Under striped awnings the wedding guests depart; in cars, in bars, they re-shuffle, re-sort themselves for the night. The old act is on: Boy meets Girl, at smoky parties, in public conveyances, in the best hotels, in the lowest boozers, in suburban parlours, on park benches, under viaducts. And steady trains of midgets march behind.
Off comes the paper again. And now the artist seems to be impatient. It isn’t enough just to rip off the sheet and leave it wherever it happens to fall. This time he has to tear it into very small pieces, crumple the scraps in his hand, and throw them peevishly into the grate along with the cigarette ends and the empty cigarette packets, the spent matches, the paint rags, the flattened and finished tubes. Perhaps he’s a trifle hung-over this morning. Perhaps the breakfast coffee wasn’t strong enough; perhaps he really needed a couple of doubles to start the day with; perhaps there were too many bills in the morning mail; perhaps his wife walked out on him yesterday; perhaps he’s just happened to catch the eternally calm clear eye of one of the Heaven-Born. Or perhaps it’s one of a million other possible trials which accounts for the dissatisfaction he feels with his own efforts.
After all, they do these things much better on the moving pictures. So let’s turn to the dream screen, which displays simultaneously three superimposed themes.
The most remote of these presumably should be the one used as background, very frail, very underemphasized, ranks of uniformed figures marching on a diagonal slant from upper right to lower left. These figures are exactly similar, featureless, diminutive, uncoloured, like the outline drawings used in demonstrating statistics. The ranks are evenly spaced, extending across the whole screen; they march throughout at a regular medium pace, raising their legs in a modified goose-step. The effect on the eye of this transient army is no more disturbing than a background of falling snow or continuous heavy rain. The background does not fade or solidify: it is not modified in any way by the development of the other two themes; nor is it ever extinguished by them.
Against the basic motif, moving roughly horizontally, but in a fluid, swerving, weaving band, a stream of dancers, men and women in couples, appearing small at left, gradually enlarging centre (certain couples enormously), diminishing again as they move towards right. As the dancers individualize they are seen to be of all ages, classes and nationalities, stepping their various rhythms to a jumble of distant dance tunes further confused with intermittent far-off blaring of martial music. No face remains prominent long enough for complete apperception, but continually changing details emerge. A schoolboy in Eton jacket partnering a heavy fly-blown woman of fifty with bull-neck and sparse blue marcelled hair. A hard, judge-like man of about sixty-five, personifying the more hidebound and sadistic type of disciplinarian, woodenly placing his feet in bright patent leather shoes. Simpering over his stiffly encircling arm, a horribly travestied sweet young girl of sixteen in perfectly transparent white muslin; the rouged points of her breasts stand out through the white like the red spot on a tarantula. A poet-like, precious young intellectual, spectacled, wearing a silk shirt and otherwise a baby’s napkin, is dancing with a big black negress whose far-too-tight satin dress is bursting at every seam. His twin brother, identical except that his face is redder and that he wears an eyeshade instead of glasses: in his case a striped and monogrammed blazer goes with the napkin. His partner a Peter Amo blonde with the usual trimmings. A dear old lady in white fichu and cap; her swollen ankles teeter dangerously over three-inch-pinpoint heels studded with brilliants. An overalled surgeon, sinisterly grotesque with his gauze mask and rubber gloves. A yellow gentleman flashing yellow diamonds. A bus-driver in uniform. A very dignified, polished, bearded member of the Académie Française attired in full tenue de soir with the Legion of Honour in his buttonhole. Fliers, bellboys, witch-doctors, scientists, typists, waiters, beauty queens, parsons, racing cyclists, whores, sandwichmen, cooks, schoolmasters, prize-fighters, Chinamen, kings. These people can be rearranged indefinitely to include any combination, as they waltz or shuffle or glide or rumba or tango or walk or whirl or whatever across the screen.
The third theme has as its accompaniment sentimental song-hits of the most saccharine variety, which fragmentarily make themselves heard cross-jangling the other tunes. Equating pictorially, numerous quick flashes flicking about the screen with glimpses of conventional love scenes in gardens, conservatories; a girl and boy on a staircase embracing; an enlaced couple leaning over a steamer rail and watching the moon rise (moon is searchlight); mouths searching, clinging; hands (male and female) fumbling, stroking, clutching, questing, trembling, gripping other hands, bodies, slipping straps from shoulders, unfastening buttons; shot, from above, of a man and girl in bathing-suits pressed together in a tight clinch on a beach; close-up of the girl’s upturned, imbecilic, nympholeptic face. Various erotic flashes, in boats, cars, bedrooms, parks, dance-halls, etc. None of the shots, which break out at random all over the screen, lasts for more than a second. The effect is rather that of looking at a high building in various parts of which windows are lit up one after another as lights are switched on and off in the different rooms.
Music increases to utmost confusion of dance bands, military bands, crooners, as something whitish, roundish, rises from centre base and slowly travels straight up like a balloon, like a bubble, traversing the whole height of the screen. Maybe it’s an igloo; maybe it’s an egg. Up it goes, steady and sedate, and inside it B is sitting cross-legged, reading a book. Just as the bubble, the balloon, the igloo, the egg, or whatever it may be, reaches the top of the screen it explodes quietly with a smothered genteel belch.
The bubble-plop signals disruption of the combined themes. The dancers and lovers blow madly in all directions; fly apart; disintegrate: they and the music vanish together.
The ranked figures continue their unassertive march for a few seconds, until it becomes clear that they are quite young boys in some sort of uniform, Boy Scouts perhaps, or members of some other youth organization.
The troop of about twenty boys marches along a dusty road in full summer sun. The marching is not at all smart, several boys are out of step and others have broken rank and are lagging behind. They are all hot and tired and quite considerably bored. One who has a blistered heel scuffs along barefoot with his shoes in his hand.
At right, parallel to the road, from which it is separated by a wire fence bearing No Trespassing notices, a cool, shimmering lake with flowering flags growing to the edge of the water. A freshly painted row-boat is moored to a miniature jetty. Opposite this the march falters, breaks down completely, the boys straggle up to the fence, bunch together there like young cattle, eyes focused enviously on the boat and the water. Simultaneously with the break up of the march, from behind some willows on the other side of the fence, two smiling girls (one is unmistakably B — could the other be A in her younger days? It’s impossible to tell really, they’re so much alike) appear on the sunlit slope. Smiling into one another’s faces, oblivious, selfcontained, they walk hand-in-hand to the jetty, unfasten the boat, get in and row out and away, towards the centre of the lake.
From the level of the boys’ eyes, through the thick wire mesh, as if looking into a cage, the boat shown withdrawing swiftly, with extreme effect of solitariness, inaccessibility; diminishing into a toy, a waterbird, a floating leaf in the distance; vanishing.