BACK streets, gutters of stagnating darkness where men breathe
something that is not so much air as a kind of rarefied slime. . . . I
look back down the tunnelled darkness of a drain to where, at the mouth,
a broader, windier water-way glitters with the gay speed and motion of
sunlit life. But around all is dimly rotting; and the inhabitants are
those squamous, phosphorescent creatures that darkness and decay beget.
Little men, sheathed tightly in clothes of an exaggeratedly fashionable
cheapness, hurry along the pavements, jaunty and at the same time
furtive. There is a thin layer of slime over all of them. And then there
are the eyes of the women, with their hard glitter that is only of the
surface. They see acutely, but in a glassy, superficial way, taking in
the objects round them no more than my western windows retain the
imprint of the sunset that enriches them.
Back streets, exhalations of a difficulty puberty, I once lived on the
fringes of them.