Page:The Anarchists - A Picture of Civilization at the Close of the Nineteenth Century.djvu/19

 not tear himself away. For a moment he watched the incessant play of the signals at the entrance of the station; then, across the tracks and through the confusion of iron posts and cars, he tried to reach Westminster Abbey with his eye; but he could not recognize anything except the shimmering dial on the steeple of Parliament House and the dark outlines of gigantic masses of stone that arose beyond. And scattered in every direction the thousands and thousands of lights.

Again he turned to the open place where he had before been standing. Beneath his feet the trains of the Metropolitan Railway were rolling along with a dull rumbling noise; the entire expanse of the Victoria Embankment lay beneath him, half illumined as far as Waterloo Bridge. Stiff and severe, Cleopatra's Needle rose in the air.

From below came to the man's ears the laughing and singing of the young fellows and the girls who nightly monopolize the benches of the Embankments. "Do not forget me—do not forget me," was the refrain. Their voices sounded hard and shrill. "Do not forget me"—one could hear it everywhere in London during the Jubilee Year. It was the song of the day.

If anybody had observed the features of the man who was just now bending over the edge of the bridge, he would not have failed to catch a strange expression of severity that suddenly possessed them. The pedestrian no longer heard anything of the now suppressed, now subdued noise and the trivial song. Again a thought had seized him at the sight of the mighty quays at his feet; how many human lives might Jie crushed beneath these white granite quarries, piled one upon the other so solid and unconquerable? And he thought again of that silent, unrewarded, forgotten toil that had created all the magnificence round about him.

Sweat and blood are washed away, and the indi-