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These opinions, never nebulous, became sharp as illuminated sky-signs when the Boer War began. 'The impertinent rascals! cried S. Cohn furiously. 'They have invaded our territory. 'Is it possible? ejaculated Mrs. Cohn. 'This comes of our kindness to them after Majuba! A darkness began to overhang the destinies of Britain. Three defeats in one week!
Yes, New York looked good . . . good and exciting, with all the taxi-cabs rattling in at the dark tunnel beside her, with all the people hurrying in and hurrying out, with all this medley of street-cars and sky-signs and crushed snow and drays and horses and policemen, and that vast hotel across the street, towering to heaven like a cliff. It even smelt good.
We glided at diminished speed through the trim suburbs, skirted the city, on whose tall buildings the electric sky-signs were already beginning to twinkle, crashed heavily over a vast network of metals at some great terminus, then tore off again into the gathering darkness. In a little, we slowed down again. We were running through wooded country.
The train ran them roof-high through endless vistas of the mean grey streets of south-east London, where the street-lamps were beginning to throw out a yellow haze against the murky drizzle of the late afternoon; slowed to a crawl in obedience to the raised arms of imperious signals; stopped over viaducts for long wearisome minutes while flaunting sky-signs drummed into the passengers the superabundant merits of Somebody's Whisky or Somebodyelse's Soap.
Its frayed edge rose and sank, was parted and joined again now descending to the first-storey windows and blotting out the cabmen and passengers on omnibus tops, now rolling up and over the parapets of the houses and the sky-signs.
And a regular guy means, I presume, a reliable or respectable guy. The point here, however, is that the guy in the grotesque English sense does represent the dilapidated remnant of a real human tradition of symbolising real historic ideals by the sacramental mystery of fire. It is a great fall from the lowest of these lowly bonfires to the highest of the modern sky-signs.
"Oh," he said, "I sometimes carry them with me at night to study the advertising sky-signs. I'm a little short sighted. You see, it's part of my business to study the technique of the electric signs." After some current event pictures the programme prepared to repeat itself, and they went out. "Will you come in and have some cocoa with us?" said Helen as they reached the door of the bookshop.
It is somewhat the same with things like the sky-signs in Broadway. The aesthete must not ask me to mingle my tears with his, because these things are merely useful and ugly. For I am not specially inclined to think them ugly; but I am strongly inclined to think them useless. As a matter of art for art's sake, they seem to me rather artistic.
Atmospheric effects may be seen there that are unobtainable without the combustion of soft coal. Talk, for example, as much as you please about the electric sky-signs of Broadway not all of them together will write as much poetry on the sky as the single word "Illinois" that hangs without a clue to its suspension in the murky dusk over Michigan Avenue.
Thou coverest the Lake District with advertisements of pills, and the blue heaven itself with sky-signs; and in thy passion for cheap and nasty pictorial journalism thou art allowing the art of wood-engraving to die out, even as thou acceptest photogravures instead of etchings." I cowered before their wrath, while renewed cries of "Thou art responsible! Thou! Thou!" resounded from all sides.
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