The Shop Of Ghosts

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