Page:Stringer - Wine of Life.djvu/393



TORROW, as his train came to a stop beneath the arches of the New York viaduct, was troubled by a world-strangeness which tended to chill and cramp his soul. The spectacle of countless thousands, intent on their own ends, still again impressed him with his insignificance, reviving the thought that he was noth- ing more than an infinitesimal atom in that whirling mael- strom of life. He found himself surrounded by fellow- travellers immured in their own interests, hurrying on, with an empty-eyed preoccupation peculiar to city throngs, to their unknown tasks and destinations. He stared into flat-windows and caught glimpses of life, bald life in crowded and sordid hives, incredibly close at hand and at the same time incredibly remote from him. He emerged into a world of colour, of hurried intentness touched with lightheartedness, of grinding wheels and proces- sional street-crowds, of uncomprehended panoramic movements about gay-windowed shop-fronts, of dizzy iron structures concealing their gaunt limbs under casings of stone as white as ivory, of clean-swept morning avenues with an old-world quietness still on them and the huddled centuries confounded by those tip-tilted streets known as skyscrapers within a stone's throw of a chalet from France and a Roman palazzio and a Greek temple of books, pallid-walled and pagan-simple, that might have survived through the cool and quiet of time from the day of Eratosthenes.

It was a mellower and a more pictorial world, Storrow found, a world which was not slow to weave about him its old allurement at the same time that he awakened to 383