Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky by Patrick Hamilton Read Free Book Online Page B

waiting a bit. Well – good-bye for the present.’ He smiled and again left her.
    In the next few minutes he threw himself into his work with tremendous bounce, once or twice looking over in her direction, and catching her eye, and smiling. And then he saw her rising, with a mock-serious and self-conscious little look (which was a kind of wink to him), and passing through the bar, and going out.
    Some three or four minutes passed before he was again released. Then he went audaciously to the door, and out into the street.
    She was not just outside, as he had expected she would be, but about twenty yards away, looking into the window of a little sweet-and-newspaper shop which was closed. He went towards her and she came towards him. The night was cold and serene in the light of a clear, buoyant moon. After the fuddled thick noise of the house it was as though he stepped from orgy into spirituality. He spoke low, out of deference to the atmosphere, and so did she.
    ‘Here’s the doings,’ he said, and proffered a ten shilling note.
    ‘Oh – but I don’t want all that. It’s only eight and six.’
    ‘Oh, that don’t matter. Go on.’
    ‘All right, I will then,’ she conceded, and put it in her bag, and snapped it close, without ado. Then she looked up at him, speaking rather like one who has been punished unjustly. ‘An’ I hope you know how grateful I am – ’cos I am.’
    He held out his hand. ‘Not a bit. Only too glad to help where I can.’
    ‘An’ I’ll come in an’ pay it back to-morrow. I will, honest.’
    ‘No need for that. Just when you like.’
    Their hands were still joined. ‘And whenever you want any help, I’ll give it to you ,’ she said, in the same punished tone. ‘I will, truly.’
    ‘Let’s hope I won’t.’
    It was all rather awkward. She released her hand, smilingly bending her head sideways to make the withdrawal gracious and tender. ‘Well – good night,’ she said.
    ‘Good night. Sleep well.’
    ‘You bet. Good night.’
    ‘Good night.’
    He watched her going down the street. As she reached the corner she waved and vanished. He stood at the door of ‘The Midnight Bell’ for a few moments, with his hands on his hips, looking each way, savouring the night; then went inside.

C HAPTER VIII
    T HE CLOCK STOOD at five to ten, and he at once perceived that the climax of the evening had been reached. Apart from a few at the back of the lounge, there were now no women in the place, and it seemed as though their disappearance had relaxed the last bonds of equability and restraint.
    A horrible excitement was upon everybody and everything. Indeed, to one unacquainted with the feverish magic that alcohol can work there could have been only one way of accounting for the scene. This house must have been the theatre of some tremendous conference, in which some tremendous crisis had arisen at the moment of adjournment, and the individuals had gathered into frightened but loquacious groups to discuss the bombshell. (But some of them were in fits of laughter about it.) In such circumstances alone might the ordinary despondence and lethargy of man have been galvanized into such potency of discourse, such keenness of confidence, such an air of released honour-brightness and getting down to the essentials of life as was apparent everywhere here.
    Men! They thrust their hats back on their heads; they put their feet firmly on the rail; they looked you straight in the eye; they beat their palms with their fists, and they swilled largely and cried for more. Their arguments were top-heavy with the swagger of their altruism. They appealed passionately to the laws of logic and honesty. Life, just for to-night, was miraculously clarified into simple and dramatic issues. It was the last five minutes of the evening, and they were drunk.
    And they were in every phase of drunkenness conceivable. They were talking drunk, and confidential drunk, and laughing drunk, and beautifully drunk, and leering