Crowds. Gerald Stanley Lee
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SPEAKING AS ONE OF THE CROWD
It is a little awkward to say what I am going to say now.
Probably it will be still more awkward afterward.
But I find as I go up and down the world and look in the faces of the crowds in it, that it is true, and I can only tell as it is.
I want to be good.
And I do not want to go up on a mountain to do it, or to slink off and live all alone on an island in the sea.
I go a step further.
I believe that the crowds want to be good.
But I cannot prove that people want to be good in crowds, and so for the sake of the argument, and to make the case as simple as possible, I am going to give up speaking for crowds, and speak for myself as one member of the crowd and for Lim. Lim and I (and Lim is a business man and not a mere author) have had long talks in which we have confided to each other what we think this world, in spite of appearances, is really like, and we have come to a kind of provisional program and to a definite agreement on our two main points.
1. We want to be good.
2. We want other people to be good, partly as a matter of convenience for us, partly for morally aesthetic reasons, and partly because we want to be in a kind of world where what is good in us works.
The next point in our confession follows from this. It is an awkward and exposed thing to say out loud to people in general, but
3. Lim and I want to make over the earth.
4. Sitting down grimly by ourselves, all alone, and believing in a world hard, with our eyes shut, does not interest us. It is this particular planet just as it is that interests us, in its present hopeful, squirming state.
It does not seem to us to the point just now to conceive some brand new, clean, slick planet up in space, with crowds of perfect and convenient people on it, and then expect to lay it down in the night like a great, soft, beautiful dew or ideal on this one. We want to take this heavy, inconvenient, cumbersome, real planet that we have, and see what can be done with it, and by the people on it, what can be done by these same people, whose signs one goes by down the street, with Smith & Smith, Gowns, with Clapp & Clapp, Butchers, with W.H. Riley & Co., Plumbers and Gas Fitters, and with things that real people are really doing.
The things that real people are really doing, when one thinks of it, are Soap, Tooth-brushes, Subsoil Pipes, Wall Papers, Razors, Mattresses, Suspenders, Tiles, Shoes, Pots, and Kettles. Of course the first thing that happened to us, to Lim and to me (as any one might guess, in a little quiet job like making over the earth), was that we found we had to begin with ourselves.
We did.
We are obliged to admit that, as a matter of fact, we began, owing to circumstances, in a kind of rudimentary way with the idea of getting people to take up goodness by talking about it.
But we are reformed preachers now. We seldom backslide into talking to people about goodness.
We have made up our minds to lie low and keep still and show them some.
Of course one ought to have some of one's own to show. But the trouble always is, if it is really good, one is sure not to know it, or at least one does not know which it is. The best we can do with goodness, some of us, if we want it to show more quickly or to hurry people along in goodness more, is to show them other people's.
I sometimes think that if everybody in the world could know my plumber or pay a bill to him, the world would soon begin slowly but surely to be a very different place.
My plumber is a genius.
CHAPTER II
IS IT WRONG FOR GOOD PEOPLE TO BE EFFICIENT?
Perhaps it will seem a pity to spoil a book—one that might have been really rather interesting—by putting the word "goodness" down flatly in this way in the middle of it.
And in a book which deals with crowds, too, and with business.
I would not yield first place to any one in being tired of the word. I think, for one, that unless there is something we can do to it, and something we can do to it now, it had better be dropped.
But I have sometimes discovered when I had thought I was tired of a word, that what I was really tired of was somebody who was using it.
I do not mind it when my plumber uses it. I have heard him use it (and swearing softly, I regret to say) when it affected me like a Hymn Tune.
And there is Non, too.
I first made Non's acquaintance as our train pulled out of New York, and we found ourselves going down together on Friday afternoon to spend Sunday with M—— in North Carolina. The first thing he said was, when we were seated in the Pullman comfortably watching that big, still world under glass roll by outside, that he had broken an engagement with his wife to come. She was giving a Tea, he said, that afternoon, and he had faithfully promised to be there. But a weekend in North Carolina appealed to him, and afternoon tea—well, he explained to me, crossing his legs and beaming at me all over as if he were a whole genial, successful afternoon tea all by himself—afternoon tea did not appeal to him.
He thought probably he was a Non-Gregarious Person.
As he was the gusto of our little party and fairly reeked with sociability, and was in a kind of orgy of gregariousness every minute all the way to Wilmington (even when he was asleep we heard from him), we called him the Non-Gregarious Person, and every time he piled on one more story, we reminded him how non-gregarious he was. We called him Non-Gregarious all the way after that—Non for short.
This is the way I became acquainted with Non. It has been Non ever since.
I found in the course of the next three days that when Non was not being the life of the party or the party did not need any more life for a while, and we had gone off by ourselves, he became, like most people who let themselves go, a very serious person. When he talked about his business, he was even religious. Not that he had any particular vocabulary for being religious, but there was something about him when he spoke of business—his own business—that almost startled me at first. He always seemed to be regarding his business when he spoke of it as being, for all practical purposes, a kind of little religion by itself.
Now Non is a builder or contractor.
For many years now the best way to make a pessimist or a confirmed infidel out of anybody has been to get him to build a house. No better arrangement for not believing in more people, and for not believing in more kinds of people at once and for life, has ever been invented probably than building a house. No man has been educated, or has been really tested in this world, until he has built a house. I submit this proposition to anybody who has tried it, or to any one who is going to try it. There is not a single kind or type of man who sooner or later will not build himself, and nearly everything that is the matter with him, into your house. The house becomes a kind of miniature model (such as they have in expositions) of what is the matter with people. You enter the door, you walk inside and brood over them. Everything you come upon, from the white cellar floor to the timbers you bump your head on in the roof, reminds you of something or of rows of people and of what is the matter with them. It is the new houses that are haunted now. Any