h
in it for you, my friend, in his back pocket. Just you try it on.

_The Mabbot street entrance of nighttown, before which stretches
an uncobbled tramsiding set with skeleton tracks, red and green
will-o'-the-wisps and danger signals. Rows of grimy houses with gaping
doors. Rare lamps with faint rainbow fins. Round Rabaiotti's halted ice
gondola stunted men and women squabble. They grab wafers between which
are wedged lumps of coral and copper snow. Sucking, they scatter slowly.
Children. The swancomb of the gondola, highreared, forges on through the
murk, white and blue under a lighthouse. Whistles call and answer._

THE CALLS: Wait, my love, and I'll be with you.

THE ANSWERS: Round behind the stable.

_(A deafmute idiot with goggle eyes, his shapeless mouth dribbling,
jerks past, shaken in Saint Vitus' dance. A chain of children 's hands
imprisons him.)_

THE CHILDREN: Kithogue! Salute!

THE IDIOT: _(Lifts a palsied left arm and gurgles)_ Grhahute!

THE CHILDREN: Where's the great light?

THE IDIOT: _(Gobbing)_ Ghaghahest.

_(They release him. He jerks on. A pigmy woman swings on a rope slung
between two railings, counting. A form sprawled against a dustbin and
muffled by its arm and hat snores, groans, grinding growling teeth, and
snores again. On a step a gnome totting among a rubbishtip crouches
to shoulder a sack of rags and bones. A crone standing by with a smoky
oillamp rams her last bottle in the maw of his sack. He heaves his
booty, tugs askew his peaked cap and hobbles off mutely. The crone
makes back for her lair, swaying her lamp. A bandy child, asquat on the
doorstep with a paper shuttlecock, crawls sidling after her in spurts,
clutches her skirt, scrambles up. A drunken navvy grips with both hands
the railings of an area, lurching heavily. At a comer two night watch in
shouldercapes, their hands upon their staffholsters, loom tall. A plate
crashes: a woman screams: a child wails. Oaths of a man roar, mutter,
cease. Figures wander, lurk, peer from warrens. In a room lit by a
candle stuck in a bottleneck a slut combs out the tatts from the hair
of a scrofulous child. Cissy Caffrey's voice, still young, sings shrill
from a lane.)_

CISSY CAFFREY:

_I gave it to Molly
Because she was jolly,
The leg of the duck,
The leg of the duck._

_(Private Carr and Private Compton, swaggersticks tight in their oxters,
as they march unsteadily rightaboutface and burst together fro