Page:The Heart of England.djvu/28

 perhaps his first. Here was a policeman stern and expectant in a dark entry, or smoking a pipe; there stood or sat or leaned or lay men and women who no more give up their secrets than the blinded windows and the doors that will not be knocked at for hours yet. How noble the long, well-lighted streets at this hour, fit with their smooth paved ways for some roaring game, and melancholy because there is no one playing. The rise and fall of the land is only now apparent. In the day we learn of hills in London only by their fatigue; in the night we can see them as if the streets did not exist, as they must have appeared to men who climbed them with a hope of seeing their homes from the summits or of surprising a stag beneath. The river ran by, grim, dark and vast, and having been untouched by history, old as hills and stars, it seemed from a bridge, not like a wild beast in a pit, but like a strange, reminiscential amulet, worn by the city to remind her that she shall pass. How tameless and cold the water, alien, careless, monstrous, capable of drowning in a little while the uttermost agony or joy and making them as if they had never been. I passed by doors where lived people whom I knew, but it was two o'clock in the morning; they could not know me. I wondered which of them I could safely disturb. With what expression would they come down from their warm beds and oblivion, with dull, puzzled eyes, and slowly recall those things which—even the pleasant ones—our lonely lives so often reduce to mere entries in a tedious chronicle. I left the question unanswered.

Now I saw a tall, stiff crane surmounting the houses and nodding in the sky, itself simple, strong, direct,