in this spirit will understand and believe in plays that are
written in this spirit, and the people who work for such employers will
like to go to such plays, and the theatre managers, instead of being the
bullies and tyrants of the world of art, will be held in the power of
the men who see things and who make things--men who in vast sweeps
called audiences, night after night, make new men upon the earth.

PART TWO

IRON MACHINES

CHAPTER I

STEEPLES AND CHIMNEYS

I went to the Durbar the other night in cinema colour and saw the King
and Queen through India. I had found my way, with hundreds of others,
into the gallery of the Scala Theatre, and out of that big, still rim of
watchful darkness where I sat I saw--there must have been thousands of
them--crowds of camels running.

And crowds of elephants went swinging past.

I watched them like a boy, like a boy standing on the edge of a thousand
years and looking off at a world.

It was stately and strange, and like far music to sit quite still and
watch civilizations swinging past.

Then suddenly it became near and human--the spirit of playgrounds and of
shouting and boyish laughter ran through it. And we watched the
elephants, naked and untrimmed, lolling down to the lake and lying down
to be scrubbed in it with comfortable low snorting and slow rolling in
the water, and the men standing by all the while like little play-nurses
and tending them, their big bungling babies, at the bath. A few minutes
later we watched the same elephants, hundreds of them, their mighty
toilets made, pacing slowly past, swinging their gorgeous trappings in
our eyes, rolling their huge hoodahs at us, and all the time still those
little funny dots of men beside them, moving them silently, moving them
invisibly as by a spirit, as by a kind of awful wireless--those great
engines of the flesh! I shall never forget it or live without it, that
slow pantomime of those mighty, silent Eastern nations, their religions,
their philosophies, their wills, their souls, moving their elephants
past--the long panorama of it, of their little awful human wills, all
those little black, helpless-looking slits of Human Will astride those
mighty necks!

I have the same feeling when I see Count Zeppelin with his airship, or
Grahame-White at Hendon, riding his vast cosmic pigeon up the sky; and
it is the same feeling I have with the locomotives--those unconscious,
forbidding, coldly obedient