He edged and dawdled back to Cannon Street against the human stream. The roads were full of huge red buses, their foreheads announcing eccentric destinations, places he had never heard of. A girl’s voice fluttered at his elbow. “He’s a dear.” He turned to see what she was like. Nobody there. A ghost, perhaps. It had melted in the crowd. Where he had heard that voice there was a bus which was going to Theydon Bois. And where was that? London was too big to know itself. It was congested with anxious people and nervous engines, and at the same time a man might just as well be on Crusoe’s island. There would be more in a parrot than in all these people. The angel Gabriel himself couldn’t make a chart of London. He would never know from whom the words came which floated up to the blue calms out of those swirling miles of uproar and confusion. But Crusoe could be in less doubt about his parrot.
It was terrifying, if you thought about it. London was like the dream in which you stood by yourself at night and saw all the stars break loose and stream down the sky. Jimmy paused by the London Stone at the thought of that boyish dream. And that was strange, too. His dream persisted, which only he himself knew, just as did that oldest stone in London, which had come from nobody knew what age and place. What irrelevant things to survive in so long and immense a show! But that dream, the stars out of law and falling down the sky, was like the spectacle of London on a Saturday afternoon. Terrifying! None of the books had ever proved whether it all mattered, or whether it did not. Whether everything was happening so because it had to, or whether it was all worse than shove-ha’penny. Cosmic shove-ha’penny?
He crossed over by Cannon Street Railway Station. From there he could see, dominant over the confusion and the noise, with a lambent cloud behind it, the triumphant dilation of St. Paul’s, holding above the capital its mysterious symbol to the sun. By Jove, though, man did that. He even divined the culminating mystery. Not much shove-ha’penny about that. Jimmy watched a sad woman, in clothes women do not wear unless they must, go by a dreary fellow standing by the kerb, pause, fumble in her handbag, and return to give the chap something, though she hardly looked at him. Was that a chance hint? But a man never knew when he was tipped a crafty wink out of the welter of the alien tumult. Jimmy warmed with a sudden confidence, anyhow, that the shabby woman was as important as Wren’s masterpiece, as anything in London. She was a vestal to the god of April. He had seen her compassion for a wreck, and she didn’t know it. There must be something inherent in this chaos which informed it. Perhaps in the beginning it got the word and had remembered it, without knowing what it meant. These people were all right. They would work out what had to be done, in spite of all the Perriams, and without knowing what they were doing.
That thought, outside the fruiterer’s, gave him the freedom to admire a favourite shop. Better than any Bond Street jeweller’s, that place. The greengrocer trafficked with the raw material of the poet. Sonnets and lyrics by the pound. You could come to any generous and hopeful decision before that shop window. It accorded with the dome of St. Paul’s, and a white cloud, and the poor woman whose pity was moved by misfortune. If the earth were not a good place, when it could do that, then what would you call it? If the good fortune of that window was just the chance luck of time and rain, like that woman’s pity, then it was good luck. It could not have been better if divinely planned. Those massed grapes were the translucent globules, purple and gold, of the juice of our own star. Enough to make the sun laugh, to see what he had done. Jimmy lit a pipe as he surveyed the show. Those colours would put it across Helen’s artist pals at Hampstead. What an artist, to get those dyes out of mixing mud and sunlight! Helen herself couldn’t get that hint of green light in those topaz lanterns, the melons. The rank of geometrical pines was a rich joke. The oranges were the congealed drops of the glow of luxurious noons. No doubt about the earth being a baby, when you saw the skin of a peach. Plenty of time for it to grow. Only fools get impatient with a baby.
Jimmy found himself, without knowing how he got there, by Blackfriars Bridge. “Premier’s Grave Speech.” The newsboys were running along, holding placards like slovenly aprons. You felt anxious to learn what made the boys run in excitement, got a stimulating hint from a word or two, and then a draught blew the placard open to merely that full announcement. Speeches were always grave. That was the joke of a speech by a statesman; it was wind to keep the ignorant shivering. Wasted on a fine Saturday, anyhow. A little group stood near him, eagerly talking, with a policeman in the midst. The constable hurried away from it, with a lady’s silk reticule in his hand. He looked comical, the helmeted and serious man, with so incongruous a little dainty in his fist. The women in the group watched him go away with it, but they did not smile. They were all talking together.
“Couldn’t stop her. I was as near as I am to you, that I was.”
“Yes. Just dropped that bag, and over she
