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London Sights
The New Statesman and Nation (incorporating The Athenaeum) vol. II, no. 20, New Series (July 11, 1931) : 46-47
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Rush Hour in the Underground.
      Eeryone was packed close together in the train. Short people stood with their faces up. Women held pinioned between strangers looked patient and unimplicated. The men who had room held swaying newspapers. Everybody lurched together, compact and tired.
      The train rushed into Oxford Circus, and everybody turned towards the door shuffling forward an inch at a time. Once on the platform everybody hurried. Young men buttoned the lower buttons of their jackets, gripped despatch cases and ran, winding like grape vines. As they went their trousers blew back, and showed legs inside their suits.
      Everybody wound through the tube, not looking at posters, pushing against the rush of air. Everybody’s eyes gazed blindly at the backs that rose and fell, and the legs that scissored desperately.
      A short, compact woman hurried with the rest. Her coat [47] was brought to keep her warm, and her country cheeks were framed by a hat put on without aid of mirror. She stared straight ahead and other people pushed past her. Suddenly she cried out sharply, “God, God, I wish I was going to a home, and not to a room!”
      Everybody hurried, no one heard.
      Her steps flagged, people bumped into her. She faltered and then paused in an archway with the insanity of loneliness growing in her eyes.

Court Ladies.
      They simpered in the sun and the crowd stared at them. They knew they were being looked at and felt foolish but pleased. Their eyes were vapid and round. They had been arranged and were still under the spell of being perfectly put, but it made them very placid as they turned their small heads from side to side.
      The crowd pressed close and the eyes of the Court ladies grew more primly vacant. They were unaware that their white garb was a dingy grey, but perhaps this was unavoidable as they had been waiting so long. The crowd liked the white wigs that the Court ladies wore and they certainly fitted very neatly; tight, sleek, elegant, small, pulling their yellow eyes open in a perfect circle and showing there was no guile within.
      All at once one of the Court ladies opened her mouth, wide, completely, altogether. The crowd shivered with indescribably intimate feelings and gazed with awful fascination. She held it open and turned to right and left so that everyone might see how she was doing it. Her mouth was transparent. It was like a long, yellow, hungry flower; still undecided as to what shape it intended to be. It trembled, and distended, and was more than one could stand. Then, indifferent to the crowd, or perhaps because of it, and just to show she did not mind going one step further for the poor, common creatures, she opened something more, and there in her throat was a trap door. A wonderful red-purple trap door that presumably had ideas of its own about what it would put out or take in.
      The crowd was almost fainting, but rapidly came to feel that they liked the lady’s insides almost better than her out. Then she closed her mouth, and the crowd was not sure that it had not been swallowed, but delicately, discreetly, with a more than débutante nicety, the pelican in st. James’ Park resumed her basking in polite prominenee.

Our Girls.
      She stood high in the lingerie department, and naturally, for it was clear that she had an affinity with crépe de Chine. She was slender and soft, more a fold than a contour, and her finish was the latest product of refined industry. Perhaps born in a hairdresser’s window, out of Wax Model by Marcel, her speech was like cold cream pressed out of a tube, and her nails were so pink they made you blink.
      She was serving nightdresses. As a matter of fact, she was serving them to a customer, but being perfect and complete in herself she was only faintly aware of the customer, and felt more interest in a conversation she was having with a fellow immortal who was standing sublimely idle.
      “Well I said to him, I said, ‘You know yourself I’m a hiker,’ but — Four guineas, modom, but I’ve something better if you prefer it. This is a sweet thing, and only five pounds ten. Of course, the lace is not real at that price, you couldn’t expect it.”
      Then that deeper note of human feeling that at times betrays the strongest, came into her voice, and turning in distaste from the customer, she said, “I did twenty-seven miles, though I wish you could have seen my feet!” Again she was interrupted and she had to drop from mellifluous heights, ‘“Oh, nothing cheaper, modom. Well, naturally, one wouldn’t think of washing them, but if the first impression is good I don’t think that matters, do you?”
      While the customer was dealing with that she said to her friend, “I liked it! I told him I did, but I would not camp. I said to him, ‘No, I don’t think camping is nice, and besides, I cannot stand worms in my food.’”
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