Page:Soullondonasurv00fordgoog.djvu/139

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THE SOUL OF LONDON

than a bundle of memories, your life is so much shorter, since you remember seasons, not events. It is with you: "The season when good old Hinds had his place in Cadogan Square;" or, "The year, don't you remember? when we used to drink barley water", or, "Hermit's year". But the Saturday footballer remembers so many glorious Saturdays relieved by so many blank weeks. He remembers the splendid crowded journeys back—"The time when Old Tommy sang 'Soldiers of the Queen'"—"The time when we had the cask of beer on the luggage rack coming back from playing Barnes"—"The time when Black and Moses stuck the ticket collector under the seat and kept him there till Waterloo."

So the life of seasons and years is shorter, swifter, more regretful, less filled. And, the breaks being less marked, the life itself is the more laborious and less of a life. For it is in the breaks, in the marking time, that the course of a life becomes visible and sensible. You realise it only in leisures within that laborious leisure; you realise it, in fact, best when, with your hands deep in your trousers pockets, or listless on your watch-chain, you stand, unthinking, speculating on nothing, looking down on the unceasing, hushed, and constantly changing defile of traffic below your club windows. The vaguest thoughts flit through your brain: the knot on a whip, the cockade on a coachman's hat, the sprawl of a large woman in a victoria, the windshield in front of an automobile. You live only with your eyes, and they lull you. So Time becomes mani-

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