That was it. Dancers in the dark—in search of a new sensation. Jerry was beckoning to a man who had come out to speak to the orchestra. “Oh, Fred,” she said, easily: “do me a favor? When Wigs and Davy see fit to blow in, will you tell them that we got sick of waiting and have gone out with Crawf and Dum-Dum?”
“I’ll do that little thing for you; but they’ll be fit to be tied,” Fred responded with a grin. He stayed carrying on a light badinage with Jerry until the two boys reappeared, coats over their arms, their broad, mild countenances for once overrun with emotions, which were added to as Fred thrust them parting darts about how Wigs and Davy would pay them out for playing the fresh young Lochinvars.
The two boys sat in front, and the trio sat together in back as before. Jerry was still humming the tune that the orchestra had been playing—
“All the knowledge learned at College
Still that don’t explain——”
Jerry had found time to wish that she might have been among the dancers; Jerry, the excitement-eater. They had passed a movie palace letting out crowds from its first show. Excitement-eaters all . . . who for want of excitement of their own, had gone to swallow down excitement in reels—of indiscriminate kinds. Indiscriminate excitement by proxy—excitement that exhausted or stimulated, but created the appetite for excitement at first hand.
Jerry stopped humming. “If only this hadn’t happened at the time of the police-strike. But what can those Home Guard birds do?”
“It may not have to come to that,” said Jim.
They veered away from the city outskirts, and started pounding down the State Road towards the South Shore. It was cold, and the boys in front drove with sullen swiftness.
“I feel somehow—as if this were the end of the world,” said Joy miserably. Such awful things are happening that the world’s just got to topple over sometime—and to-night feels just like it.”