He found himself presently in Bond Street. The bright May day had
brought out great quantities of people, so that he had to come down from
altitudes of abstraction to pick his way among them.
He was struck by the prevailing interest and contentment in the faces he
passed. There was no sense of insecurity betrayed, no sense of the deeps
and mysteries upon which our being floats like a film. They looked
solid, they looked satisfied; surely never before in the history of the
world has there been so great a multitude of secure-feeling,
satisfied-looking, uninquiring people as there is to-day. All the tragic
great things of life seem stupendously remote from them; pain is rare,
death is out of sight, religion has shrunken to an inconsiderable,
comfortable, reassuring appendage of the daily life. And with the
bright small things of immediacy they are so active and alert. Never
before has the world seen such multitudes, and a day must come when it
will cease to see them for evermore.
As he shouldered his way through the throng before the Oxford Street
shop windows he appreciated a queer effect, almost as it were of
insanity, about all this rich and abundant and ultimately aimless life,
this tremendous spawning and proliferation of uneventful humanity. These
individual lives signified no doubt enormously to the individuals, but
did all the shining, reflecting, changing existence that went by like
bubbles in a stream, signify collectively anything more than the
leaping, glittering confusion of shoaling mackerel on a sunlit
afternoon? The pretty girl looking into the window schemed picturesque
achievements with lace and ribbon, the beggar at the curb was alert for
any sympathetic eye, the chauffeur on the waiting taxi-cab watched the
twopences ticking on with a quiet satisfaction; each followed a keenly
sought immediate end, but altogether? Where were they going altogether?
Until he knew that, where was the sanity of statecraft, the excuse of
any impersonal effort, the significance of anything beyond a life of
appetites and self-seeking instincts?
He found that perplexing suspicion of priggishness affecting him again.
Why couldn't he take the gift of life as it seemed these people took it?
Why was he continually lapsing into these sombre, dimly religious
questionings and doubts? Why after all should he concern himself with
these riddles of some collective and ultimate meaning in things? Was he
for all his ability and security so afraid of the accidents of life that
on that account he clung to this conception of a larger impersonal issue
which the world in general seemed to have abandoned so cheerfully? At
any rate he did cling to it--and his sense of it made the abounding
active life of this stirring, bristling thoroughfare an almost
unendurable perplexity....
By the Marble Arch a little crowd had gathered at the pavement edge. He
remarked other little knots towards Paddington, and then still others,
and inquiring, found the King was presently to pass. They promised
themselves the gratification of seeing the King go by. They would see a
carriage, they would see horses and coachmen, perhaps even they might
catch sight of a raised hat and a bowing figure. And this would be a
gratification to them, it would irradiate the day with a sense of
experiences, exceptional and precious. For that some of them had already
been standing about for two or three hours.
He thought of these waiting people for a time, and then he fell into a
speculation about the King. He wondered if the King ever lay awake at
three o'clock in the morning and faced the riddle of the eternities or
whether he did really take himself seriously and contentedly as being in
himself the vital function of the State, performed his ceremonies, went
hither and thither through a wilderness of gaping watchers, slept well
on it. Was the man satisfied? Was he satisfied with his empire as it was
and himself as he was, or did some vision, some high, ironical
intimation of the latent and lost possibilities of his empire and of the
world of Things Conceivable that lies beyond the poor tawdry splendours
of our present loyalties, ever dawn upon him?
Trafford's imagination conjured up a sleepless King Emperor agonizing
for humanity....
He turned to his right out of Lancaster Gate into Sussex Square, and
came to a stop at the pavement edge.
From across the road he surveyed the wide white front and portals of the
house that wasn't big enough for Marjorie.