elves very badly, but they do not know how to do it. They
know that enjoyment only means eating the same dinner at a different
restaurant, and afterwards meeting the same tired people, or seeing the
same show, the same songs, jests, dances at different houses. But
Eastward ... there, large and full, blossoms Life--a rather repellent
Life, perhaps, for Life is always that. Hatred, filth, love, battle, and
death--all elemental things are here, undisguised; and if elemental
things repel you, my lamb, then you have no business to be on this
planet. Night, in the particular spots of the East to which these pages
take you, shows you Life in the raw, stripped of its silken wrappings;
and it is of passionate interest to those for whom humanity is the only
Book. In the West pleasure is a business; in the East it is recreation.
In the East it may be a thinner, poorer body, but it is alive. The
people are sick, perhaps, with toil; but below that sickness there is a
lust for enjoyment that lights up every little moment of their evening,
as I shall show you later, when we come to Bethnal Green, Hoxton, and
the athletic saloons. You may listen to Glazounoff's "L'Automne
Bacchanale" at the Palace Theatre, danced by Pavlova, but I should not
look in Shaftesbury Avenue or Piccadilly for its true spirit. Rather, I
should go to Kingsland Road, Tunnel Gardens, Jamaica Road; to the
trafficked highways, rent with naphthas, that rush about East India
Dock. There, when the lamps are lighted, and bead the night with tears,
and the sweet girls go by, and throw their little laughter to the
boys--there you have your true Bacchanales.

So, leaving the fixed grin of decay in Coventry Street, we mounted a
motor-'bus, and dashed gaily through streets of rose and silver--it was
October--and dropped off by the Poplar Hippodrome, whose harsh signs lit
the night to sudden beauty.

To turn from East India Dock Road to West India Dock Road is to turn,
contradictorily, from West to East, from a fury of lights and noise and
faces into a stillness almost chaste. At least, chaste is the first word
you think of. In a few seconds you feel that it is the wrong epithet.
Something ... something there is in this dusky, throttled byway that
seems to be crawling into your blood. The road seems to slink before
you; and you know that, once in, you can only get out by retracing your
steps or crossing into the lost Isle of Dogs. Against the wrath of
October cloud, little