Walkin’ with his eyes shut, said the driver. And soused, into the bargain.

His hands shook.

Walking with his eyes shut. This has some connexion, Elyot felt vaguely, I am responsible for this. His feet were still lead, fixed to the same spot. He must drag himself into the circle of faces, associate with just such another face, flat on the pavement, that circumstance had lifted up and given a temporary distinction. He must advance and say – what?

Would you ever! said the woman with the newspaper twist. It was three months, come Easter, she had seen the milkman killed in Pimlico Road.

But ’e ain’t dead. Or is ’e? she wondered.

Her head twitched in an ague of excited surmise.

They began to babble. A mingling of sympathy and pity, of ashamed exaltation, of practical advice. Elyot, advancing to the fence, saw, between craning necks, the thin trickle of blood from the corner of a mouth. It trickled out thin and private. No one had any business looking at this stream of blood. But there it was. And the man moaned in a disjointed way, as he had in drink, it might have been this still, the same obliviousness, detachment.

Out of the commanding of official voices, the blue police, rang an ambulance bell. The lips of the man blew in and out. On the blood a glitter of whitish froth. And I am standing here for what, you asked, for the buried moment, for that second of connexion on the kerb that broke too easily. You stood there, half attentive to the far-off voices, hushed now that the man was tucked on the stretcher, about to be carried away. It would soon be over. A keen spasm to be added to the sum total of everybody’s individual sensation.

It was truly over, in the clanging of a bell.

Elyot Standish continued homeward, through the landscape of his own mind, through the remoter geography of Ebury Street. He had failed, in one of those moments of arrested initiative, to step off the pavement and rescue a drunk from a bus. He felt exhausted, sick. Intermittently he tried to seize on the significance of this incident, while coming to the conclusion, in defeat, that it was unimportant. The whole business was unimportant. It would join the regiment of unimportant events, the anonymous face fading on the wet pavement, Eden closing the compartment door, Elyot walking homeward up Ebury Street. Try as his conscience might to raise the dead, the dead continued to lie with folded hands. It was quite remote. But he continued to feel sick. Something had lodged itself in his stomach, forced downwards by the mind. And it was a struggle to keep it there.

Coming to the house he let himself in. There was no change in the ritual of this, the glance at the doorpost to see what damage dogs had done, as he skirted the milk-bottles left by Julia for the morning. This was going home. The drunk putting his hand in his pocket, searching under a handkerchief for his fare, was also going home. But your mind rejected this. The man perhaps was already dead. On the first floor Elyot turned on the light. It helped him retrieve himself from an avenue of too obtrusive images. But there still remained the house, in a white and honest light, in the corrosive silence of deserted houses.