Tales of Space and TimeWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Science
Tales of Space and Time
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Science fiction, English
It would have been amusing if one could have confronted a Regent Street
shopkeeper of the nineteenth century with the development of his
establishment in which Denton's duties lay. Nineteenth Way was still
sometimes called Regent Street, but it was now a street of moving
platforms and nearly eight hundred feet wide. The middle space was
immovable and gave access by staircases descending into subterranean
ways to the houses on either side. Right and left were an ascending
series of continuous platforms each of which travelled about five miles
an hour faster than the one internal to it, so that one could step from
platform to platform until one reached the swiftest outer way and so go
about the city. The establishment of the Suzannah Hat Syndicate
projected a vast _façade_ upon the outer way, sending out overhead at
either end an overlapping series of huge white glass screens, on which
gigantic animated pictures of the faces of well-known beautiful living
women wearing novelties in hats were thrown. A dense crowd was always
collected in the stationary central way watching a vast kinematograph
which displayed the changing fashion. The whole front of the building
was in perpetual chromatic change, and all down the _façade_--four
hundred feet it measured--and all across the street of moving ways,
laced and winked and glittered in a thousand varieties of colour and
lettering the inscription--
SUZANNA! 'ETS! SUZANNA! 'ETS!
A broadside of gigantic phonographs drowned all conversation in the
moving way and roared "_hats_" at the passer-by, while far down the
street and up, other batteries counselled the public to "walk down for
Suzannah," and queried, "Why _don't_ you buy the girl a hat?"
For the benefit of those who chanced to be deaf--and deafness was not
uncommon in the London of that age, inscriptions of all sizes were
thrown from the roof above upon the moving platforms themselves, and on
one's hand or on the bald head of the man before one, or on a lady's
shoulders, or in a sudden jet of flame before one's feet, the moving
finger wrote in unanticipated letters of fire "_'ets r chip t'de_," or
simply "_'ets_." And spite of all these efforts so high was the pitch at
which the city lived, so trained became one's eyes and ears to ignore
all sorts of advertisement, that many a citizen had passed that place
thousands of times and was still unaware of the existence of the
Suzannah Hat Syndicate.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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