Marius and I were on the edge of the crowd, in the wrong street perhaps, but to have approached the noise any closer would have been like walking into a cave where the waves break over the opening. So we stood still, resisting it, while the crowd wandered past us blankly, edging nearer and nearer to the center of the noise. Like stirred-up mud sinking back to the bottom of a pool they drifted; and we were like stones becoming visible out of the murk.
I stayed by Marius because even from that first sight of him I wanted to know him. In the sepulchral dirtiness of the streets he became defined as something living; in the graveyard of East London he was an intruder, like a tree. He seemed to spread his roots around him like an aura upon which the weeds of the graveyard would not grow. The crowd, as they went past him, circled him deferentially and left a space between their bodies and his. He had a power either of the plague or the angels. I wanted to know which. Or if it were both.
The crowd were scurrying now. They were all small beside him. Tiny, wiry men like bantams; men in caps, men with their trousers hitched so far up that they had to step jerkily, like ducks, walking from the waist. Then fatter, smoother men hustling along busily like balloons when the air is expelled from them; rotund dominant men blowing along by the pressure of their own innate distention; with prominent hips, tight hips, their legs working from their knees and no waist at all. And then the youths, all oily, hair like seaweed, all hair, nothing but dangling greasy heads on matchstick bodies and heads nodding, clamorous, their mouths blindly and ferociously demanding attention like wounds. And then Marius.
Marius was like a monster in the land of the damned. But there did not seem to be life except with him.
The crowd took us at last. There was a rush from behind, and we were carried, unresisting, up a side street. There we could see the loudspeaker. Six great trumpets stood on top of a van like some immemorial gramophone; cones which might at any moment, surely, be turned into blunderbusses to scatter us with grapeshot. And the sound bellowing out of them in waves; more steady than a gramophone, more persistent; a giant’s loudspeaker and a giant’s voice and a man in a grey suit on top of the van, his hands on his hips, speaking quietly.
At first that was all I could see. The light was failing; in half an hour it would be dark. I was jostled into the front garden of a house; and then, by raising myself on the railings, I could see further. I saw the small circle of men placed round the van; hard, serious men, standing at ease, in raincoats. Marius had been wearing a raincoat. I wondered if he might be one of them. But Marius had disappeared. And outside the small circle of henchmen were the police, scores and scores of them, just standing motionless between the guardians and the crowd.
I looked for Marius. He must have pushed past me when I had stepped into the garden. The crowd was beginning to surge. Some women complained.
I liked the women better than the men. They were more individual; the older ones solid, controlled, exercising judgment. They were on their own mostly, despising the herd-nervous flotsam of the men. The tide rolled about them and left them calm. Short women, rather square, with handkerchiefs round their heads and carrying shopping-bags although it was a Sunday. And every here and there was a young girl, on tip-toe, with the savagely pretty face of a fox or squirrel — one of those childishly confident East End girls whom one expects to be a gangster’s moll or a rich man’s mistress but who never are because they are so respectable. Girls with wide cheek-bones and slanting eyes and reddish hair piled up on their heads in tiers, brown coated and skirted (long coats, short skirts, so that only a small and surprising band of skirt was visible), and stockinged in the best, the very best, silk. From a distance they were beautiful.
And then someone began to sing. At first it was only a group of youths opening and shutting their mouths, silently, because nothing could be heard above the unending boom of the loudspeaker. But gradually, as the group solidified itself around a suddenly upraised banner like one of those legendary squares amid the chaos of Waterloo — the banner bounding slightly above their grease-plumed heads to give assurance to their movements and indeed some conformity to the otherwise haphazard opening and shutting of their mouths — the singing became audible; tentative at first, like the preliminary murmurs of chickens in a thunderstorm; then taking strength; and during a momentary pause of the loudspeaker it suddenly rang out clear and strong, shockingly almost, a solemn tuneless song grated out with the unholy desperation of hymns that are sung in lifeboats or in earthquakes, a frail yet determined demonstration of will that threatened to defy even the eternity of the loudspeaker. And then there was the clatter of horses, and a line of mounted police came trotting into the crowd.
Until that moment the scene had presented at least the semblance of order, even if it did not possess the purpose I had been looking for. But with the arrival of the mounted police all action and order failed. At Waterloo the squares were supposed to have held, I believe, against even the most extravagant charges; but these did not, and this was hardly a charge — more like a jogging up the Mall to an opening of Parliament or some equally redundant traditional procedure. But in the Mall the crowds were guarded by two lines of soldiers; they were safe from the lovely, the terrifying horses; and here, where the horses were on top of them, they were not.
And they were lovely horses. Big bays and chestnuts; big snorting geldings edging into the crowd sideways, stamping, crouching rather; beautiful horses beautifully kept with fine, shiny coats and the skin jerking up and down around their withers; big mares clattering, slipping slightly, their eyes wide, haunches trembling, prancing in tiny controlled steps into the crowd who wobbled and fell back as if elephants were upon them. It was not a panic, not a rush — just a queer boiling hubbub of wrestling compliant; a nervous instinctive fear such as people have for mice or toads, not the fear of tigers, of the jungle. But the horses went on edging in, remorseless, beautiful; and then a child went down, and a woman after it, and then the quick balloon-blown hustling of the men went over them, and the shouting rose, crescendoing. Then a whole row of women seemed to trip over at once, like ninepins; and the men backed eddying round them, pausing, bending to help them up. But the horses came on, shuddering, insistent, and knocked the bending men on top of the women, and then it was near to panic, suddenly there was fear. From under the delicate bone-brittle hocks of the horses people picked themselves up, picked the children up, turning kneeling with their hands up in front of their faces and then hurrying, feverishly, out of the way of the monsters. And it was then that I saw Marius again — he was standing as if wedged between the tail of one horse and the head of another, standing quite unmoved and serious and staring into the horse’s eye as if he had already appraised its physical points and was now more concerned with its character, its temperament; staring at the horse and then looking down to see a fat demented child on the ground at his feet and picking it up and with one swift and exaggerated movement lifting it clean over the horse’s head into the arms of a pedestrian and bewildered policeman; then turning to find the mother screaming for it from behind the barrier of flashing hooves and bridles and going over to her to offer her his hand, politely, to lead her through the burning ring of flesh and leather, Brunnhilde-like, and introducing her to the policeman who was indeed showing signs of impatience with the howling child who had bitten him on the finger. The mother seized the child and ran; and then the horses were past us. In a few moments the street was almost deserted.