PART TWO

IRON MACHINES

CHAPTER I

STEEPLES AND CHIMNEYS

I went to the Durbar the other night in cinema colour and saw the King and Queen through India.  I had found my way, with hundreds of others, into the gallery of the Scala Theatre, and out of that big, still rim of watchful darkness where I sat I saw—­there must have been thousands of them—­crowds of camels running.

And crowds of elephants went swinging past.

I watched them like a boy, like a boy standing on the edge of a thousand years and looking off at a world.

It was stately and strange, and like far music to sit quite still and watch civilizations swinging past.

Then suddenly it became near and human—­the spirit of playgrounds and of shouting and boyish laughter ran through it.  And we watched the elephants, naked and untrimmed, lolling down to the lake and lying down to be scrubbed in it with comfortable low snorting and slow rolling in the water, and the men standing by all the while like little play-nurses and tending them, their big bungling babies, at the bath.  A few minutes later we watched the same elephants, hundreds of them, their mighty toilets made, pacing slowly past, swinging their gorgeous trappings in our eyes, rolling their huge hoodahs at us, and all the time still those little funny dots of men beside them, moving them silently, moving them invisibly as by a spirit, as by a kind of awful wireless—­those great engines of the flesh!  I shall never forget it or live without it, that slow pantomime of those mighty, silent Eastern nations, their religions, their philosophies, their wills, their souls, moving their elephants past—­the long panorama of it, of their little awful human wills, all those little black, helpless-looking slits of Human Will astride those mighty necks!

I have the same feeling when I see Count Zeppelin with his airship, or Grahame-White at Hendon, riding his vast cosmic pigeon up the sky; and it is the same feeling I have with the locomotives—­those unconscious, forbidding, coldly obedient terrible fellows!  Have I not lain awake and listened to them storming through the night, heard them out there ahead working our wills on the blackness, on the thick night, on the stars, on Space, and on Time while we slept?

My main feeling at the Durbar while I watched those splendid beasts—­the crowds of camels, the crowds of elephants—­all being driven along by the little, faint, dreamy, sleepy-looking people was, “Why don’t their elephants turn around on them and chase them?”

I kept thinking at first that they would, almost any minute.