Like some consummate
temptress, she plays the mystic, clothing herself with light and
darkness, skirting the intangible, hinting at the infinities, flinging
out the eternal spiritual lure, so that she may better seduce the
senses through the soul. And Rickman was too young a poet to
distinguish clearly between his senses and his imagination, or his
imagination and his soul.
He stood in Piccadilly Circus and regarded the spectacle of the night.
He watched the groups gathering at the street corners, the boys that
went laughing arm in arm, the young girls smiling into their lovers'
eyes; here and there the faces of other women, dubious divinities of
the gas-light and the pavement, passing and passing. A very ordinary
spectacle. But to Rickman it had an immense significance, a rhythmic,
processional resonance and grandeur. It was an unrhymed song out of
_Saturnalia_, it was the luminous, passionate nocturne of the streets.
Half-past nine; a young girl met him and stopped. She laughed into his
face.
"Pretty well pleased with yourself, aren't you?" said the young girl.
He laughed back again. He was pleased with the world, so of course he
was pleased with himself. They were one. The same spirit was in Mr.
Rickman that was in the young girl and in the young April night.
They walked together as far as the Strand, conversing innocently.
CHAPTER VIII
At ten o'clock he found himself in a corridor of the Jubilee Variety
Theatre.
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