Page:The Yellow Book - 08.djvu/240

Well, it was nearing four, and if I wanted a grateful country's twelve-pound-ten, I must make haste—so presently I found myself in a great hall, of which I have no clearer impression than that there were soft little lights all about me, and a soft chime of falling gold, like the rippling of Pactolus. I have a sort of idea, too, of a great number of young men with most beautiful moustaches, playing with golden shovels—and as I thus stood among the soft lights and listened to the most beautiful sound in the world, I thought that thus must Danae have felt as she stood amid the falling shower. But I took care to see that my twelve sovereigns and a half were right number and weight for all that.

Once more in the street, I lingered awhile to take a last look at the Falls. What a masterful, alien life it all seemed to me. No single personality could hope to stand alone amid all that stress of ponderous, bullying forces. Only public companies and such great impersonalities could hope to hold their own, to swim in such a whirlpool and even they, I had heard whisper, far away in my quiet starlit garret, sometimes went down. "How," I cried, "would—

again quoting poetry. I always quote poetry in the City, as a protest—moreover, it clears the air.

The more people buffeted against me the more I felt this crushing sense of almost cosmic forces. Everybody was so plainly an atom in a public company, a drop of water in a tyrannous stream of human energy—companies that cared nothing for their individual atoms, streams that cared nothing for their component drops; such atoms and drops, for the most part to be hadfor