"But the great sights of Canton we have not yet mentioned. These are the streets, and they are by all odds the finest we have seen in the country. They are very narrow, few of them being more than six or eight feet wide, and some of them less than the former figure. Not a single wheeled carriage can move in all Canton, and the only mode of locomotion is by means of sedan-chairs. We had chairs every day with four bearers to each, and it was strange to see how fast the men would walk in the dense crowds without hitting any one. They kept calling out that they were coming, and somehow a way was always made for them. Several times, when we met other chairs, it was no easy matter to get by, and once we turned into a side street to allow a mandarin's chair to pass along. We did knock down some things from the fronts of stores, and several times the tops of our chairs hit against the perpendicular sign-boards that hung from the buildings. There are great numbers of signs, all of them perpendicular, and they are painted in very gaudy colors, so that the effect is brilliant. Sometimes, as you look ahead, the space between the two sides of the street is quite filled with these signs, so that you cannot see anything else.Latterly he had suffered from strange irritations not easily to be ascribed to liver, misgivings, a sense of having definitely accepted a secondary edition of himself. An old acquaintance would have detected at once the change in his character, the marked leaning towards conservatism in politics and a certain reactionary tendency in his general ideas. He was becoming fixed in his views, and believed in a stable universe. His opinions, in fact, were as automatic as his Swedish exercises in the morning and his apple before breakfast. There was a slight compensatory increase in his sense of humour, and there was his approaching marriage to Lilian Payne, the gifted daughter of a wealthy town councillor."Only to take care of you whenever I had the chance. Go, now, you must!""Oh, Arthur!" Her hand went up to pull[Pg 198] down his, for the moment, unwilling head. "Oh, Arthur, we will get married some day."So the argument had waged since the telling of Tom Driver's story. Gregg's chief difficulty was to get Allingham to see that there really might be something in this theory of a world in which merely trivial things had become permanent, whilst the cosmos itself, the hitherto unchanging outer environment of man's existence, might have opened up in many new directions. Man might have tired of waiting for a so long heralded eternity, and made one out of his own material tools. The Clockwork man, now crystallised in Gregg's mind as an unforgetable figure, seemed to him to stand for a sort of rigidity of personal being as opposed to the fickleness of mere[Pg 110] flesh and blood; but the world in which he lived probably had widely different laws, if indeed it had humanly comprehensible laws at all.
