Brockett dressed as a ballet dancer, of Mr.
Zanti digging for treasure beneath the grey flags of Bennett Square, of
Clare Elizabeth Rossiter riding down Oxford Street amidst the shouts of the
populace, of the world as a coloured globe on which he, Peter Westcott,
the author of that masterpiece, "Reuben Hallard," had set his foot ... so,
triumphant, he slept.
II
On the next morning the Attack on London began. The house in Bucket Lane
was dark and grim when he left it--the street was hidden from the light
and hung like a strip of black ribbon between the sunshine of the broader
highways that lay at each end of it. It was a Jewish quarter-notices in
Yiddish were in all the little grimy shop windows, in the bakers and the
sweetshops and the laundries. But it was not, this Bucket Lane, a street
without its dignity and its own personal little cleanliness. It had its
attempts at such things. His own room and Mrs. Williams' tea and bread and
butter had been clean.
But as he came down out of these strange murmuring places with their sense
of hiding from the world at large the things that they were occupied in
doing, Bucket Lane stuck in his head as a dark little quarry into which
he must at the day's end, whatever gorgeous places he had meanwhile
encountered, creep. "Creeping" was the only way to get into such a place.
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