Inside the pawnbroker's shop nothing was proud, except perhaps a grandfather clock that stood in a corner like an old aristocrat who has buttoned his coat, cocked his hat, and decided to go down hill with an air. For the rest—just junk lingering in this sordid, waiting-room atmosphere to be reclaimed and taken home. I looked at it and saw it as junk; then I looked again, knew that some of it had been hard to part with, was, in fact, transmuted by affection so that its very frayed unloveliness brought tears to their eyes. Those cheap, badly-made china shepherdesses designed to simper across a mantelpiece at the girlish gallant whose flirtatious salute was ruined because the hand that once held his hat had vanished—how remarkable that anyone had made them, how remarkable that anyone had cared sufficiently to buy them! There they were in the pawnshop, and perhaps some poor woman scraping up four-pence interest to keep them hers, gazing at her bare mantelpiece, longing for their sugary smiles, the cheap, conventional romance of them....
* * *
"Something'll happen soon," said the pawnbroker to me. "You just have to wait."
So I waited for comedy or pathos in the dim crowded shop that smelt of undusted china and old boots. Beyond the stacked window—so full of clocks and fractious bronze horses, of watches and silly shaped silver vases—I saw a busy London district; people passing and repassing, tramcars at congested cross-roads, omnibuses, women shopping and stopping to talk, their baskets over their arms. I became aware of a man in a blue overcoat examining the window.
"He's an old hand at 'popping' things," said the pawnbroker.
"You know him then?"
"Never seen him before; but I can tell."
"How?"
"Well, just watch the way he's going over my stock. I bet he's sized up every blessed thing in the window. It's the jewellery he's interested in. He's wondering if I'm overstocked with gold bracelets. See, he's counting them. He's not sure. He's coming in. You listen!"
The man in the blue overcoat entered, and spoke in a firm, rather condescending manner.