Nearly all the best and most precious things in the universe you can get
for a halfpenny. I make an exception, of course, of the sun, the moon,
the earth, people, stars, thunderstorms, and such trifles. You can get
them for nothing. Also I make an exception of another thing, which I am
not allowed to mention in this paper, and of which the lowest price is a
penny halfpenny. But the general principle will be at once apparent.
In the street behind me, for instance, you can now get a ride on an
electric tram for a halfpenny. To be on an electric tram is to be on
a flying castle in a fairy tale. You can get quite a large number of
brightly coloured sweets for a halfpenny. Also you can get the chance of
reading this article for a halfpenny; along, of course, with other and
irrelevant matter.
But if you want to see what a vast and bewildering array of valuable
things you can get at a halfpenny each you should do as I was doing last
night. I was gluing my nose against the glass of a very small and
dimly lit toy shop in one of the greyest and leanest of the streets
of Battersea. But dim as was that square of light, it was filled (as a
child once said to me) with all the colours God ever made. Those toys of
the poor were like the children who buy them; they were all dirty; but
they were all bright. For my part, I think brightness more important
than cleanliness; since the first is of the soul, and the second of the
body. You must excuse me; I am a democrat; I know I am out of fashion in
the modern world.
.....
As I looked at that palace of pigmy wonders, at small green omnibuses,
at small blue elephants, at small black dolls, and small red Noah’s
arks, I must have fallen into some sort of unnatural trance. That lit
shop-window became like the brilliantly lit stage when one is watching
some highly coloured comedy. I forgot the grey houses and the grimy
people behind me as one forgets the dark galleries and the dim crowds
at a theatre. It seemed as if the little objects behind the glass were
small, not because they were toys, but because they were objects far
away. The green omnibus was really a green omnibus, a green Bayswater
omnibus, passing across some huge desert on its ordinary way to
Bayswater. The blue elephant was no longer blue with paint; he was
blue with distance. The black doll was really a negro relieved against
passionate tropic foliage in the land where every weed is flaming and
only man is black. The red Noah’s ark was really the enormous ship
of earthly salvation riding on the rain-swollen sea, red in the first
morning of hope.
Every one, I suppose, knows such stunning instants of abstraction, such
brilliant blanks in the mind. In such moments one can see the face
of one’s own best friend as an unmeaning pattern of spectacles or
moustaches. They are commonly marked by the two signs of the slowness of
their growth and the suddenness of their termination. The return to real
thinking is often as abrupt as bumping into a man. Very often indeed
(in my case) it is bumping into a man. But in any case the awakening is
always emphatic and, generally speaking, it is always complete. Now, in
this case, I did come back with a shock of sanity to the consciousness
that I was, after all, only staring into a dingy little toy-shop; but
in some strange way the mental cure did not seem to be final. There
was still in my mind an unmanageable something that told me that I had
strayed into some odd atmosphere, or that I had already done some odd
thing. I felt as if I had worked a miracle or committed a sin. It was as
if I had at any rate, stepped across some border in the soul.
To shake off this dangerous and dreamy sense I went into the shop and
tried to buy wooden soldiers. The man in the shop was very old and
broken, with confused white hair covering his head and half his face,
hair so startlingly white that it looked almost artificial. Yet though
he was senile and even sick, there was nothing of suffering in his
eyes; he looked rather as if he were gradually falling asleep in a not
unkindly decay. He gave me the wooden soldiers, but when I put down the
money he did not at first seem to see it; then he blinked at it feebly,
and then he pushed it feebly away.
“No, no,” he said vaguely. “I never have. I never have. We are rather
old-fashioned here.”
“Not taking money,” I replied, “seems to me more like an uncommonly new
fashion than an old one.”
“I never have,” said the old man, blinking and blowing his nose; “I’ve
always given presents. I’m too old to stop.”
“Good heavens!” I said. “What can you mean? Why, you might be Father
Christmas.”
“I am Father Christmas,” he said apologetically, and blew his nose
again.
The lamps could not have been lighted yet in the street outside. At
any rate, I could see nothing against the darkness but the shining
shop-window. There were no sounds of steps or voices in the street; I
might have strayed into some new and sunless world. But something had
cut the chords of common sense, and I could not feel even surprise
except sleepily. Something made me say, “You look ill, Father
Christmas.”
“I am dying,” he said.