The song died down. It was ember, crimson coal. It was ash....
Night was there. The lamps burned fitfully overhead. Without was a dark rushing of buildings. Night and the City was there. The singing was over.
David’s heart was full of the blood of songs: they were singing still in his heart. He looked out of the window.
Black. A dim rushing of buildings—a rushing of swarming streets gutted with yellow lights. Life out there was burning against black—was being swept into black.
In the window David saw himself reflected, saw past himself to Tom and the vague faces of the car. His own face was pale, there in the frame of the window. His own face lay half blotted out in the swinging of streets as under water. Tom’s face was pale and clear. David looked out of the window seeing the City: and saw imprinted there the faces of David and his new friend—white, ghostly, real. His heart beat with agony of portent.
Another silence. Silence of preparation.
The car prepared to die—to be shattered into two-score lives, into a thousand passions. The steel-straight mood racing to the City was done. In its place a flutter of moods, a scatter as of birds under low skies.
Above the lamplight, under the swaying ceiling, shreds of song hovered, torn remnants of voices.
The train shrieked and shivered, it plunged into a tunnel.
Smoke swept away David’s vision. The City was gone from the window and the reflection in it of himself. Teeming pouring blackness without.