WHEN THE CLOCK STRIKES FIVE.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 227, 25 September 1929, Page 6

WHEN THE CLOCK STRIKES FIVE.

To look down on a city and see roofs beyond roofs, with an occasional gash which is a street, is to lose sight of the fact that it is man who has made these tall masses which reach towards the sky; for so much of man's handiwork is seen and so little of man himself. The buildings are merely cages in which activity is the more fierce because the outside of the cage is so calm and unmoved. It is five o'clock. With a shriek the siren bursts over the city, a call to freedom. It is the dominant voice, and immediately following the city awakens to the music of an equally confident but Jess vociferous chorus. There seems to be a momentary calm when all traffic is at a standstill. Then, a minute afterwards, the story of "The Pied Piper of Hamlin" is told all over again. Just as the rats tumbled into the streets in- answer to the piper's lilt so, at the hour of five—the end of the day's toil—the people crowd into the open. Viewed from above, hurrying, teeming humanity is little different from the mass which found death in the Weser. From high up the onlooker forgets he is looking down on individuals, because there is nothing to distinguish the one from the mass. Man is one with the traffic simply because both do only the one thing—they move. Direction becomes purposeful only in the individual, and with individuality lost the movement of-the crowd becomes aimless. Hitherto trams have wound their way through the streets leisurely, traffic has moved on sluggishly in the afternoon's content, but at the hour of the end of the day's work there is a new stir. Life has a new significance. It is purposeful.' Traffic is no longer aimless; it also has a definite lestination. The hour of five in the day is like the season jf spring in the year. The stir permeates all ictivity. Glimpsed aslant through the windows ;he typiste gathers up her papers. Office staffs jegin to move about preparatory to going home. iVhere before human activity was muffled behind 'our grey walls now it find's jubilant expression >ut of doors. Twinkling lights begin to blink an undecided invitation. Points of fire cleave a way through indefinite dusk, and from a vantage point above the clear lines of the city seem gradually to merge in the enveloping cloak of greyness. Life begins to be heard rather than seen. Things made by man take on the significance of man himself. At a jump the electric light advertisement sign awakes to recurrent persistence; and where man cannot shout Irs wares by voice th-_ sign blares it forth for him to catch the eye of the passerFive is the hour waited for. As life has previously drained from the buildings into the streets, Iso now it radiates from the heart of the city ! through the streets, its arteries. Tram cars crawl up the hills from the city valleys and a wraith of drifting steam falls languidly back watching the fiery insistence of the suburban train. Grace" ful in a setting of soft greyness and long wharf lights, the ferries move away four abreast into the gathering dusk. Life radiates away from a" centre; and robbed of its daytime activity the city lies like a husk—a thing of silence. Life watched from above impersonally is unreal. Detached from his kind, the onlooker feels beyond the significance of everyday existence. The tenseness of the individual is lost for the nonce; and all that arises from the arena of reality below is a strange blending of indiscriminate sound that makes for peace. —F.C.J.