or lighting a
pipe. He disposed his meals for it, altered his plans for it, lay
awake in the night and went over it again. Two or three shops were to
him an arsenal; an area was to him a moat; corners of balconies and
turns of stone steps were points for the location of a culverin or an
archer. It is almost impossible to convey to any ordinary imagination
the degree to which he had transmitted the leaden London landscape to
a romantic gold. The process began almost in babyhood, and became
habitual like a literal madness. It was felt most keenly at night,
when London is really herself, when her lights shine in the dark like
the eyes of innumerable cats, and the outline of the dark houses has
the bold simplicity of blue hills. But for him the night revealed
instead of concealing, and he read all the blank hours of morning and
afternoon, by a contradictory phrase, in the light of that darkness.
To this man, at any rate, the inconceivable had happened. The
artificial city had become to him nature, and he felt the curbstones
and gas-lamps as things as ancient as the sky.

One instance may suffice. Walking along Pump Street with a friend, he
said, as he gazed dreamily at the iron fence of a little front garden,
"How those railings stir one's blood!"

His friend, who was also a great intellectual admirer, looked at them
painfully, but without any particular emotion. He was so troubled
about it that he went back quite a large number of times on quiet
evenings and stared at the railings, waiting for something to happen
to his blood, but without success. At last he took refuge in asking
Wayne himself. He discovered that the ecstacy lay in the one point he
had never noticed about the railings even after his six visits--the
fact that they were, like the great majority of others--in London,
shaped at the top after the manner of a spear. As a child, Wayne had
half unconsciously compared them with the spears in pictures of
Lancelot and St. George, and had grown up under the shadow of the
graphic association. Now, whenever he looked at them, they were simply
the serried weapons that made a hedge of steel round the sacred homes
of Notting Hill. He could not have cleansed his mind of that meaning
even if he tried. It was not a fanciful comparison, or anything like
it. It would not have been true to say that the familiar railings
reminded him of spears; it would have been far truer to say that the
familiar spears occasionally reminded