90 THE SOUTH COUNTRY 



philatelist. Hardly one spoke; only the women moved 

 from left to right instead of straight on, and their voices 

 were inaudible when their lips moved. The roar in 

 which all played a part developed into a kind of silence 

 which not any one of these millions could break; the sea 

 does not absorb the little rivers more completely than this 

 silence the voices of men and women, than this solitude 

 their personalities. Now and then a face changed, an 

 eyebrow was cocked, or a mouth fell; but it meant less 

 to me than the flutter as of a bird when drop by drop 

 the rain drips from the beeches and gives a plash and a 

 trembling to one leaf and then another in the under- 

 growth. There is a more than human force in the move- 

 ment of the multitude, more than the sum of all the 

 forces in the arched necks, the grinding chest muscles, 

 and the firm feet of the horses, the grace of the bright 

 women, the persistency of the tall men and thick men. 

 They cannot stop. They look stupid or callous or blank 

 or even cruel. They are going about another's business; 

 they conceal their own, hiding it so that they forget (as 

 a drunkard forgets where he has hidden his gold) where 

 they have hidden it, hiding their souls under something 

 stiffer and darker than the clothing of their bodies. It is 

 hard to understand why they do not sometimes stop one 

 another, to demand where the soul and the soul's business 

 is hid, to snatch away the masks. It was intolerable that 

 they were not known to me, that I was not known to 

 them, that we should go on like waves of the sea, obey- 

 ing whatever moon it is that sends us thundering on the 

 unscalable shores of night and day. Such force, such 

 determination as moved us along the burning streets might 



