They were slatternly women, but warm-hearted; and when I had managed to arouse the gentleman in khaki and hoist him to his feet (for the cause of his indisposition was plain—and he had slept it off) they called down blessings on my head and overwhelmed our friend with sympathy which he did not wholly deserve and to which he made no rejoinder. Nor did he vouchsafe any very lucid answer when I asked him whither he was bound. I was prepared to pilot him—but I could hardly do so without knowing towards which point of the compass he proposed to steer, or rather, to be steered. "I know w'ere I wanter go," was all I could get out of him. Very well; if he knew his address, it was no concern of mine; he could lead on; I would act as a mere supporter. In this capacity, with my arm linked firmly in his, I brought him forth from the tunnel to the street (he had no wish, it seemed, to go through the tunnel into the court), and here we bade farewell to the ladies.
"Which way now?" I inquired. My charge responded not, but crossed to a corner and meandered up one of those interminable thoroughfares which lead out of London into the suburbs. Trudging with him and helping him to sustain his balance, which was not as stable as could be wished, I plied him with mildly genial conversation and at last elicited a few vague answers. These were couched in the cockney idiom, but I caught a faint nasal twang which led me to suspect that the speaker had come from the other side of the Atlantic. Yes—he told me he had just arrived from Canada.
We had proceeded a short distance when on the further side of the street I descried a golden halo which outlined the silhouette of a coffee stall. It occurred to me that a cup of hot coffee would be a good tonic to disperse the last symptoms of my friend's indiscretion, so I deflected him across the road, and we brought up, together, alongside the coffee-stall's counter.
Lest the reader should be unacquainted with that unique creation, the coffee-stall, I must explain that it is nocturnal in habit, emerging from its lair only between the hours of 11 p.m. and 7 a.m. It is an equipage of which the interior is inhabited by a fat, jolly man (at least according to my experience he is always fat and jolly) surrounded by steaming urns, plates of cake, buns of a citron-yellow hue, pale pastries, ham sandwiches and packets of cigarettes. The upper panels of one of its sides unfold to form a bar below and a penthouse roof above, the latter being generally extended into an awning. The awning is a protection for the customer not against the sun—a luminary from whose assaults the London coffee-stalls have little to fear—but against the rain. Thanks to these awnings, and the chattiness of the fat, jolly man, and the warmth exhaled by the urns, and the circumstance that the public houses are shut, our coffee-stalls are able to sell two brownish beverages, called respectively coffee and tea, which otherwise could hardly hope to achieve the honour of human consumption.
Fate has guided me on many midnight pilgrimages through the town, and I have imbibed, sometimes with relish, the liquids alluded to; I have also partaken of the pallid pastry and the citron-yellow buns. I am therefore in a position to write, for the benefit of persons less well informed, a treatise on coffee-stalls. This I shall refrain from doing. The one point it is necessary for me to mention is that the fat, jolly man, being deplorably distrustful, does not supply casual customers with teaspoons. You may have a cup of alleged tea (one penny) or a cup of alleged coffee (one penny); a dollop of sugar is dropped into the cup; the fat, jolly man gives the mixture a stir-round with a teaspoon; then he places the cup before you on the bar; but the teaspoon is still in his grasp. I dare say he would lend you the teaspoon if you requested him to do so; but unless you have that audacity he prefers to keep the teaspoon on his side of the bar, out of harm's way. This may seem strange, when you perceive that the teaspoon is fashioned of a metal unknown to silversmiths and might be priced at threepence. But even a threepenny teaspoon is a souvenir which some collectors would not despise.
Presumably regular customers receive teaspoons, for teaspoons lie in a heap on the fat, jolly man's side of the counter. This was the case at the coffee-stall before which the young soldier and I ranged ourselves. And the heap of teaspoons seemed to exercise a curious fascination upon the soldier. He continued to stare at them for some minutes after I had set in front of him his cup of coffee. Then he stared at the fat, jolly man, who was cutting slabs from a loaf. He stared for a long time, making no reply to my remarks.
Rain began to patter on the awning—it had rained earlier in the night—and I became aware of a figure, lurking in the background on the pavement, beyond the awning's shelter, but within the radius of the haze of light projected therefrom. It was a wretched, slinking figure, that of an elderly man with bleared eyes and a red nose: one of those pariahs who haunt cabstands and promote the cabs up the rank when the front vehicle is hailed. This special specimen of his breed appeared to be a satellite of the coffee-stall proprietor: perhaps he helped to tow the stall to its berth. Whatever might be his function, he lingered on the outskirts of the ring of light, watching us; and the young soldier, in his slow scrutiny of the stall and its surroundings, caught sight of him, and stared stolidly, as he had stared at everything else.
I was in the act of drinking my coffee when the soldier suddenly leant across the counter, picked up a spoon, turned, and threw it at the derelict whose face wavered on the edge of the lamplight's circle. The victim of this extraordinary attack dodged the missile, then grovelled after it in the gutter. Meanwhile the fat man (instantaneously ceasing to be jolly) gave vent to an angry protest.