Stories with a Vengeance — page 115: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE SPECTRE OF THE STRAND. A TALE OF THE DAY. BY J. GREVILLE BURNS. PROLOGUE. How bounteous have the heavens been this sad October day in London! Those two essentials of life—air and water—the only gifts the poor can expect m this world, have been given to them to- day ungrudgingly—literally hurled at their unprotected heads for fifteen consecutive hours; and now, when this stirring history opens—St. Paul’s has just tolled three hours before midnight—the rarest object to be met with in the streets is a beggar who isn’t shining with rain, or an umbrella that hasn’t been twice at least turned inside out. In all London, on a wet.and stormy night, there 1s probably no thoroughfare which is more depressing or uncomfortable to the destrian than the one which approaches Blackfriars Bridge on the City side; for there the wind and rain buffets and blusters with fiendish violence, as if with the inten-. tion of compelling him either to dive distractedly through the Underground Railway, and there rid the streets of his woe-begotten figure, or of forcmg him to take “ a last leap,” and bury his misery in the Thames. | How the rain pours down on this spot on this particular night! At intervals it is positively pugilistic, barring even the progress of the belated Times reporter, and compelling him every few steps to stand still and to gaze upon the strikingly grand, ' though savagely uncomfortable scene which surrounds him—the massive bridge that spans the shadowy river, the struggling gas-jets, and pale electric lights sparklin star-like along road, embankment, an street—the stone, palace-like buildings that mount heavenwards into semi-darkness— the far-off blot in the sky made by the big Google ortals of the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral—the jolting cab, whose driver seems to have gone home and left behind his shiny hat and his stiff leathern cape to look after the horse—when suddenly he receives what a votary of the “P. R.” would term “a reg’lar one in the eye ” from the rain, blurring his vision, checking the progress of his thoughts, and convincing him that life to-night is not to be enjoyed, but to be wept over and de. plored. _ The river has been three hours and a quarter on the ebb. It flows beneath the bridge and around the massive pillars lingeringly. It seems a thing of life. Serpent-like, it crawls past the granite walls, licking the sides of half-stranded barges, the stairs that lead to the City, the slimy timbers of the breakwater that stands gibbet-like out of its waters, and lurking near ugly wharves like river-pirates in search of something to seize upon. In search of corpses warm from the hands of human ghouls whose food and drink are blood and gold; in search of the bonnet, the hat, or the neckerchief of the suicide whose bones shall send earth no other megsage till they, too, are flung ashore, mute witnesses of mortality fifty years hence; in search of straws and feathers blown to-night from deserted birds’-nests in crumbling City church towers; of torn love-letters, scattered on the stream by despairing swains, who are only prevented by that hope which “ springs eternal” from leaping in and sinking with the fr. ents; of broken baskets, that in the darkness look like dead men’s heads half concealed ; in search of these and other flotsam that shall be pounced on by human vultures in the early morn, and flung into CY, JOO S CO)