SIX IN THE MORNING

Evening Star, Issue 19763, 13 January 1928, Page 11

SIX IN THE MORNING

LONDON'S DOUBLE LIFE

GREYHESS BEFORE DAWN * STROLLERS IN THE STREET. Take two or three million people from the heart of London. Take all the buses away. Gather up all the taxicabs and put them in a corner somewhere for the time being. Take the thunder of the city—skim it oif and seal it down where it can’t be heard. Take the policemen and the chestnut engines and the electric signs. ... No. Leave a few policemen. But before you do all this have a last look at them. Hear them drone. Reel into the midst of it and study it, like a drowning man studying the fury of a whirlpool. Mostly toppling red omnibuses. They clamor and toss, they swing urgently in and out, they pause and turn, they cross and recross each other’s tracks with the frantic uncertainty of a bed of ants. FACES RACE PAST. Faces go racing past. Swift and unreal, tremulous like a gust of vibrating masks. Is this a girl’s smile or the sour intensity of ,a stockbroker —a shop assistant’s grin or the glump of a caretaker? It is hard to tell. They sweep past so quickly and they flicker as they go. They are just faces shaken in the wind. Taxicabs and cars. You hardly noticed them before. They seem to /Be of a lower order of things, nosing humbly through the maze. They are jammed thick in tile shadows of domineering red buses. Back to red buses. In this swimming landscape the red buses persist. They come pitching up in an endless procession from nowhere; they lurch round and rumble past and are gone somewhere, like blind monsters waddling over the edge of the world. LIGHTS RIP.PLE AND VANISH. Lights play in the air above. They ripple along the facades of the buildings and reach up, vanishing into the sky—a symbol, perhaps, of ultimate futility of all this human press. There is a desperate importance in the air. All these things seem to he moving to a fixed resolve. This din, this rushing past, this violent lumbering of buses and streaming of millions, all this clamor and palpitation, is the breath of a great city. Now take it away. Lift out the people and the buses and the electric signs and cabs and cars It is 6 o’clock in the morning—a Sunday morning in autumn. There are no buses, no cars, no crush of millions. What has happened to the buildings? In this light they are shrunk. They look somehow dumpy. Through tho deep greyncss just before dawn you see hero and there shops with their windows brightly lit. Incredibly casual figures stroll along the pavements under the light of gas lamps, Now and then one of them stops to look at a display of gloves or gramophones. IS THIS LONDON? Is this London? One thinks inevitably of the main street of a big country town at 10 o’clock at night—that thick, silent hour after most of its citizens have gone home and before the rest of them have been emptied in noisy heaps from the picture shows. Only a few shops are still open for drinks and supper. The mercers and music dealers have locked up, but they have loft the lights on to snow the splendor of their gloves and gramophones. One of tho strollers drifts round a corner. One fancies a man with a girl clinging to his arm pausing under one of the street lamps to look at his watch, and then hurrying on. Here is tho Strand—or Station street. If it is tiie Strand something has happened to its buildings. Deprived suddenly of their lights and signs and the humanity that froths all about them, they have lost their life and character. Is this (ho Tivoli or the Western Empress—Simpson’s or the “now bank”? Yon smile at the hulk of Australia House. It isn’t real. Further along will be Freds billiard room, ion can always find tho hoys at Fred’s this time of night. If Fred can get that match going between Toby Muller and If you pause to look ahead you will never reach Fred’s even in a dream. The light is now clearer. Feeling through the haze, brave and serene—bursting with something like a mother’s assurance and affection and a promise of care over “blind groping mankind ” rises the unmistakable dome of St. Paul’s.