IN CHRISTMAS WEEK

Maoriland Worker, Volume 12, Issue 303, 20 December 1922, Page 13

IN CHRISTMAS WEEK

By R. B. CuKnipghame Graham

The roar of London slackened, sm<3 those pterodactyls of the streete, the motor-omnibuses, seemed to disport themselves like great Behemoth .or Leviathan, reducing their creators to an inferior place, as if they lived upon the sufferance of the great whirring beasts.

The Avhite-faced, hurrying, furtivelooking crowds which throng the pavements for the most part of the year, had given place to multitudes or comfortable folk on shopping bent, who walked less warily than the woricdriven slaves, who move about the streets seeming as if they felt that everybody's hand was armed againsf. them, and that to halt a moment in the race exposed them to its blow. A biting frost clad hydrants in steel mail where water dropped from them, and spread white blotches on the wooden pavement at which the cabhorses, inured to petrol patches on the stones, to mud, even to blood after an accident, to paper blowing in their eyes, and ail the myriad night noises of the town, shied as at something menacing, so-far away had Nature gone out of their lives, as if no vision of green fields in which they played and raced beside their mothers, so stiltily upon their giraffe-looking legs, ever returned to haunt their labourdeadened brains.

The electric light shone blue against the trunks of trees, and the sharp cold almost dispelled the scent of horse-dung which perfumes the a.ir of London, as if to nullify all our attempts to set a bar betw.een ourselves and other animals, and bring us face to face with their and our common necessities and origin, laughing at the refinements of material progress, and showing us that the one way by which we can escape the horrors of the world, lies through the portals of the mind.

Peace upon earth, goodwill towards all mankind, was the stock phrase in every church, as if to make the bitterness- Gf life outside, more manifest, reducing as it did the preachers* words to a mere froth of wormwood on the air, or at the most a counsel of perfection, towards which it was not worth one's while to struggle, seeing set so far out of our reach.

Holiday-making crowds filled Piccadilly, which looks quite unfamiilar without, its strings of crawling cabb and prostitutes plying for hire upon its atones, as eventide drew. near. ■ One felt a sort of truce of God was in the air, and that the Stock Exchange, the sweating den, and the gigantic manuiactory, Iα which a thousand toiled to make vast sums for some uninteresting and quite unnecessary man. were quiet,- and that ■ perhaps even the wretched negro in the india-rubber bush might have a day of rest.

The parks, under their canopy ot white, turned fields again, and as the dusk came- on, the sound of church bells in the air gave a false feeling of security, though one was well aware no tiger-haunted jungle held half the perils of the vast stucco solitude, in which we pass our lives. Day followed day, cold, miserable, and cheerless, and the town left deserted, by the myriads who make it look like some vast anthill, on which the ants all strive against each other, instead of helping one another after the fashion of. their semi-respectable- pre*o T types, set one athinking on the Eastern legend, framed in a warm and sunny land, and therefore quite unfit for the chill north, which was -the cause of such a change in life.

The frosty stars shone out, so cold and clear, they seemed but the reflections of some world extinct, which had preserved its light, but with the heat evaporated. The moon was more congenial to our northern blood, pale, pasr sionless, and with an air of infinite yearning after something unexpressed, whilst the full yellow-beam of light from Jupiter, recalled one to the plains, where in far Nabothea the three kings sat gazing on the stars— a kingly occupation, and one which nowadays all their descendants have allowed to fall into disuse. Perhaps ■unwisely, for ,if" they followed it, who Snows if some particular, bright star might-yet arise on their horizon, to. •.guide them upwards out of the realms ©f self? '

It may be too that all of us are ■kings born blind, arid that the guiding star is shining Tmghtly in the sky, -whilst we sit sightless, with-our dim orbits fixed upon the mud. Or it may chance that motor-cars, arriving -at the stable where the lowly Savibur babe-was laid, would liave affrighted, all the humble company assembled :to adore. The gulf that ya t woas between the millionaire and the poor man.is wider far than that between the -watchers by the ass and oxen's stall, and the three sheikhs, who. lighted ttown from off their horsee to reverPttce . xfi&tei.'S^:-.•'- •• < - " -■ . - ~i - ■

Nor was the .gulf between the sheikhs, and the animals stabled; so snugly, with their warm breath making an aureole about the sleeping baby's head, so* deep as that which yawns between the modern dweller in our stucco Babylon, and his selected breeds of animals rendered so bestial by improvement as scarce to move the pity of their owners for all their various pains.

