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.
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