CHAPTER VIII
Cyprian did not return to the flat. He went out into the restless London streets. Block after block he passed, from the more fashionable quarters to the outskirts of the park, walking swiftly to escape pursuing Memory, until at last the damp darkness of the river divided the myriad scintillating eyes of the city.
Further along the Embankment dead forms lay huddled where the shadows lay deepest, every now and again to start erect, galvanized into life by the angry flash of a police-lantern.
As he paused to strike a match against a stone bench, shaped like an incompleted coffin, one of these corpses twitched itself upright.
"Fit ter drop!" it muttered, still in the throes of uneasy slumber; "Gawd! fer one bloody night to fergit meself in."
Cyprian replaced his pipe in his pocket and fumbled.
"Here," he said, "I don't know who you are, and you don't know who I am, but if you, too, are in need of sleep and a little forgetting, go and buy it with this, which will not buy it for me."
With the astonished gratitude of a "Gawd bless yer bleedin' eyes, Gov'ner" (even here it was God, God, God, thought Cyprian, who refused to be shut out of Man's tortured intellect even while it anathematized His works) this invisible wreck of Humanity, made in His image, slouched away to drink itself blind to sorrow for a short time in some starless rat-hole known only to its kind.
And Cyprian sat and smoked on the deserted seat, still redolent with the effluvia of rotting rags, until a suspicious arc of light searched him out in his sins and a voice, hoarse with hectorings, commanded him to move on.
Morning found him so far from home that a sleepy taxi-driver whom he hailed rolled a jaundiced eye on receiving the directions of this individual whose damp, crumpled clothes and unclean collar showed unmistakable evidence of an unusual brand of night-on-the-tiles, and Cyprian was obliged to disburse half the fare in advance.