No doubt men were at work in the engine-belly of the crane, just as others were very far away among the dynamos that kept us moving. But they were sweating invisible. That, too, is the Modern Spirit: great organisations run by men as impersonal as the atoms of our own frames, noiseless, and to all appearances infallible.
At night, too, when the broad flat streets out in the suburbs are deserted, these electric trams appear romantic and a little wonderful. Gongs sound at their approach rather plaintively, headlights blaze out upon the black night, the lights within are a tall, mellow flood, a reflection is cast, dim and flying, upon old black houses behind trees and upon the large, blank windows of the tall pink and terracotta shops that face them. The great rectangular blaze glides along with a heavy, impersonal groan of sound that is like a new form of silence, the figure of the mechanician in front has a backward rake like that of a man in the bows of a boat; as it passes there is the gleam of a long row of pink faces in the heart of the light. And all these things, the clang of the gongs, the rumble growing and dying away, the strong lights, the momentary and half revealed details of the darkened buildings, the thought of all these people going out a long way to sleep in the blacker darkness, have about them something touching and romantic, something 'characteristic' and foreign.
Of the older methods of communication I suppose the bicycle to come next, but I have always found entering London in this way to be tedious and dispiriting.
41
