The passing of the century

As the last minute of the century drew near thousands of men and women thronged into the Square before the great clock of the Town Hall. To be one of the crowd was to take part in a purely sentimental function - one of the few occasions upon which the great British public plays formal homage to the influence that plays so great a part in its national life. No spectacle attracted the throng; nothing was about to happen that should entertain their eyes or ears; each unit in the mass must have a private sensation in his own mind which he held in common, although he could not share it, with others. There was no spectacle, it has been said; yet that is hardly true. Hanging high above, in the light fog, the clock's yellow face was signalling Time's great news - that another year was far advanced in its last hour, and that the sand of another century ebbed low in the glass. The clock face, with its sweeping minute hand, made a centre for the eyes and thoughts of the multitude. All such crowds have a pulse; thoughts and sensations and ideas are in the surrounding air, contributed to and drawn upon by all - by the man who holds the bottle to his mouth no less than by him who stands alone with his thoughts, by old fourscore who looks sadly backward upon the years that have fallen away from him, and by the sweethearts who look to the clock to usher in their years of happiness. To share the common thrill of feeling one needed but to leave one's thoughts to themselves, when they would vibrate in true unison to the prevailing note of one's fellows.

Yes, the clock was the thing. A steady stream of thought flowed upwards through the gloom to where the bells were jangling, hammering, beating, chasing echoes abroad over the city; the small noises of the people were obliterated by the metallic clatter and the resultant strife of harmonics and over-tones in the air; Time, who as a rule slips by us almost disregarded, was passing in a pageant of savage music, and dominating for once the expectant crowd. Remember that it was a crowd composed largely of people not much accustomed to meditate on abstractions, that half of them sought in the witching midnight movement an opportunity for, and a stimulus to, conviviality; that a third of them were the poor outcasts of a city who flock to the companionship of a crowd as sea-birds in a storm gather round a lighthouse - remember this, and you may realise the significance of that upward stream of thought. It flowed towards the belfry, where the bells were swinging in the shadow and scaring spiders in their webs and mice in their holes; higher still towards the lighted chamber where the wheels and cogs and weights invented by man to measure out the movements of eternity were clicking, catching, revolving on their solemn business; and out again to where the great minute-hand, now not far from the perpendicular, marched round the lighted dial, two strides to the minute.

The bells ceased ringing some minutes before twelve; and these last minutes were long. They were tasted and examined separately, held close before the eyes, as it were, and magnified; their slow passage suggested an image of Time tottering yearly on the verge of extinction and yearly drinking a youthful elixir. This apparent delay, or rallentando of the hour, was not the least vivid of the night's impressions, and, hallucination thought it might be, it was surely of value to poor hurried toilers. Anything that gives foothold even for a moment amid the current of time is a benefit to people who although they are sometimes accused of living only in the present are in reality hardly ever conscious of it. We realise easily the past and the future; the one is kept alive by memory; imagination plays with the other and projects it fearlessly into a space that contains no contradictions; only the present is hard to make real. So for people who pass to-day in dreams of yesterday and tomorrow a division of years, however arbitrary, cannot but be precious, since it gives them a few moments in which they may come up with Time, make his shadows tangible, and consolidate his triple life.

All this, or the essence of it, was in the air; and what were the people doing who thronged the pavement? Most of them who were not gazing at the clock were disposed in little groups of men and women keeping a kind of rude festival. Small and impotent instruments, such as the mouth-organ, the accordion, and the penny whistle, were urged by their players to adorn with a thin and florid counterpoint the cantus firmus of the bells; circles of merry-makers were formed, in which a few couples made shift to dance to the rhythm of a sobbing concertina; but on the whole the crowd was quiet, awed, perhaps, by the domination of the clock and the solemnity of the hour. The bottle, indeed, travelled round convivial circles; pale-faced youths gulped and shuddered over raw and nauseous spirits under a vague impression that a crisis was approaching for which they needed to be strung up; those whom liquid comfort had already overcome sang loud snatches of song that died away suddenly into murmuring soliloquy, while the singers leaned and pondered upon their fellows or failed to avoid the dizzy pavement; but all this added to rather than took away from the portent of the travelling minute-hand. It was pointing, an emblem of the things that go on whether we live or die, to the words written somewhere above the dial: "So teach us to number our days." No one could see the words; some knew they were there, but even the dullest could hardly fail to read their message in the two creeping hands now almost merged in one. An old man remarked that he had seen twenty years come in and go out on that spot, "and," he added with sorrow, "I suppose they'll come in just the same when I'm gone." He expressed our common amazement that the world should have the heart to outlive us. Yet thousands stood there as surely under sentence of death as prisoners in the condemned cell; admonished by a clock fashioned by dead hands - a clock that probably will proclaim the last hour of every creature who listened to it yesterday; and the strong tower will stand when the clock shall have worn out; and Time will outlast.

But the last minute had fled before the end of these meditations, and the uplifted hands of the clock touched the hour. A deep note swelled and filled the air with mellow thunder; Big Abel was striking twelve. After two or three stokes the atmosphere and the buildings and the telegraph wires had all attuned themselves to the great vibration, and gave it back to the bell in a clinging echo, so that for about a minute his diapason prevailed over all other sound. The crowd stood for a moment irresolute, as though waiting for some great outward thing to happen and forgetting to look inwards for its sensation. But in a second or two the people broke out into cries that seemed feeble enough beneath the now ear-splitting cannonade of the bells; the bottles, travelling their last round, attained an almost perpendicular elevation; everyone who had an instrument caused it to utter its voice; but the noise of the bells was so great that united song was impossible. A little boy near me who had twice attempted to "raise" a tune and had been beaten down by the jangling bells looked up at the tower with an air of injury, saying, "It should play tunes - Auld Lang Syne an' that." But even that great song of fellowship failed to establish itself; instead of singing it, the more demonstrative people embraced each other, and all gave expression to some kind of good wish. In these exercises some minutes passed, and when people looked again at the clock they found the minute hand well started on its voyage into the new century. The old scroll was rolled up, then, and the new one opened fair and clean and - uninteresting; a sudden flatness fell upon the crowd, and the square began to empty itself through the adjacent streets. For perhaps half-an-hour the clatter of bells pursued the throng and mingled with the cries and laughter of cheerful celebrants; for perhaps an hour or two the pavement still echoed to the step of a belated reveller and then, for the little while in which the unresting city takes on the appearance of rest, the square lay vacant under the stars of a new January sky, and the drama of the clock went on in an empty theatre.