The
policeman and the loafers in the ring of fire made by the public-houses at
the cross-roads--even these were grave with the universal affliction of
life, and grim with the relentless universal egotism. Lovers walked as
though there were no heaven and no earth, but only themselves in space.
Nobody but me seemed to guess that the road to Delhi could be as naught to
this road, with its dark, fleeing shapes, its shifting beams, its black
brick precipices, and its thousand pale, flitting faces of a gloomy and
decadent race. As says the Indian proverb, I met ten thousand men on the
Putney High Street, and they were all my brothers. But I alone was aware
of it. As I stood watching autobus after autobus swing round in a fearful
semi-circle to begin a new journey, I gazed myself into a mystic
comprehension of the significance of what I saw. A few yards beyond where
the autobuses turned was a certain house with lighted upper windows, and
in that house the greatest lyric versifier that England ever had, and one
of the great poets of the whole world and of all the ages, was dying: a
name immortal. But nobody looked; nobody seemed to care; I doubt if any
one thought of it. This enormous negligence appeared to me to be fine, to
be magnificently human.
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