes as in the heavens, from the bright electric arc-lights to tiny gaslights; and from this height of over 400 feet one gets the impression, familiar to those who have looked at the world from a balloon, that the rim of the horizon rises all round. "Around the circle of the desert spreads," but the desert now is of the cloud-covered sky, and far as the eye can reach are the stars of this great city, and now through that firmament of stars there is a dark path in an unilluminated Milky Way which marks the course of the river.
As one looks down from here and listens to the combination of throbbing sounds that come up from below, there is a certain impressiveness in the thought of being in the centre of such focused activity. One seems to be pressing the ear close to the heart of a great country. I wonder what that other city looked like from the pinnacle of whose temple He looked down on the other great cities that had their day? What Carthage looked like? The present edition of Rome and Paris and London, and Pekin from the Imperial pagodas on the top of Coal Hill, I have looked down on at night, but none of them is like this. From the Capitol Rome lies quietly wrapped in the memories of past greatness; from the hill of Montmartre the electric lights here and there give suggestive glimpses of the City of Pleasure. In Pekin, looking across the lotus-pond and the marble bridges, all that is squalid in the city is shrouded in a veil of foliage, and above the tops of the trees only what is beautiful emerges, and the city sleeps in the enjoyment of thoroughly Oriental repose; and, like a solidly-built, healthy man, London sleeps soundly; but the strenuous, restless activity of this city can hardly be said to sleep. I watched it make an attempt at a pause for five minutes on the day of the President's funeral. At an appointed time all the street traffic was supposed to stand still. My! what an effort it was! It was not a real pause; it seemed more like the gasping holding of the city's breath, holding for these five minutes as if something were going to burst; and then at the second when the clock marked the end of the five minutes on went everything spinning with a feeling of absolute relief. As one looks down from here one cannot help speculating as to what is to be the future of what lies below. Is it going to be the greatest city that the world has ever seen—in real greatness, or only in acute development of material civilisation; and are the multitudes that populate it going to get more happiness from the arcs of their little lives than those of Carthage and Rome, or Pekin, or Babylon, or London? Or are they going at the pace that kills? Or at least the pace that tires into premature exhaustion?
But leaving these speculations, as it is now one o'clock, I get into the cage of the elevator and drop down whirring as the floors toss upwards beyond me—"Down twenty-eight," and we pull up with a jerk, and a pale-faced man gets in. "Down twelve," and two tired-looking women and a small boy get on board; and then the floor on which is a newspaper office, and a crowd is waiting to descend. The paper is just going to press, and their work is done. And then right down below the level of the street I go to see the paper actually printed. Immense rolls of paper are being lowered from the street level and handled as easily as if they were of no more weight than a lead pencil, put before machines which devour them to a deafening noise of machinery. The room reminds one of the lower deck of an ironclad in action, and the workers there seem fighting for their lives—fighting against time, fighting against the machine, fighting against the paper, which would fill up the room if it were left at the discharging end of the machines without being sent rapidly aloft; and there on the floor above the men are fighting hand to hand with great bundles of papers that must be sent out in time for the morning trains. Outside in the square stand horses sufficient for the artillery of an army corps awaiting their burdens, and as I go up town by the surface car, although there is not yet any sign of light, I pass hundreds of men on their way down town to make an early start in the battle struggle of a new day in the City of Unrest.