In that old cosmos, with its simple., reasonable life, so like the life Of plants and trees, as fixed and: as immutable as are the seasons or t&e tides, there was a sympathy,, unthought of, but all the same at hand, which though it did not spend itself in theories, redeemed mankind from many of its sins. Justice, one hears, is but of modern growth; but in its action on the lives of. men it toils a thousand leagues behind the old brutality which, though it certainly denied all rights, admitted kingship, or at least was conscious of a link between all sentient things, just as some deity who had created man in his own image might feel ashamed when called Tipon to punish and destroy beings so like himself, though for all that he could not hold his hand.

So in the Christmas week, with its fierce cold and misery to thousands mocked by false protestations of the brotherhood of man, and pinched with hunger in the midst of Avealth, it must have seemed that all the legend was but another of the corpse-candles lighted to set them running after its thin flame.

I Then came a thaw, and all the ironI bound streets became Sloughs of DeI spond, in which a million horses, turnjed to machines, chained in .their stables, and taken out, but to Bound ceaselessly upon the cruel stones till it was time to be led back again and chained up for the night, toiled wretchedly, not comprehending that they i'were agents in the progress of the world. Still all the time the church bells pealed, and all the time the planets shone out soft and mellow, making one think involuntarily upon some old ..bright world which perhaps never lias existed save in dreams, but which we now and then have to imagine for ourselves or else go mad at seeing ugliness reversed as beauty, and wealth adored as wisdom, with all the meanest qualities'of man enthroned as virtues, like a tin sky-sign setting forth some trash with its full-bodied lies. Frost, silence, traffic, all was the same to the vast vulgar tov/n, the hugest ■ monument of Philistinism that the world has seen, or ever will behold.

The blackened muddy snow, reminding one of something- pure, denied, I then scorned and cast upon the mire, I lay piled in heaps in the chief squares, left there by accident or by design, as if to give the magnates in their shapeless palaces the mumps, and render I them as hideous as the great cubes of masonry in which they lived. Misery seemed to reign triumphant in the wilderness of bricks, where dullness strove with smug hypocrisy to make life unendurable, whilst slowly the great city seemed to take up its usual course as the drear week drew out. Ladies in motor-cars, with the hard, uninviting air that wealth imparts so often even to youth and beauty, flitted about, scattering the mud on those whose toil paid for each article of dress they wore, as if they had conferred a favour on the world by deigning to exist. The chill and penetrating damp which rises from the London clay after a thaw, and makes its way into the bones and soul, to them was but another stimulus to life, and aid to appetite. Neither the look of wretchedness of men or animals seemed to say anything to them, although no doubt their minds were ail with charitable schemes; for never in the history of the human race has charity, that most unhuinanising virtue which has ever made mankind think itself better than its fellows, walked in our midst so or justice hid itself more timidly, than at the present day.

Boys, cold and pinched, with voices rendered-.hard by all the Sin their parents had imbibed, ran shout-ing: out the names of newspapers, flourishing broadsheets on which the headings j told of 'murders, adulteries,, cheating and robbery; and smug-faced citizens and prurient-minded.girlSj their-pink-ands-white complexions strangely at variance with the twinkle in their eyes, eagerly stopped and bought them, jostling the men as if by accident, pleased at the contact with them as they passsed, and yet taking offence at once if but a word: was said, saving their -conscience in the national way, which finds all things permissible if but due [ silence is preserved.

so auii ana strenuous was tne> mc that it appeared impossible "in other lands the sun was shining, and that the browa-faced men and merry blackrhaired wi)men hail fime to love and be beloved. That, nothing might be wanting to set forth all aspects of our pomp and state, in a small, narrow street, well strewn- with .offal from the stalls of costermongers' barrows, under the iteming light-of naphtha lamps, a,line bf J JJWB; stQod'vrailißg at the door of j a