TURGIS SEES HER 179

building, perhaps to jostle him as they passed. It
would have been easier for Turgis, as he knew only too
well, if he too had had a companion, to match all these
pairs of girls, but he had only a few acquaintances, no
friends, and, in any event, he preferred to hunt in soli-
tude, to thread his way through the brilliant jungle
alone with his hunger and his dream.

A bus took him to the West End, where, among the
crazy coloured fountains of illumination, shattering the
blue dusk with green and crimson fire, he found the cafe
of his choice, a teashop that had gone mad and turned
Babylonian, a white palace with ten thousand lights.
It towered above the older buildings like a citadel,
which indeed it was, the outpost of a new age, perhaps
a new civilisation, perhaps a new barbarism; and behind
the thin marble front were concrete and steel, just as
behind the careless profusion of luxury were millions of
pence, balanced to the last halfpenny. Somewhere in
the background, hidden away, behind the ten thousand
lights and acres of white napery and bewildering glitter-
ing rows of teapots, behind the thousand waitresses and
cash-box girls and black-coated floor managers and
temperamental long-haired violinists, behind the
mounds of shimmering bonbons and multi-coloured
Viennese pastries, the cauldrons of stewed steak, the
vanloads of harlequin ices, were a few men who went to
work juggling with fractions of a farthing, who knew
how many units of electricity it took to finish a steak-
and-kidney pudding and how many minutes and
seconds a waitress (five feet four in height and in average
health) would need to carry a tray of given weight from
the kitchen lift to the table in the far corner. In short,
there was a warm, sensuous, vulgar life flowering in the