The cab finally rolled out of the gas-lit vault into a vast expanse of
gloom. This changed to the shadowy lines of a street that was like a
passage in a monstrous cave. The lamps winking here and there resembled
the little gleams at the caps of the miners. They were not very
competent illuminations at best, merely being little pale flares of gas
that at their most heroic periods could only display one fact
concerning this tunnel--the fact of general direction. But at any rate
I should have liked to have observed the dejection of a search-light if
it had been called upon to attempt to bore through this atmosphere. In
it each man sat in his own little cylinder of vision, so to speak. It
was not so small as a sentry-box nor so large as a circus tent, but the
walls were opaque, and what was passing beyond the dimensions of his
cylinder no man knew.
It was evident that the paving was very greasy, but all the cabs that
passed through my cylinder were going at a round trot, while the
wheels, shod in rubber, whirred merely like bicycles. The hoofs of the
animals themselves did not make that wild clatter which I knew so well.
New York in fact, roars always like ten thousand devils. We have
ingenuous and simple ways of making a din in New York that cause the
stranger to conclude that each citizen is obliged by statute to provide
himself with a pair of cymbals and a drum. If anything by chance can be
turned into a noise it is promptly turned. We are engaged in the
development of a human creature with very large, sturdy, and doubly,
fortified ears.
It was not too late at night, but this London moved with the decorum
and caution of an undertaker. There was a silence, and yet there was no
silence. There was a low drone, perhaps a humming contributed
inevitably by closely-gathered thousands, and yet on second thoughts it
was to me silence. I had perched my ears for the note of London, the
sound made simply by the existence of five million people in one place.
I had imagined something deep, vastly deep, a bass from a mythical
organ, but found as far as I was concerned, only a silence.
New York in numbers is a mighty city, and all day and all night it
cries its loud, fierce, aspiring cry, a noise of men beating upon
barrels, a noise of men beating upon tin, a terrific racket that
assails the abject skies. No one of us seemed to question this row as a
certain consequence of three or four million people living together and
scuffling for coin, with more agility, perhaps, but otherwise in the
usual way. However, after this easy silence of London, which in numbers
is a mightier city, I began to feel that there was a seduction in this
idea of necessity. Our noise in New York was not a consequence of our
rapidity at all. It was a consequence of our bad pavements.
Any brigade of artillery in Europe that would love to assemble its
batteries, and then go on a gallop over the land, thundering and
thundering, would give up the idea of thunder at once if it could hear
Tim Mulligan drive a beer wagon along one of the side streets of
cobbled New York.