'I thought I should not sleep,' he writes--the
words he omitted are supplied in brackets--(on account of) 'pain in
(the) hand and chest and (the) wonder of what I had done.... Slept like
a child.'
He felt strange and disconcerted the next morning; he had nothing to do,
he was living alone in apartments in Bloomsbury, and he decided to go
up to Hampstead Heath, which he had known when he was a little boy as a
breezy playground. He went up by the underground tube that was then
the recognised means of travel from one part of London to another, and
walked up Heath Street from the tube station to the open heath. He
found it a gully of planks and scaffoldings between the hoardings of
house-wreckers. The spirit of the times had seized upon that narrow,
steep, and winding thoroughfare, and was in the act of making it
commodious and interesting, according to the remarkable ideals of
Neo-Georgian aestheticism. Such is the illogical quality of humanity
that Holsten, fresh from work that was like a petard under the seat
of current civilisation, saw these changes with regret. He had come up
Heath Street perhaps a thousand times, had known the windows of all the
little shops, spent hours in the vanished cinematograph theatre, and
marvelled at the high-flung early Georgian houses upon the westward
bank of that old gully of a thoroughfare; he felt strange with all these
familiar things gone.
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