It was a dry night, but very cloudy. Points of faint illumination,
mysteriously travelling across the heavens and revealing the
otherwise invisible cushioned surface of the clouds, alone showed that
searchlights were at their work of watching over the heedless town.
Entertainments had drawn in the people from the streets; motor-buses
were half empty; implacable parcels-vans, with thin, exhausted boys
scarcely descried on their rear perches, forced the more fragile
traffic to yield place to them. Footfarers were few, except on the
north side of Coventry Street, where officers, soldiers, civilians,
police and courtesans marched eternally to and fro, peering at one
another in the thick gloom that, except in the immediate region of
a lamp, put all girls, the young and the ageing, the pretty and
the ugly, the good-natured and the grasping, on a sinister enticing
equality. And they were all, men and women and vehicles, phantoms
flitting and murmuring and hooting in the darkness. And the violet
glow-worms that hung in front of theatres and cinemas seemed to mark
the entrances to unimaginable fastnesses, and the side streets seemed
to lead to the precipitous edges of the universe where nothing was.
G.
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