This Is the End | Page 7

Jay, was really considering the words in
front of him--To Stop O'Bus strike Bell at Rear.[Footnote: He must
have changed at the Bank into a Tilling 'bus.] He deduced from this that
it was an Irish 'bus, and supposed that this accounted for its rather
head-long behaviour. He spent some moments in imagining the
MacBus, child of a sterner race, which would run gutturally without
skids, and wear a different cut of bonnet.
He dismounted into a faint yellow fog diluted with a faint twilight, in
the Brown Borough. The air was vague, making it not so much an
impossibility to decipher the features of people approaching as a

surprise to find it possible. A few rather premature bar row-flares
adapted Scripture to modern conditions by hiding their light under tin
substitutes for bushels, in the hope of protecting such valuables as cat's
meat and bananas from aerial outrage. Kew pranced over prostrate
children, and curved about the pavement to avoid artificially vivacious
passers-by, who emerged from the public-houses.
Nana lived in a little alley which was like a fiord of peace running in
from the shrill storm of the Brown Borough. Here little cottages shrank
together, passive resisters of the twentieth century. Low crooked
windows blinked through a mask of dirty creepers. Each little front
garden contained a shrub, and was guarded by a low railing, although
there would have been no room for a trespasser in addition to the shrub.
Nana's house, at the end of the alley, looked along it to the far turmoil
of the mother-street.
Kew insulted the gate, as usual, by stepping over it, and knocked at the
door. He held his breath, so that he might more keenly hear the first
whisperings of the floor upstairs, which would show that Nana was
astir.
A gardenful of cats came and told him that his hopes were vain. Cats
only exist, I think, for the chastening of man. They never come to me
except to tell me the worst, and to crush me with quiet sarcasm should
my optimism survive their warning.
But before the cats had finished speaking, there was a most
un-Nana-like sound of bounding within, and Jay appeared. She threw
herself out of the darkness of the door on to the twilit Kew.
The cats were ashamed to be seen watching this almost canine display,
and went away.
"I didn't know you weren't in France," said Jay to Kew.
"I didn't know you weren't in Heaven," said Kew to Jay. "What's all this
about golden seas and aeroplanes snarling around?"
"Oh, snarling.... That's just what they do," said Jay. "Let's pretend I said
that."
It seemed as if childhood turned its face to them again after a thousand
years. These roaring months of War run like a sea between us and our
peaceful beginnings, so that a catchword flashed across out of our past
is as beautiful and as incredible as the light in a dream.
When they were little they used to bargain for expressive words. Their

childhood was full of such hair-splittings as: "If you tell how we said
Wank-wank to the milkman, you must let me have the old lady who
had a palpitation and puffocated running after the 'bus."
They were not spontaneous people. They were born with too great a
love of words, a passion for drama at the expense of truth, and a habit
of overweighting common life with romance. It was perhaps good for
them to have acquired such a very simple relation by marriage as
Anonyma.
"About the sea," said Jay, "I'll tell you later."
"Well, tell me first why you found home so suddenly unbearable.
You've stood it for eighteen years."
"I've been a child all through those eighteen years. And to a child just
the fact of grown-upness is so admirable. I wonder why. But under the
fierce light that beats from the eye of a woman suddenly and violently
grown old, Cousin Gustus and Anonyma don't--well, Kew, do they?"
The dusk filled the room as water fills a cup, and to look up at the light
of an outside lamp on the ceiling was like looking up through water at
the surface. Jay wore a dress of the same colour of the dusk, and her
round face, faint as a bubble, seemed to float on its background
unsupported.
"Didn't you think about adopting a baby?" suggested Kew. "That
evidently put Cousin Gustus's back up."
"I didn't put Cousin Gustus's back up so high as he put mine," answered
Jay. "Oh, Kew, what are the old that they should check us? What's the
use of this war of one generation against another? Old people and
young people reach a deadlock that's as bad as marriage without the
possibility of divorce. Isn't all forced fidelity