Collected Works. George Orwell
in which it was easier to interest herself in How to strop French Razors than in her own desperate plight. All fear had left her. Of the future she was utterly unable to think; even so far ahead as to-night she could barely see. There was a night in the streets ahead of her, that was all she knew, and even about that she only vaguely cared. Meanwhile there were Cage Birds and The Barber’s Record; and they were, strangely, absorbingly interesting.
At nine o’clock the attendant came round with a long hooked pole and turned out the gaslights, and the library was closed. Dorothy turned to the left, up the Waterloo Road, towards the river. On the iron footbridge she halted for a moment. The night wind was blowing. Deep banks of mist, like dunes, were rising from the river, and, as the wind caught them, swirling north-eastward across the town. A swirl of mist enveloped Dorothy, penetrating her thin clothes and making her shudder with a sudden foretaste of the night’s cold. She walked on and arrived, by the process of gravitation that draws all roofless people to the same spot, at Trafalgar Square.
CHAPTER III
§I
(Scene: Trafalgar Square. Dimly visible through the mist, a dozen people, Dorothy among them, are grouped about one of the benches near the north parapet.)
Charlie (singing): “ ’Ail Mary, ’ail Mary, ’a-il Ma-ary——” (Big Ben strikes ten.)
Snouter (mimicking the noise): “Ding dong, ding dong! Shut your —— noise, can’t you? Seven more hours of it on this —— square before we got the chance of a set-down and a bit of sleep! Cripes!”
Mr. Tallboys (to himself): “Non sum qualis eram boni sub regno Edwardi! In the days of my innocence, before the Devil carried me up into a high place and dropped me into the Sunday newspapers—that is to say when I was Rector of Little Fawley-cum-Dewsbury . . .”
Deafie (singing): “With my willy willy, with my willy willy——”
Mrs. Wayne: “Ah, dearie, as soon as I set eyes on you I knew as you was a lady born and bred. You and me’ve known what it is to come down in the world, haven’t we, dearie? It ain’t the same for us as what it is for some of these others here.”
Charlie (singing): “ ’Ail Mary, ’ail Mary, ’a-il Ma-ary, full of grace!”
Mrs. Bendigo: “Calls himself a bloody husband, does he? Four pound a week in Covent Garden and ’is wife doing a starry in the bloody Square! Husband!”
Mr. Tallboys (to himself): “Happy days, happy days! My ivied church under the sheltering hillside—my red-tiled Rectory slumbering among Elizabethan yews! My library, my vinery, my cook, house-parlourmaid and groom-gardener! My cash in the bank, my name in Crockford! My black suit of irreproachable cut, my collar back to front, my watered silk cassock in the church precincts . . .”
Mrs. Wayne: “Of course the one thing I do thank God for, dearie, is that my poor dear mother never lived to see this day. Because if she ever had of lived to see the day when her eldest daughter—as was brought up, mind you, with no expense spared and milk straight from the cow . . .”
Mrs. Bendigo: “Husband!”
Ginger: “Come on, less ’ave a drum of tea while we got the chance. Last we’ll get to-night—coffee shop shuts at ’ar-parse ten.”
The Kike: “Oh Jesus! This bloody cold’s gonna kill me! I ain’t got nothing on under my trousers. Oh Je-e-e-eeze!”
Charlie (singing): “ ’Ail Mary, ’ail Mary——”
Snouter: “Fourpence! Fourpence for six —— hours on the bum! And that there nosing sod with the wooden leg queering our pitch at every boozer between Aldgate and the Mile End Road. With ’is —— wooden leg and ’is war medals as ’e bought in Lambeth Cut! Bastard!”
Deafie (singing): “With my willy willy, with my willy willy——”
Mrs. Bendigo: “Well, I told the bastard what I thought of ’im, anyway. ‘Call yourself a man?’ I says. ‘I’ve seen things like you kep’ in a bottle at the ’orspital,’ I says. . . .”
Mr. Tallboys (to himself): “Happy days, happy days! Roast beef and bobbing villagers, and the peace of God that passeth all understanding! Sunday mornings in my oaken stall, cool flower scent and frou-frou of surplices mingling in the sweet corpse-laden air! Summer evenings when the late sun slanted through my study window—I pensive, boozed with tea, in fragrant wreaths of Cavendish, thumbing drowsily some half-calf volume—Poetical Works of William Shenstone, Esq., Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, J. Lempriere, D.D., professor of immoral theology . . .”
Ginger: “Come on, ’oo’s for that drum of riddleme-ree? We got the milk and we got the tea. Question is, ’oo’s got any bleeding sugar?”
Dorothy: “This cold, this cold! It seems to go right through you! Surely it won’t be like this all night?”
Mrs. Bendigo: “Oh, cheese it! I ’ate these snivelling tarts.”
Charlie: “Ain’t it going to be a proper perisher, too? Look at the perishing river mist creeping up that there column. Freeze the fish-hooks off of ole Nelson before morning.”
Mrs. Wayne: “Of course, at the time that I’m speaking of we still had our little tobacco and sweetstuff business on the corner, you’ll understand. . . .”
The Kike: “Oh Je-e-e-eeze! Lend’s that overcoat of yours, Ginger. I’m bloody freezing!”
Snouter: “—— double-crossing bastard! P’raps I won’t bash ’is navel in when I get a ’old of ’im!”
Charlie: “Fortunes o’ war, boy, fortunes o’ war. Perishing Square to-night—rumpsteak and kip on feathers to-morrow. What else d’you expect on perishing Thursday?”
Mrs. Bendigo: “Shove up, Daddy, shove up! Think I want your lousy old ’ed on my shoulder—me a married woman?”
Mr. Tallboys (to himself): “For preaching, chanting and intoning I was unrivalled. My ‘Lift up your Hearts’ was renowned throughout the diocese. All styles I could do you, High Church, Low Church Broad Church and No Church. Throaty Anglo-Cat Warblings, straight from the shoulder muscular Anglican, or the adenoidal Low Church whine in which still lurk the Houyhnhnm-notes of neighing chapel elders. . . .”
Deafie (singing): “With my willy willy——”
Ginger: “Take your ’ands off that bleeding overcoat, Kikie. You don’t get no clo’es of mine while you got the chats on you.”
Charlie (singing):
“As pants the ’art for cooling streams,
When ’eated in the chase——”
Mrs. McElligot (in her sleep): “Was ’at you, Michael dear?”
Mrs. Bendigo: “It’s my belief as the sneaking bastard ’ad another wife living when ’e married me.”
Mr. Tallboys (from the roof of his mouth, stage curate-wise, reminiscently): “If any of you know cause or just impediment why these two persons should not be joined together in holy matrimony . . .”
The Kike: “A pal! A bloody pal! And won’t lend his bloody overcoat!”
Mrs. Wayne: “Well, now as you’ve mentioned it, I must admit as I never was one to refuse a nice cup of tea. I know that when our poor dear mother was alive, pot after pot we used to . . .”
Nosy Watson (to himself, angrily): “Sod! . . . Gee’d into it and then a stretch all round. . . . Never even done the bloody job. . . . Sod!”
Deafie