Crowds

OXFORD STREET AND THE HOUSE OF COMMONS

E

very now and then when I am in London (at the instigation of some busi-

ness man who takes the time off to belong to it), I drop into a pleasant

but other-worldly and absent-minded place called the House of Commons.

I sit in the windows in the smoking-room and watch the faces of the mem-

bers all about me and watch the steamships, strangely, softly, suddenly-

Shakespeare and Pepys, outside on the river, slip gravely by under glass.

Or I go in and sit down under the gallery, face to face with the Speaker, look-

ing across those profiles of world-makers in their seats; and I watch and lis-

ten in the House itself. There is a kind of pleasant, convenient, appropriate

hush upon the world there.

Wisdom.

The decorous, orderly machinery of knowledge rolls over one-one listens

to It, to the soft clatter of the endless belt of words.

Every now and then one sees a member in the middle of a speech, or possibly

in the middle of a sentence, slip up quietly and take a look (under glass)

3 GERALD STANLEY LEE

at The People, or he uses a microscope, perhaps, or a reading glass on The

People, Mr. Bonar Law's, Mr. Lloyd George's, Ramsay MacDonald's, Will

Crook's, or somebody's. Then he comes back gravely as if he had got the

people attended to now, and finishes what he was saying.

It is a very queer feeling one has about the People in the House of Commons.

I mean the feeling of their being under glass; they all seem so manageable, so

quiet and so remote, a kind of glazed-over picture in still life, of themselves.

Every now and then, of course one takes a member seriously when he steps

up to the huge showcase of specimen crowds, which members are always

referring to in their speeches. But nothing comes of it.

The crowds seem very remote there under the glass. One feels like smashing

something-getting down to closer terms with them-one longs for a Depart-