LITMIR.BIZ

       1

      I seemed to be standing in a busy queue by the side of a long, mean street. Evening was just closing in and it was raining. I had been wandering for hours in similar mean streets, always in the rain and always in evening twilight. Time seemed to have paused on that dismal moment when only a few shops have lit up and it is not yet dark enough for their windows to look cheering. And just as the evening never advanced to night, so my walking had never brought me to the better parts of the town. However far I went I found only dingy lodging houses, small tobacconists, hoardings from which posters hung in rags, windowless warehouses, goods stations without trains, and bookshops of the sort that sell The Works of Aristotle. I never met anyone. But for the little crowd at the bus stop, the whole town seemed to be empty. I think that was why I attached myself to the queue.

      I had a stroke of luck right away, for just as I took my stand a little waspish woman who would have been ahead of me snapped out at a man who seemed to be with her, ‘Very well, then. I won’t go at all. So there,’ and left the queue. ‘Pray don’t imagine,’ said the man, in a very dignified voice, ‘that I care about going in the least. I have only been trying to please you, for peace sake. My own feelings are of course a matter of no importance, I quite understand that’—and suiting the action to the word he also walked away. ‘Come,’ thought I, ‘that’s two places gained.’ I was now next to a very short man with a scowl who glanced at me with an expression of extreme disfavour and observed, rather unnecessarily loudly, to the man beyond him, This sort of thing really makes one think twice about going at all.’ ‘What sort of thing?’ growled the other, a big beefy person. ‘Well,’ said the Short Man, ‘this is hardly the sort of society I’m used to as a matter of fact.’ ‘Huh!’ said the Big Man: and then added with a glance at me, ‘Don’t you stand any sauce from him, Mister. You’re not afraid of him, are you?’ Then, seeing I made no move, he rounded suddenly on the Short Man and said, ‘Not good enough for you, aren’t we? Like your lip.’ Next moment he had fetched the Short Man one on the side of the face that sent him sprawling into the gutter. ‘Let him lay, let him lay,’ said the Big Man to no one in particular. ‘I’m a plain man that’s what I am and I got to have my rights same as anyone else, see?’ As the Short Man showed no disposition to rejoin the queue and soon began limping away, I closed up, rather cautiously, behind the Big Man and congratulated myself on having gained yet another step. A moment later two young people in front of him also left us arm in arm. They were both so trousered, slender, giggly and falsetto that I could be sure of the sex of neither, but it was clear that each for the moment preferred the other to the chance of a place in the bus. ‘We shall never all get in,’ said a female voice with a whine in it from some four places ahead of me. ‘Change places with you for five bob, lady,’ said someone else. I heard the clink of money and then a scream in the female voice, mixed with roars of laughter from the rest of the crowd. The cheated woman leaped out of her place to fly at the man who had bilked her, but the others immediately closed up and flung her out…So what with one thing and another the queue had reduced itself to manageable proportions long before the bus appeared.

      It was a wonderful vehicle, blazing with golden light, heraldically coloured. The Driver himself seemed full of light and he used only one hand to drive with. The other he waved before his face as if to fan away the greasy steam of the rain. A growl went up from the queue as he came in sight. ‘Looks as if he had a good time of it, eh?…Bloody pleased with himself, I bet…My dear, why can’t he behave naturally?—Thinks himself too good to look at us…Who does he imagine he is?…All that gilding and purple, I call it a wicked waste. Why don’t they spend some of the money on their house property down here?—God! I’d like to give him one in the ear-‘ole.’ I could see nothing in the countenance of the Driver to justify all this, unless it were that he had a look of authority and seemed intent on carrying out his job.

      My fellow passengers fought like hens to get on board the bus though there was plenty of room for us all. I was the last to get in. The bus was only half full and I selected a seat at the back, well away from the others. But a tousle-haired youth at once came and sat down beside me. As he did so we moved off.

      ‘I thought you wouldn’t mind my tacking on to you,’ he said, ‘for I’ve noticed that you feel just as I do about the present company. Why on earth they insist on coming I can’t imagine. They won’t like it at all when we get there, and they’d really be much more comfortable at home. It’s different for you and me.’

      ‘Do they like this place?’ I asked.

      ‘As much as they’d like anything,’ he answered. ‘They’ve got cinemas and fish and chip shops and advertisements and all the sorts of things they want. The appalling lack of any intellectual life doesn’t worry them. I realised as soon as I got here that there’d been some mistake. I ought to have taken the first bus but I’ve fooled about trying to wake people up here. I found a few fellows I’d known before and tried to form a little circle, but they all seem to have sunk to the level of their surroundings. Even before we came here I’d had some doubts about a man like Cyril Blellow. I always thought he was working in a false idiom. But he was at least intelligent: one could get some criticism worth hearing from him, even if he was a failure on the creative side. But now he seems to have nothing left but his self-conceit. The last time I tried to read him some of my own stuff…but wait a minute, I’d just like you to look at it.’

      Realising with a shudder that what he was producing from his pocket was a thick wad of type-written paper, I muttered something about not having my spectacles and exclaimed, ‘Hullo! We’ve left the ground.’

      It was true. Several hundred feet below us, already half hidden in the rain and mist, the wet roofs of the town appeared, spreading without a break as far as the eye could reach.