12 JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

one was at home on the vast expanse of deep dark
carpet, only one business man asleep with his mouth
open; at home as one would certainly not have been
if the Hollywood imagination had run riot. One was
protectively coloured, one was seedy too.

Next morning, in the public-house near the Prince's
Stage, four middle-aged women sat drinking with an
old dirty man of eighty-four. Three had the dust-
bin look; they carried about them the air of tene-
ments, of lean cats and shared wash-houses; the
fourth had risen a little way in the world, she was
the old man's daughter over from America for
Christmas. "Have another drink, Father?" He was
seeing her off. Their relationship was intimate and
merry; the whole party had an air of slightly dis-
reputable revelry. To one the party didn't really
matter; she had caught the American accent. To the
other women, who must return to the dustbin, it was
perilous, precarious, breath-taking; they were happy
and aghast when the old man drew out a pound note
and stood a round himself. "Well, why shouldn't
he?" the daughter asked them, asked Jackie boy, the
bar-tender, the beer advertisements, the smutty air,
the man who came in selling safety-razor blades, half
a dozen for threepence, "it's better than spending it
on a crowd of strange dames."

The Liverpool waterside at least had not changed
since James's day: "The black steamers knocking
about in the yellow Mersey, under a sky so low that
they seemed to touch it with their funnels, and in
the thickest, windiest light";—even the colour was
the same, "the grey mildness, shading away into black
at every pretext."