How beautiful a London street is then, with its islands of
light, and its long groves of darkness, and on one side of it perhaps some tree-sprinkled,
grass-grown space where night is folding herself to sleep naturally and, as one
passes the iron railing, one hears those little cracklings and stirrings of
leaf and twig which seem to suppose the silence of fields all round them, an
owl hooting, and far away the rattle of a train in the valley. But this is
London, we are reminded; high among the bare trees are hung oblong frames of
reddish yellow light--windows; there are points of brilliance burning steadily
like low stars--lamps; this empty ground, which holds the country in it and its
peace, is only a London square, set about by offices and houses where at this
hour fierce lights burn over maps, over documents, over desks where clerks sit
turning with wetted forefinger the files of endless correspondences; or more
suffusedly the firelight wavers and the lamplight falls upon the privacy of
some drawing-room, its easy chairs, its papers, its china, its inlaid table,
and the figure of a woman, accurately measuring out the precise number of
spoons of tea which----She looks at the door as if she heard a ring downstairs
and somebody asking, is she in?
“Street Haunting” (E4
482)
Published in The Yale
Review, October 1927
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