‘At night on the station platform . . .’

At night on the station platform, near a pile of baskets, a couple em- braced, pressed close together and swaying a little. It was hard to see where the girl’s feet and legs were. The suspicion this aroused soon caused her hands, apparently joined behind her lover’s back, to become a small brown paper parcel under the arm of a stout en- gine-driver who leaned, probably drunk, against the baskets, his cap so far forward as almost to conceal his face. I could not banish the thought that what I had first seen was in fact his own androgy- nous fantasy, the self-sufficient core of his stupor. Such a romantic thing, so tender, for him to contain. He looked more comic and complaisant than the couple had done, and more likely to fall heav- ily to the floor. A café with a frosted glass door through which much light is dif- fused. A tall young girl comes out and stands in front of it, her face and figure quite obscured by this milky radiance. She treads out onto a lopsided ochre panel of lit pavement before the doorway and becomes visible as a coloured shape, moving sharply. A wrap of honey and ginger, a flared saffron skirt, grey- white shoes. She goes off past the Masonic Temple with a young man: he is pale, with dark hair and a shrunken, earnest face. You could imagine him a size larger. Just for a moment, as it happens, there is no one else in the street at all. Their significance escapes rap- idly like a scent, before the footsteps vanish among the car engines. A man in the police court. He looked dapper and poker-faced, his arms straight, the long fingers just touching the hem of his checked jacket. Four days after being released from the prison where he had served two years for theft he had been discovered at midnight cling- ing like a tree-shrew to the bars of a glass factory-roof. He made no attempt to explain his presence there; the luminous nerves that made him fly up to it were not visible in daylight, and the police seemed hardly able to believe this was the creature they had brought down in the darkness. In this city the governing authority is limited and mean: so limited that it can do no more than preserve a superficial order. It supplies fuel, water and power. It removes a fair proportion of the refuse, cleans the streets after a fashion, and discourages fighting. With these things, and a few more of the same sort, it is content. This could never be a capital city for all its size. There is no mind in it, no regard. The sensitive, the tasteful, the fashionable, the intolerant and powerful, have not moved through it as they have moved through London, evaluating it, altering it deliberately, setting in motion wars of feeling about it. Most of it has never been seen. In an afternoon of dazzling sunlight in the thronged streets, I saw at first no individuals but a composite monster, its unfeeling sur- faces matted with dust: a mass of necks, limbs without extremities, trunks without heads; unformed stirrings and shovings spilling across the streets it had managed to get itself provided with. Later, as the air cooled, flowing loosely about the buildings that stood starkly among the declining rays, the creature began to divide and multiply. At crossings I could see people made of straws, rags, cartons, the stuffing of burst cushions, kitchen refuse. Outside the Grand Hotel, a long-boned carrot-haired girl with glasses, loping along, and with strips of bright colour, rich, silky green and blue, in her soft clothes. For a person made of such scraps she was beau- tiful. Faint blue light dropping down through the sparse leaves of the plane trees in the churchyard opposite after sundown, cooling and shaping heads, awakening eyes.