and some journalism, but in a little while he found himself on
the underside of a world in which he had always reckoned to live
in the sunshine. For innumerable men such an experience has
meant mental and spiritual destruction, but Barnet, in spite of
his bodily gravitation towards comfort, showed himself when put
to the test, of the more valiant modern quality. He was saturated
with the creative stoicism of the heroic times that were already
dawning, and he took his difficulties and discomforts stoutly as
his appointed material, and turned them to expression.
Indeed, in his book, he thanks fortune for them. 'I might have
lived and died,' he says, 'in that neat fool's paradise of secure
lavishness above there. I might never have realised the
gathering wrath and sorrow of the ousted and exasperated masses.
In the days of my own prosperity things had seemed to me to be
very well arranged.' Now from his new point of view he was to
find they were not arranged at all; that government was a
compromise of aggressions and powers and lassitudes, and law a
convention between interests, and that the poor and the weak,
though they had many negligent masters, had few friends.
'I had thought things were looked after,' he wrote. 'It was with
a kind of amazement that I tramped the roads and starved-and
found that no one in particular cared.'
He was turned out of his lodging in a backward part of London.
'It was with difficulty I persuaded my landlady-she was a needy
widow, poor soul, and I was already in her debt-to keep an old
box for me in which I had locked a few letters, keepsakes, and
the like. She lived in great fear of the Public Health and
Morality Inspectors, because she was sometimes too poor to pay
the customary tip to them, but at last she consented to put it in
a dark tiled place under the stairs, and then I went forth into
the world-to seek first the luck of a meal and then shelter.'
He wandered down into the thronging gayer parts of London, in
which a year or so ago he had been numbered among the spenders.
London, under the Visible Smoke Law, by which any production of
visible smoke with or without excuse was punishable by a fine,
had already ceased to be the sombre smoke-darkened city of the
Victorian time; it had been, and indeed was, constantly being
rebuilt, and its main streets were already beginning to take on
those characteristics that distinguished them throughout the
latter half of the twentieth century. The insanitary horse and
the plebeian bicycle had been banished from the roadway, which
was now of a resilient, glass-like surface, spotlessly clean; and
the foot passenger was restricted to a narrow vestige of the
ancient footpath on either side of the track and forbidden at the
risk of a fine, if he survived, to cross the roadway. People
descended from their automobiles upon this pavement and went
through the lower shops to the lifts and stairs to the new ways
for pedestrians, the Rows, that ran along the front of the houses
at the level of the first story, and, being joined by frequent
bridges, gave the newer parts of London a curiously Venetian
appearance. In some streets there were upper and even third-story
Rows. For most of the day and all night the shop windows were
lit by electric light, and many establishments had made, as it
were, canals of public footpaths through their premises in order
to increase their window space.
Barnet made his way along this night-scene rather apprehensively
since the police had power to challenge and demand the Labour
Card of any indigent-looking person, and if the record failed to
show he was in employment, dismiss him to the traffic pavement
below.
But there was still enough of his former gentility about Barnet's
appearance and bearing to protect him from this; the police, too,
had other things to think of that night, and he was permitted to
reach the galleries about Leicester Square-that great focus of
London life and pleasure.
He gives a vivid description of the scene that evening. In the
centre was a garden raised on arches lit by festoons of lights
and connected with the Rows by eight graceful bridges, beneath
which hummed the interlacing streams of motor traffic, pulsating
as the current alternated between east and west and north and
south. Above rose great frontages of intricate rather than
beautiful reinforced porcelain, studded with lights, barred by
bold illuminated advertisements, and glowing with reflections.
There were the two historical music halls of this place, the
Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, in which the municipal players
revolved perpetually through the cycle of Shakespeare's plays,
and four other great houses of refreshment and entertainment
whose pinnacles streamed up into the blue obscurity of the night.
The south side of the square was in dark contrast to the others;
it was still being rebuilt, and a lattice of steel bars
surmounted by the frozen gestures of monstrous cranes rose over
the excavated sites of vanished Victorian buildings.
This framework attracted Barnet's attention for a time to the
exclusion of other interests. It was absolutely still, it had a
dead rigidity, a stricken inaction, no one was at work upon it
and all its machinery was quiet; but the constructor's globes of
vacuum light filled its every interstice with a quivering green
moonshine and showed alert but motionless-soldier sentinels!
He asked a passing stroller, and was told that the men had struck
that day against the use of an atomic riveter that would have
doubled the individual efficiency and halved the number of steel
workers.
'Shouldn't wonder if they didn't get chucking bombs,' said
Barnet's informant, hovered for a moment, and then went on his
way to the Alhambra music hall.
Barnet became aware of an excitement in the newspaper kiosks at