enemy planes
flying in a beautiful formation, very leisurely as it seemed, with all
London at their mercy. Another bomb fell to the right, and presently
bits of our own shrapnel were clattering viciously around me. I thought
it about time to take cover, and ran shamelessly for the best place I
could see, which was a Tube station. Five minutes before the street had
been crowded; now I left behind me a desert dotted with one bus and
three empty taxicabs.

I found the Tube entrance filled with excited humanity. One stout lady
had fainted, and a nurse had become hysterical, but on the whole people
were behaving well. Oddly enough they did not seem inclined to go down
the stairs to the complete security of underground; but preferred
rather to collect where they could still get a glimpse of the upper
world, as if they were torn between fear of their lives and interest in
the spectacle. That crowd gave me a good deal of respect for my
countrymen. But several were badly rattled, and one man a little way
off, whose back was turned, kept twitching his shoulders as if he had
the colic.

I watched him curiously, and a movement of the crowd brought his face
into profile. Then I gasped with amazement, for I saw that it was Ivery.

And yet it was not Ivery. There were the familiar nondescript features,
the blandness, the plumpness, but all, so to speak, in ruins. The man
was in a blind funk. His features seemed to be dislimning before my
eyes. He was growing sharper, finer, in a way younger, a man without
grip on himself, a shapeless creature in process of transformation. He
was being reduced to his rudiments. Under the spell of panic he was
becoming a new man.

And the crazy thing was that I knew the new man better than the old.

My hands were jammed close to my sides by the crowd; I could scarcely
turn my head, and it was not the occasion for one's neighbours to
observe one's expression. If it had been, mine must have been a study.
My mind was far away from air raids, back in the hot summer weather of
1914. I saw a row of villas perched on a headland above the sea. In the
garden of one of them two men were playing tennis, while I was
crouching behind an adjacent bush. One of these was a plump young man
who wore a coloured scarf round his waist and babbled of golf handicaps
... I saw him again in the villa dining-room, wearing a dinner-jacket,
and lisping a little.... I sat opposite him at bridge, I beheld him
collared by two