“In a green coat. Never said a word.”
Perplexing, with that thought of a nice girl in a green coat who had gone out of April so abruptly, to worry through the eager throng of home-goers hurrying along from Ludgate Circus. They knew nothing about it. Only one of the bubbles had gone from that stream of life. Episodic, a girl who drops over a bridge when others feel jolly on a half-holiday. At the corner by the Circus he felt he would like a drink. Must have it. He left the daylight and went into a crypt, vaulted and cool, under the railway. Lamps were alight in there. It opened into other low caves with roofs arched and dim. Casks stood in rows by the walls with tiny white pails under their spigots. A famous literary man, whom Jimmy recognised because he was even more pleasing than the familiar and outrageous caricature of him, sat by himself, a black cloak falling from his shoulders, at a round table which was like a toy out of a doll’s house beside that expansive rotundity. He was nursing a comparatively minute bulb of wine on his knee with an expression of childlike faith and dreamy beatitude. Men stood about talking to each other with the rapid confidential amiability released by alcohol. Some high stools with exiguous seats were ranged along a counter. Jimmy mounted a stool next to a hulk whose taut hinder-parts bulged spherically over their pedestal. The hulk was turned the other way, consulting anxiously with another man. Jimmy got some Burgundy and a plate of sandwiches. He thought of the unknown girl in a green coat while looking at a picture on the wall illustrating high wassail, in which a nymph was emerging from a wineglass to advertise a famous brand of champagne to two men in evening dress.
“Not me,” he heard the hulk say earnestly at last to his friend. “Not me, Charley. I can’t. I can’t go back. I couldn’t apologise to Harmsworth.”
“No,” murmured his little companion meditatively. “No. He never waits for an apology, does he? But couldn’t you go back without trying to apologise? He mightn’t notice you were there.”
Jimmy was drinking when he heard that, and he made a bubbling sound in his glass, which he lowered too quickly. The barmaid glanced at him at once in cold dislike. He was a stranger there. They might think he had been eavesdropping. He left the place. Of course, those caves were for the retirement of journalists. Another world surrounded those caves. Another? No. Probably only an extension of the world he knew, complete with its Perriams and idiotic fears which meant nothing except to those whose alarms were roused by the only taboos and fetishes they knew.
Here he was. The retired front of the British Museum, frowning darkly in its retirement with its wealth of the mind, unsolicitous of attention, does not induce the stranger within its gates of iron. Beyond the austere guardians in their uniform at its outer ward an intervening desert of gravel is chiefly interesting for its doves. The doves are alive. They make love unashamed under the shadow of wisdom. You may watch them, through the iron railings, without going in. No need to cross that desert of gravel. All the urgency of life, insistent on the unknown word which first set it going, is in the iridescent neck of the gentleman who struts briskly after the coy lady: “By God, madam, but you must.” What is inside the dark portals of the building is only the sublimation of the iridescent throat of a dove in spring.
That high, massive, and grim colonnade, the last strange consequence of love, is not to be entered by humble and ignorant mortals. They are intimidated. They have the play of the doves to watch, which is easier than summoning up the courage to mount the spacious terrace of temple steps to the interior gloom. But Jimmy turned in without a thought. Man, he knew, had done something with the passionate bloom on a dove’s throat. He thought the Museum was the best thing in London except the Abbey at Evensong. He became positive when he was in the Museum. His sporadic hints concentrated into a confidence which he could not explain. Why explain, when you know? Man was aware of something better than the things to which he was daily compelled. There, about you in the Museum, the confirmation was, whichever way you looked.
Jimmy did not consult his watch. He did not know the time, as he mounted, his mind at ease, the steps to the temple which enshrined the proofs of the ardent experiments of his fellows. He was not thinking of time. He went inside, surrendered his stick, and then, irresolutely, because he was trying to think of something he could not bring to the front of his memory, went up the stairs past the stones teeming with the figures from the Indian tope of Amaravati. What had he come to that place to see? He considered this vaguely, while noticing that a wasp-waisted creature, with exaggerated breasts and hips, seemed to be moving sinuously out of the stonework. The stones moved with seductive little forms. One might suppose it was inevitable that those breasts and hips should have developed from the teachings of Buddha. Whatever man did, he found it hard to keep that from his thoughts. He gave his temples to the adoration of the baby. Quite right too. The temples began with that, and they would end with it. Things must be kept going, while we are here. But those Hindu waists were too slight. They were sensual. Adoration of the mere form of good was likely to make the generative gods shy.
He became lost among carved ivory oddments from Japan, translucent Chinese bowls of jade, lacquered boxes, and jolly dolls of the traditional Japanese puppet shows. In those things the fond human mind was at
