278
PARTISAN REVIEW
posse of Royal Canadian Mounted Policemen mounted royally upon
the cushions of an American Chevrolet.
Nearer the forest were gardens with sheltered beds of snowdrops
and here and there a few crocuses lifting their sweet chalices. The
man and his girl now seemed lost in thought, breasting the buffeting
wind that blew the girl's scarf out behind her like a pennant and
blew the man's thick fair hair about his head.
A loudspeaker, enthroned on a wagon, barked from the city
of Enochvilleport composed of dilapidated half-skyscrapers, at differ–
ent levels, some with all kinds of scrap-iron, even broken aeroplanes,
on their roofs, others being moldy stock exchange buildings, new
beer parlors crawling with verminous light even in mid-afternoon
and resembling gigantic emerald-lit public lavatories for both sexes,
masonries containing English tea-shoppes where your fortune could
be told by a female relative of Maximilian of Mexico, totem pole fac–
tories, drapers' shops with the best Scotch tweed and opium dens in
the basement (though no bars, as if, like some hideous old roue
shuddering with every unmentionable secret vice this city without
gaiety had cackled "No, I draw the line at that.-What would our
wee laddies come to then?"), cerise conflagrations of cinemas, mod–
ern apartment buildings, and other soulless Behemoths, housing, it
might be, noble invisible struggles, of literature, the drama, art or
music, the student's lamp and the rejected manuscript; or indescrib–
able poverty and degradation, between which civic attractions were
squeezed occasional lovely dark ivy-clad old houses that seemed
weeping, cut off from all light, on their knees, and elsewhere bank–
rupt hospitals, and one or two solid-stoned old banks, held up that
afternoon; and among which appeared too, at infrequent intervals,
beyond a melancholy never-striking black and white clock that said
three, dwarfed spires belonging to frame
fa~ades
with blackened
rose windows, queer grimed onion-shaped domes, and even Chinese
pagodas, so that first you thought you were in the Orient, then
Turkey or Russia, though finally, but for the fact that some of these
were churches, you would be sure you were in hell: despite that
anyone who had ever really been in hell must have given Enoch–
villeport a nod of recognition, further affirmed by the spectacle, at
first not unpicturesque, of the numerous sawmills relentlessly smok–
ing and champing away like demons, Molochs fed by whole moun-
