The Thirteen Travellers

by Hugh Walpole

He had come by now to Piccadilly Circus. He was held by the crowd for a moment on the kerb outside Swan & Edgar's. The Circus was wrapped in a pale, honey-coloured evening glow. The stir of the movement of the traffic was dimmed as though it came through a half-open door. Peter felt calm touch his bitter unhappiness as he stood there. He stayed as though someone had a hand on his shoulder and was holding him there. He was conscious for the second time that day of anticipation. Now, having been cheated once, he tried to drive it away, but it would not leave him, and he waited almost as though he were expecting some procession to pass. The shops were closing, and many people were going home. As he stood there Big Ben struck six o'clock, and was echoed from St. James's and St. Martin's. People were coming in prepared for an evening's amusement. The last shoppers were waiting for the omnibuses to take them up Regent Street.

Opposite Peter there were the Criterion posters Our Mr. Hepplewhite, and opposite Mr. Hepplewhite Mlle. Delysia was swinging her name in mid-air to entice the world into the Pavilion. Every kind of shop crowded there round the Circus—barbers', and watch-makers', and bag-makers', and hosiers', and jewellers', and tobacconists', and restaurants, and tea-shops—there they all were; and the omnibuses, like lumbering mastodons or ichthyosauri, came tottering and tumbling into the centre, finding their heavy, thick-headed way out again as though they were blinded by this dazzling, lighted world.

He was struck, as he watched, by the caution, the hesitation, the apparent helplessness of all the world. Londoners had always been represented as so self-confident, self-assured, but if you watched to-night, it seemed that everyone hesitated. Young men with their girls, women with babies, men, boys; again and again Peter saw in faces that same half-timid, half-friendly glance; felt on every side of him a kindliness that was born of a little terror, a little dread. There was some parallel to the scene in his mind. He could not catch it, his mind strove back. Suddenly, with the big form of a policeman who stepped in front of him to control the traffic, he knew of what it was that he was thinking. Years ago, when he had first come up to London, he had lived in a boarding-house, and there had been there a large family of children with whom he had been very friendly. The parents of the children had been poor, but their single living-room had been a nursery of a happy, discordant kind. Every sort of toy had found its way in there, and Peter could see the half-dozen children, now trembling, fighting, laughing, crying, the mother watching them and guarding them.

The Circus was a nursery. The blue evening sky was closed down, a radiant roof. Everywhere were the toys. Now it seemed that balls were danced in the air; now that someone sang or rang bells; now that some new game was suddenly proposed and greeted with a shout of joy. The children filled the Circus; the policemen were toy policemen, the omnibuses toy omnibuses, the theatres toy theatres.

On every side of him Peter felt the kindliness, the helplessness, the pathos of his vision. They were children; he was a child; the world was only a nursery, after all. The sense of his earlier indignation had left him. It seemed now that anger and condemnation, whether of Robsart, or Temple and his friends, or of himself, were absurd. They were all children together, children in their ignorance, their helplessness, children in their love for one another, their generosity, and their hope.

For the first time in his life that sense of disappointment that had been for so long a stumbling-block to all his effort left him. He felt as though, like Pilgrim, he had suddenly dropped his pack. Children in the nursery—the lot of them. No place in this world for high indignation, for bitterness, for denunciation.

The injustice, the ill-humour, the passions of life were like the quarrels in children's play; the wisest man alive knew just as much as his nursery-walls could show him.

He laughed and turned homewards.

The new world? Perhaps. The progress of the world? Perhaps. Meanwhile, there were nursery-tea, a game of pirates, and a fairy-tale by the fire ... and after it all, that sound, dreamless sleep that only children know. Would one wake in the morning and find that one was leaving the nursery for school? Who could tell? No one returned with any story....