The increasing crowd stares with beatific placidity.  People emerge impatiently from the bowels of the throbbing motor-bus and slip down from its back, and either join the crowd or vanish.  The two policemen and the crew of the motor-bus have now met in parley.  The conductor and the driver have an air at once nervous and resigned; their gestures are quick and vivacious.  The policemen, on the other hand, indicate by their slow and huge movements that eternity is theirs.  And they could not be more sure of the conductor and the driver if they had them manacled and leashed.  The conductor and the driver admit the absolute dominion of the elephantine policemen; they admit that before the simple will of the policemen inconvenience, lost minutes, shortened leisure, docked wages, count as less than naught.  And the policemen are carelessly sublime, well knowing that magistrates, jails, and the very Home Secretary on his throne—­yes, and a whole system of conspiracy and perjury and brutality—­are at their beck in case of need.  And yet occasionally in the demeanour of the policemen towards the conductor and the driver there is a silent message that says:  “After all, we, too, are working men like you, over-worked and under-paid and bursting with grievances in the service of the pitiless and dishonest public.  We, too, have wives and children and privations and frightful apprehensions.  We, too, have to struggle desperately.  Only the awful magic of these garments and of the garter which we wear on our wrists sets an abyss between us and you.”  And the conductor writes and one of the policemen writes, and they keep on writing, while the traffic makes beautiful curves to avoid them.

The still increasing crowd continues to stare in the pure blankness of pleasure.  A close-shaved, well-dressed, middle-aged man, with a copy of The Sportsman in his podgy hand, who has descended from the motor-bus, starts stamping his feet.  “I was knocked down by a taxi last year,” he says fiercely.  “But nobody took no notice of that!  Are they going to stop here all the blank morning for a blank tyke?” And for all his respectable appearance, his features become debased, and he emits a jet of disgusting profanity and brings most of the Trinity into the thunderous assertion that he has paid his fare.  Then a man passes wheeling a muck-cart.  And he stops and talks a long time with the other uniforms, because he, too, wears vestiges of a uniform.  And the crowd never moves nor ceases to stare.  Then the new arrival stoops and picks up the unclaimed, masterless puppy, and flings it, all soft and yielding, into the horrid mess of the cart, and passes on.  And only that which is immortal and divine of the puppy remains behind, floating perhaps like an invisible vapour over the scene of the tragedy.