It sticks. You will find certain English cousins of yours, as
far away from London as Hong-Kong, who are still wrapt up snugly in it.
Happy he afflicted with strabismus, for only he can see his nose before
his face. In the daytime you become a fish, to wriggle over the
ocean's floor amid strange flora and fauna, such as ash-cans and
lamp-posts and venders' carts and cab-horses and sandwich-men. But at
night you are neither fish, bird nor beast.
The night was May thirteenth; never mind the year; the date should
suffice: and a Walpurgis night, if you please, without any Mendelssohn
to interpret it.
That happy line of Milton's--"Pandemonium, the high capital of Satan
and his peers"--fell upon London like Elijah's mantle. Confusion and
his cohort of synonyms (why not?) raged up and down thoroughfare and
side-street and alley, east and west, danced before palace and tenement
alike: all to the vast amusement of the gods, to the mild annoyance of
the half-gods (in Mayfair), and to the complete rout of all mortals
a-foot or a-cab. Imagine: militant suffragettes trying to set fire to
the prime minister's mansion, _Siegfried_ being sung at the opera, and
a yellow London fog!
The press about Covent Garden was a mathematical problem over which
Euclid would have shed bitter tears and hastily retired to his arbors
and citron tables.
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