A SOCIALIST.
T was a bright, perfectly clear, moonlight night, one of those nights in which there seems to be no atmosphere, in which the smallest architectural details of every building show with even a greater distinctness than in mid-sunshine. The great full moon and the vast unfathomable expanse overhead seemed to have cast a spell of their own peace over even London's unpeaceful heart. The streets were empty, for the night had worn itself away to the only hour at which they are really deserted.
The clocks had just expressed their different views on the subject of two A.M. The night was so clear that Alice Hatfield, though her eyes were smarting and aching, thought she could see the hands on the big clock of St Paul's as she came on to Blackfriars' Bridge. She walked slowly, and when she reached the second arch she stopped and leaned her elbows on the parapet. How still the night was! The tide was high, and had just started on its journey seawards; it seemed to flow in one unbroken sheet save for the stir and fret that it made round the supports of the bridge. The lights along the Embankment, with their perfect reflections, might have seemed almost Venetian to anyone inclined to take a more rose-coloured view of things than she. To her they only brought a maddening remembrance of the time when she—not alone then—had first seen them from the windows of the Arundel Hotel. The noise of the water against the bridge was very like the sound of the waters rushing round the stones in the Derbyshire streams—only those waters had always made a song that was to be enjoyed, not understood—and this dark tide, as it broke against the stone, seemed to be whispering constantly some message to her, which she as constantly, but vainly, tried to catch.
It made her shiver. She turned and leaned back against the parapet. The other side of the bridge was in the ruthless hands of the paviors, who had literally left no stone unturned in order to produce that utter chaos in which the heart of the contractor delighteth. The large slabs of paving-stones, standing and lying about in all sorts of positions, made the place look—ugh!—like a graveyard, and the displaced earth and heaps of sand looked like half-made graves, in which the spade and pick of the sexton had ceased to clink. There was a bright red spot of fire about a hundred yards from her—someone was comfortable beside it, she supposed—and somehow she hated that patch of red light more than anything else in the whole picture.
Alice had found a fresh lodging easily enough, and this time she had adopted the badge of marital servitude, and had taken another name. The new room struck her as cheerless and unwelcoming, and her poor possessions looked less friendly than they had done in the old attic at Spray's Buildings. Her bundle of work had been brought with the rest, but she seemed to have no heart to begin it, nor yet to get herself food, and she sat on there, hour after hour, till the sense of complete isolation grew too much for her. At Spray's Buildings she had had no friends, and had valued her few acquaintances but slightly, and she did not realise the amount of comfort that could be got out of a chance meeting with Miss Fludger on the stairs until such meetings were things of the past.
'I will go out,' she had said, rising at last with a feeling that even in strange and unregarding faces there would be companionship of a kind. So she had left her room and had wandered about, passing more than one spot hung thickly round with memories of her short day of sunshine. Then when night fell she felt that she could not go back to that new inhospitable room of hers.