So Humphrey agreed, and they went up into Holborn. It was Sunday evening and every shop was shut, except an isolated restaurant and a tobacconist here and there. The public-houses alone were wholly open, and their windows radiated brilliance into the night. The East had invaded the West for its Sunday parade, and the streets were a restless procession of young people; sex called to sex without anything more evil in intention than a walk through the streets, a hand-clasp and, perhaps, a kiss in some by-way, and then to part with the memory of a gay adventure that would linger during the dull routine of the week to come, to be forgotten and replaced by another.
Beaver was for taking the "tube" to Shepherd's Bush—it was a new luxury for London then, making people wonder how they could have borne so long with the sulphurous smoke and gloom of the old underground railway—but the movement of the streets fascinated Humphrey, and, though the journey took much longer, they went out by omnibus.
Ah! that ride.... The first ride through London, when Humphrey felt the great buildings all around him, and above him, rising enormously in a long chain that seemed to stretch for miles and miles, below the sky that was copper-tinted with the glare of thousands of lamps. What did London mean to him, then? He found his mind groping forwards and backwards, and this way and that way, puzzling for the secret of the real London that was hidden in the stones of it. He was a little afraid of it all, it seemed so vast and complicated. In Easterham, one knew every one, and to walk the streets was like walking the rooms of one's house—but here no man noticed another, one felt strange and outcast at first, intensely lonely, and minutely insignificant. Idly, as he looked down from this omnibus, at the people as they strolled up and down, he wondered of what they were thinking. Did they ever think at all, these people of the streets—did they ever have moments of meditation when they pondered the why and the wherefore of anything? It seemed so odd to Humphrey, as he thought of it—here was the centre of a great civilization, here were men and women, well and decently dressed, here was London broad and mighty, and yet the minds of those who walked below him were, he felt, narrow and pinched. They might have been living in Easterham for all their lives.
And, now, he felt afraid for the first time, knowing that he could never conquer these people by the path he had chosen. What mattered anything to them, except that it touched the root of their lives? They cared nothing, he knew, for the greatness of things. They talked vaguely of the greatness of Empire, but they never thought about it, nor understood it. They lived in a world of names—the world itself was nothing but a string of names which they had been taught. The very stars above them were just "Stars," and the word meant no more to them: if you had talked to them of infinite worlds beyond worlds, of other planets with suns and moons and stars of their own, they would have winked an eye ... and how, when they could not be conquered with the mightiness of everything about them, could Humphrey Quain hope to conquer them. For he had nothing beyond the desire to conquer them—a desire so strong, smouldering somewhere within him, that it had burnt up almost every other interest; he could think perhaps more deeply than they could, but for the rest, he was limited by lack of great knowledge, lack of everything, except an innate gift of shrewd observation and a power of intuitive reasoning.
Out of the mists of his thoughts, Beaver's voice came to him.
"There's the Marble Arch," said Beaver. "What have you been dreaming about? You haven't said a word all the time."
Humphrey laughed. "I was looking at the people," he said. "I always like looking at people."
They went past Hyde Park, with its naked trees showing like skeletons in the moonlight. The night seemed to deepen the spaciousness of the Park, with its shadows and silence; it held all the mystery and beauty of a forest. And later they passed the blue, far-reaching depths of Kensington Gardens, with the scent of trees and the smell of earth after rain coming to them.
It was all new to Humphrey, new and delightful. He promised himself glorious days and nights probing this city to its heart, and listening to the beat of its pulses. Already, for so was he fashioned, he began to note his emotions, and to watch his inner self, and the impressions he was receiving, so that he could write about them. This was the journalist's sense—a sixth sense—which urges its possessor to set down everything he observes, and adds an infinite zest to life, since every experience, every thought, every new feeling, means something to write about. Nor did he think of the things he saw, in the way of the average man. He thought in phrases. It did not content him to feel that a street lamp was merely a lamp. He would ask himself, almost unconsciously, "What does it look like?" and search for a simile. His thoughts ran in metaphors and symbols. They swung into Notting Hill High Street, and here the streets were almost as crowded as those at Holborn, and the lights of the public-houses flared, oases of brilliance in the desert of dark, shuttered shops. And so down the hill to Shepherd's Bush, with its lamps twinkling round the green, and its throng of people—more men and women thinking of nothing at all, and going up and down in herds, like cattle.