Prelude To A Certain Midnight

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Hardly any of the old crowd go to the Bar Bacchus now, yet for twenty-five years it was one of the three most popular meeting-places in London. Suddenly nobody wanted to go there any more. The old customers developed a distaste for the bar at which they had for so many years intoxicated themselves with mixtures of alcohol and intimate conversation, where they had cashed cheques, borrowed money, made eyes at one another’s husbands and wives, and uttered strong words about deep matters.

People said that the ‘atmosphere’ of the Bar Bacchus had changed. But they could never tell you how it had changed, or what had changed it. It is difficult — I believe that it is impossible — to explain a change of atmosphere. The atmosphere of a place is the soul of that place, and when it departs the place dies. One may make equations: A New Manager, plus the New Manager’s Friends, minus certain Old Familiar Faces, plus a Strange Barman, plus the Tension that goes with Unfamiliar Voices, minus Intimacy, equals a Change of Atmosphere. But this is not satisfactory. One might as well describe an oppressive quiet in terms of decibels, or explain a grief in cubic centimetres of salt tears. One might as well expect an oceanographer to draw up the loneliness and the darkness of the Mindanao Deep on a plumb-line.

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