"Eyes—front!"
* * *
The Cenotaph stands there with a wind pulling ... pulling like fingers touching the Flag.
Romance on Wheels
When normal London folk have gone home to bed the coffee-stalls come trundling out of the mysterious dark to stay at street corners and bridge-heads till the dawn. Ask your friends if they have ever sought refreshment at a coffee-stall. I wager that perhaps only the Bad Boy of the Family or Dance Club Jane have experienced the happiness of sausages at 3 A.M. in this temple of romance.
The coffee-stall at the street corner is the only thing left in our modern world that approximates to the mediæval inn or guest-house. Hotels are graded and standardized, and you know exactly the kind of people you will find in them. Good hotels are so much alike that patrons often have to ask the hall porter whether they are in London or Rome.
But the little coffee-stall, set netwise at street corners to catch queer fish, is dramatic. If ever I write a play the first act will take place round a coffee-stall; but I am told that this has been done; and no wonder. Here it is that you, like some traveller in the old days before the last dragon died, will meet varlets and squires, knights on some bright errantry, damsels in distress, and many a wandering fool: all the old characters of Romance like moths round a flame, dropping in out of the night to snatch a sausage and then off, mysterious, elusive, into the night.
There was a mist round the coffee-stall when I found it: one of those strange, fugitive fogs that drift like ghosts at night in the hollows. In the mist the stall was a glow-worm, yellow and furry, warm and desirable, a home to wanderers and fly-by-nights, comforting with its smell of hot coffee and its pungent, inviting sizzle.
Six or seven people, black against the yellowness and the banked Woodbines and the tiers of depressing cakes, gazed round suspiciously as I came in out of the incalculable dark, for after a certain time of morning every plain man may have the mark of the devil on him. Round this stall were the following people: