Where, I ask you, where--?" But he had no friends; not
even a boy heeded him. The drum continued to bang in our rear.
I enjoyed all this. All this seemed to me to be fine, seemed to throw
off the true, fine, romantic savour of life. I would have altered
nothing in it. Mean, harsh, ugly, squalid, crude, barbaric--yes, but
what an intoxicating sense in it of the organized vitality of a vast
community unconscious of itself! I would have altered nothing even in
the events of the night. I thought of the rooms at the top of the
staircase of the Foaming Quart--mysterious rooms which I had not seen
and never should see, recondite rooms from which a soul had slipped away
and into which two had come, scenes of anguish and of frustrated effort!
Historical rooms, surely! And yet not a house in the hundreds of houses
past which we slid but possessed rooms ennobled and made august by
happenings exactly as impressive in their tremendous inexplicableness.
The natural humanity of Jos Myatt and Charlie, their fashion of
comporting themselves in a sudden stress, pleased me. How else should
they have behaved? I could understand Charlie's prophetic dirge over the
ruin of the Knype Football Club.
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