STREAM-LINED

Evening Star, Issue 21992, 30 March 1935, Page 2

STREAM-LINED

[Written by Mari' Scott, for the ‘ Evening Star.’] Wo live in a stream-lined age in which speed is the only god. It is a day of records —and their breaking. The centenary air race thrilled a listen-ing-in world; Sir Malcolm Campbell is at° it again; the Queen Mary is our hope for the Atlantic. It is all tremendously important to us, but, if there should be any dispassionate observers watching us through critical telescopes from another and a wiser planet, they must be immensely entertained at the sight of this little world busily whirling away and innumerable insects upon its surface whose sole ambition it is ever to whirl faster and faster. Speed is the absorbing topic of the day, and we must have speed at all costs.” Has it ever occurred to you to wonder just why ? The craze, like many others, is infectious in the extreme. While the spectacular figures of the day are busy breaking records, the ordinary individual emulates them indefatigably. Our towns are filled with young men making private but passionate records on their motor cycles, with girls catching their trams in five seconds less each morning, children seeing how fast they can bicycle to school, babies urging their mothers to lung-bursting efforts behind their perambulators. Everyone is hurrying faster and faster every day, getting there in record time, rushing back again, trying to do it quicker tomorrow; and so on through all the eddying, frenzied days. What is the use of it all? It would be easier to understand if the record-breakers had any particular use for leisure; but that, unfortunately, has been omitted from their education. To-day the growth of machinery, the inventions ot science, the tireless experiments of man all promise a great increase in unoccupied time, and few people seem to have any idea how to spend it profitably. We have not been born and bred to leisure nor learned how to make our lives beautiful by its wise employment. The other day a young friend motored rtfe thirty miles through lovely pastoral cwrtitry to the railroad. I allowed something over an hour for the trip, and was placidly ready at the appointed time. He arrived on the second, would not come inside, but blew such shattering blasts upon bis horn that I cut short my adieux and rushed out. Hardly wus I seated and my mouth opened to thank him when we started with a rush that took my breath and made me bite my tongue. We tore through the country, with its belts of lovely trees, its gracious hills and line of rugged mountains, as though a fiend pursued us. Soon I ceased to regret the view for we were enveloped in a cloud of dust that made both sight and speech impossible; and my companion considers himself my very. good friend, and this drive presented the only opportunity for meeting or talk for six months to come. Yet he sat bent over the steering wheel, his eyes glued to the road, save when he glanced distractedly at the speedometer, deaf to my murmurs, blind to the beauty that Jay about us. We reached the station in about forty minutes, and the boy turned to me with a faint smile—Jiis first sign of recognition—and said blithely: “ Three minutes better than last time. Not so bad. By the way, what was that you said to me about five miles back?” “Nothing much. It was just, that there’s a side road there that I’ve always longed to explore. You know the one, a little bendy track that winds through somo native bush. I’d love to know what lies round the bend.” He smiled his young, disarming smile. “ I know. I pass it every day. Sort of makes one wonder, doesn’t it?” “ And yet you’ve never gone to see?” His tone was full of a patronising pity. “My dear old thing, how can I? You’ve got to stick to main roads nowadays. No chance of getting up s.peed on a bye-way like that.” The pity was mine as I looked at the young face in which stream-lining was already taking the place of dreams. Why stick to main roads when the byeways of life are so much more fascinating, so much more worth while ? I was about to venture to say so when he spoke again. “ Funny, isn’t it, to think that we’ve just taken forty-three minutes to do a trip that took my parents most of the day? They used to be quite pleased if their old horses and buggy covered the ground in five hours. My word, I’m glad I live in a speed age. I don’t reckon they knew they were alive then.”

I did not answer, for I was thinking of his father and mother whom I had known and loved, of their gracious kindliness, their busy lives with their rich leisure, their broad, sane views, the books they read, the music they studied, the full, glad lives they led. They had been blessed in that they had not lived in a stream-lined age. The irony of it is that all this hurrying is going on in a world that contains more unemployed people, more possessors of an unhappy and enforced leisure than ever before. There is a generation growing up that must face the possibility of never finding any permanent work, any niche that it is destined happily to fill. And yet they, like everybody else, are intent on doing everything as quickly as possible, getting everywhere as soon as they can, oven though there is nothing to do when they get there. The mania pursues them even on a holiday. They set off on a leisurely camping trip, but it has seized them before they have passed even a few peaceful days. In a moment they are caught up by this mad urge for speed; the vague “ few miles a day ” turns to a couple of hundred; in a flash they have joined the mob of strenuous lei-sure-seekers who must get somewhere each night, must cover a certain number of miles each day. They are like some frenzied procession, haunted ever by the dread of an unoccupied hour. Even more do they hate the prospect of spending a day or two in solitude. They have no use at all for their own company. So poor an opinion do they hold of it that it is a little surprising that they can expect anyone else to value it. They must rush about _in iliobs, must always be doing something strenuously. So they join the vast company of the stream-lined, the devotees of the great god of speed. The crowd of hikers rush on ; the motorists whirl by in a cloud of dust; the aeroplanes whizz overhead; and all the beauty of all the world lies about them, ungucssed and unexplored because they belong to a speed age, an era in which no one dreams that there is plenty of time “ to stand and stare.”