Page:Walpole - Fortitude.djvu/380

 the Green Park were black and chill and in and out of the Clubs figures slipped cautiously and it seemed furtively. Just beyond the Green Park they were building a vast hotels climbing figures and twisting lines of scaffolding pierced the air, and behind the rolling and rattling of the traffic the sound of many hammers beat rhythmically, monotonously

To Peter upon his omnibus, suddenly that sound that he had heard before—that sound of London stirring—came back to him, and now more clearly than he had ever known it. Tap-tap-tap-tap Clamp-clamp-tap-tap-tap-tap—whir! whir I Clamp-clamp

It seemed to him that all the cabs and the buses and the little black figures were being hurried by some power straight, fast, along Piccadilly to be pitched, at the end of it, pell-mell, helter-skelter into some dark abysmal pit, there to perish miserably.

Yes, the beast was stirring! Ever so little the pavements, the houses were heaving. Perhaps if one could see already the soil was cracking beneath one's feet. “Look out! London will have you in a minute,” Tap-tap-tap-tap—clamp-clamp—tap-tap-tap-tap—whir-whir—clamp-clamp

Anyhow it was a heavy, clammy day. The houses were ghosts and the people were ghosts, and grey shadows, soon perhaps to be a yellow fog, floated about the windows and the doors and muffled all human sounds.

He passed the great pile of scaffolding, saw iron girders shining, saw huge cranes swinging in mid-air, saw tiny, tiny black atoms perched above the noise and swallowed by the smoke tap-tap—clamp-clamp

Yes, the beast was moving and, out and in, lost and then found again, crept that twisting chain of beggars to whose pallid army Peter himself had once so nearly belonged.

“I suppose I've got a headache after all that row with Clare,” Peter thought as he climbed off the omnibus.

He realised, as he came into the Bloomsbury square, and saw Mrs. Brockett gloomily waiting for him, that the