Page:The Heart of England.djvu/27

 Did they ever sit up thinking and thinking, trying to explain to themselves why they were there, and then fall asleep in their chairs and awake still with the same goalless thought and so go shivering to bed? The window lights were now as strange to me and as fascinating as, to a salmon swaying by a bridge, the lights and faces of the poachers on the bank. As if it were new came back to me the truism that most men are prisons to themselves. Here was a city imprisoned deep, and I as deep, in the rain. Was there, perhaps, joy somewhere on account of those thousands of prisoners and lighted windows?

I left London that night on foot. By way of preparation, I stayed until after midnight to listen to a sweet voice that drew upon all the gloom and jangle of London the sweet patterns of some old country melodies. Strange and pleasant it was to look out upon the London night of angry-ridged, tumultuous roofs, and then, sharply drawing a curtain, to live upon a cadence, a melody—

A pure rose upon a battlefield, a bright vermeil shell upon a slatternly sea-shore after storm, would not be of a more piercing beauty than those songs just there.

Then I set out and began to stain the immense silence of the city with the noise of my heels and stick. A journalist or two went by; a fat man and his fat dog straying from the neat bar of a Conservative Club homewards without precipitancy; a few pleasure-seekers with bleared or meditative eye; a youth with music in his steps, fresh from some long evening of talk and song,