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He recalls to us what England was like and what people were like in an age when electric trams were unknown, when bicycles were rare, when the retail trader was a person who could still call his soul his own. He has shown us people born in one world and growing old in another.
A handsome service of electric trams and a great new bridge over the Vistula raised Warsaw's level from an external point of view, and made it something like a modern city. Then came the war, the German aeroplanes and their bombs, the violent attacks and the panics, shell-fire, the blowing-up of bridges, wild exodus of Warsaw people and entry of the Germans.
Then men and women array themselves in the garments of civilisation and sally forth, in carriages, on foot, and in trams, according to the degrees of social importance which provide that in old countries the middle term shall be made to suffer for the priceless treasure of a respectability which is a little higher than the tram and financially not quite equal to the cab.
The concierge sat at her window under the arch of the porte-cochere at 57 Boulevard Montparnasse. She sat gazing across its black shade to the sunny street. She was thinking. The last twenty-four hours had given food for thought. The trams passed and repassed, people in carriages, people on foot the usual crowd not interesting.
It had given these subject races cigarettes, boots, bowler hats, cricket, race meetings, cheap revolvers, petroleum, the factory system of industry, halfpenny newspapers in both English and the vernacular, inexpensive university degrees, motor-bicycles and electric trams; it had produced a considerable literature expressing contempt for the Subject Races, and rendered it freely accessible to them, and it had been content to believe that nothing would result from these stimulants because somebody once wrote "the immemorial east"; and also, in the inspired words of Kipling
There were trams and tram bells, and motors and carriages, and over all an appalling thunder of trains rushing to and fro above our heads, on lines roofing the entire street, built upon iron stilts. Every minute they swooped by, running north and south, and I trembled lest they should leap their tracks and crush us into powder.
Swiftly as they were walking they could scarcely have traversed the distance between the bridge and the trams in so short a time. Had they gone down the steps to the river embankment? I paused and listened, thought I heard a faint patter, as of a woman's high heels on the stone steps, and ran down the flight. The paved walk below St. Thomas' Hospital was deserted; I could see far in the moonlight.
'We'll stop as soon as we see a nice place, said Anthea. 'I've got threepence, and you boys have the fourpence each that your trams didn't cost the other day, so we can buy things to eat. I expect the Phoenix can speak French. The carpet was sailing along over rocks and rivers and trees and towns and farms and fields.
The snow fell all day, muffling the silent city. Silence is at all times one of Tokyo's characteristics. For so large and important a metropolis it is strangely silent always. The only continuous street noise is the grating and crackling of the trams.
Gothard tunnel, presaging the future; the view of the Ticino and Lago Maggiore as the train climbed the slopes of Monte Cenere; the view of Lugano, the view of Como Italy gathering thick around her now the arrival at her first resting-place, when, after long driving through dark and dirty streets, she should at last behold, amid the roar of trams and the glare of arc lamps, the buttresses of the cathedral of Milan.
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