Then in the small hours, into the now dark and
deserted streets comes a wild whirl of carts and men, the place
spurts paper at every door, bales, heaps, torrents of papers,
that are snatched and flung about in what looks like a free fight,
and off with a rush and clatter east, west, north, and south. The
interest passes outwardly; the men from the little rooms are going
homeward, the printers disperse yawning, the roaring presses slacken.
The paper exists. Distribution follows manufacture, and we follow
the bundles.

Our vision becomes a vision of dispersal. You see those bundles
hurling into stations, catching trains by a hair's breadth, speeding
on their way, breaking up, smaller bundles of them hurled with
a fierce accuracy out upon the platforms that rush by, and then
everywhere a division of these smaller bundles into still smaller
bundles, into dispersing parcels, into separate papers, and the
dawn happens unnoticed amidst a great running and shouting of boys,
a shoving through letter slots, openings of windows, spreading out
upon book-stalls. For the space of a few hours you must figure the
whole country dotted white with rustling papers--placards everywhere
vociferating the hurried lie for the day; men and women in trains,
men and women eating and reading, men by study-fenders, people
sitting up in bed, mothers and sons and daughters waiting for father
to finish--a million scattered people reading--reading headlong--or
feverishly ready to read. It is just as if some vehement jet
had sprayed that white foam of papers over the surface of the land. . .

And then you know, wonderfully gone--gone utterly, vanished as foam
might vanish upon the sand.

Nonsense! The whole affair a noisy paroxysm of nonsense, unreasonable
excitement, witless mischief, and waste of strength--signifying
nothing. . . .

And one of those white parcels was the paper I held in my hands,
as I sat with a bandaged foot on the steel fender in that dark
underground kitchen of my mother's, clean roused from my personal
troubles by the yelp of the headlines. She sat, sleeves tucked up
from her ropy arms, peeling potatoes as I read.

It was like one of a flood of disease germs that have invaded a
body, that paper. There I was, one corpuscle in the big amorphous
body of the English community, one of forty-one million such
corpuscles and, for all my preoccupations, these potent headlines,
this paper ferment, caught me and swung me about. And all