Gumbril stopped the cab. “It’s after half-past eight,” he said. “At this rate we shall never get anything to eat. Wait a minute.”
He ran into Appenrodt’s, and came back in a moment with a packet of smoked salmon sandwiches, a bottle of white wine and a glass.
“We have a long way to go,” he explained, as he got into the taxi.
They ate their sandwiches, they drank their wine. The taxi drove on and on.
“This is positively exhilarating,” said Mrs. Viveash, as they turned into the Edgware Road.
Polished by the wheels and shining like an old and precious bronze, the road stretched before them, reflecting the lamps. It had the inviting air of a road which goes on for ever.
“They used to have such good peep-shows in this street,” Gumbril tenderly remembered: “Little back shops where you paid twopence to see the genuine mermaid, which turned out to be a stuffed walrus, and the tattooed lady, and the dwarf, and the living statuary, which one always hoped, as a boy, was really going to be rather naked and thrilling, but which was always the most pathetic of unemployed barmaids, dressed in the thickest of pink Jaeger.”
“Do you think there’d be any of those now?” asked Mrs. Viveash.
Gumbril shook his head. “They’ve moved on with the march of civilization. But where?” He spread out his hands interrogatively. “I don’t know which direction civilization marches—whether north towards Kilburn and Golders Green, or over the river to the Elephant, to Clapham and Sydenham and all those other mysterious places. But, in any case, high rents have marched up here; there are no more genuine mermaids in the Edgware Road. What stories we shall be able to tell our children!”
“Do you think we shall ever have any?” Mrs. Viveash asked.