To-night he went southwards down Gower Street, drawn by the never-ending fugitive perspective of the lamps.  He went westwards down Shaftesbury Avenue to Piccadilly.  The Circus was a gleaming basin filled with grey night clear as water, the floor of it alive with lights.  Lights that stood still; lights that wandered from darkness into darkness; that met and parted, darting, wheeling, and crossing in their flight.  Long avenues opened out of it, precipitous deep cuttings leading into the night.  The steep, shadowy masses of building seemed piled sky-high, like a city of the air; here the gleam of some golden white facade, there some aerial battlement crowned with stars, with clusters, and points, and rings of flame that made a lucid twilight of the dark above them.  Over all was an illusion of immensity.

Nine o’clock of an April night—­the time when a great city has most power over those that love her; the time when she lowers her voice and subdues her brilliance, intimating that she is not what she seems; when she makes herself unearthly and insubstantial, veiling her grossness in the half-transparent night.  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.  The young girl had vanished.

For a moment he stood debating whether he would go home and work out some ideas he had.  Or whether he would pursue the young Joy, the fugitive actuality, to the very threshold of the dawn.  Whether, in short, he would make a night of it.