Mood

The fish shop was crowded at five o’clock. I would have to wait, I knew. But it didn’t really matter. I wasn’t in a hurry.

I never was nowadays. I was quite content to stand calmly in the queue listening to the wireless which was playing loudly, so loudly that it could even drown the babble of voices and the shrill laugh of two girls joking with the chinaman behind the counter. He was a funny little man with a face round and flat like the moon, and he kept time with the music. He seemed unreal somehow with his flat moonlike face. Then the music, the voices, the smell of the fish and chips, all lost their reality. It was very odd. And when I went out into the street again it, too, had become unreal. It hadn’t been like that before. But it was now. It was as if I was in a dream. It was cold, too, and the air was very still. The long lines of the street lights seemed to stretch for miles and miles in a glittering fantastic chain. Nearly all the people had gone. How strangely my footsteps echoed in the stillness. Then a tram clanged past and the noise of it lingered behind, poised in the silence that there had been. The shops were empty now; empty and dark. It was like a dream walking along under their verandahs in the dark and I walked on and on and on. All I could hear were my own footsteps. All I could see was myself reflected dimly in the darkened shop windows. And the silence and the darkness increased and clung closer round me. It was all me, and yet it wasn’t me. I didn’t understand it, butpage 8 I felt it and accepted it. I no longer existed, nothing existed, nothing was real, nothing at all, save the footsteps and the shadow, the darkness and the sound- imprisoning silence. The net of unreality had caught me and held me.

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