There are many dreamers like Cuckoo
on the thin riband of that pavement, moving in a maze created by
everlasting custom, beneath their flowers, half senseless to life, and
yet alive to the least human notice, behind the stretched barriers of
their veils. She walked from the Circus to Hyde Park corner and back
again; then turned, with an ever-growing lassitude, to repeat the
desolate experience. By this time the playhouses had vomited their
patrons into the night, and locomotion was becoming more difficult.
Sometimes there was a block, and Cuckoo found herself "hung up," as she
called it, squashed in a mass of people, all intent on some scheme of
their own, and resentful of the enforced interruption to their movement.
Then, by some unknown and mysterious means, the human knot was untied,
and all the atoms murmured on again through the ocean of the town. And
still Cuckoo was alone, and still the mechanical smile came and went upon
her lips, and her feet seemed to grow heavier and heavier, till they were
as cannon-balls to be lifted and dragged by her protesting muscles. And
still her senses seem to become more and more drugged by the familiarity
of it all, the familiarity of smile, of tired limbs, of incessant slow
motion, of staring faces and watchful eyes; the familiarity of the cabs
rolling home towards Knightsbridge and farther Kensington, with a dull,
harsh noise; the familiarity of personal, intense loneliness and longing
for quiet; the familiarity of the knowledge that quiet could only be
earned by failure, and that failure meant lack of food, debt, and deeper
degradation.
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