IN THE HIGHWAY
The Hole in the Wall being closed, its customers went their several
ways; the sailors, shouting and singing, drifting off with their retinue
along Wapping Wall toward Ratcliff; Mr. Cripps, fuller than usual of
free drinks--for the sailors had come a long voyage and were
proportionally liberal--scuffling off, steadily enough, on the way that
led to Limehouse; for Mr. Cripps had drunk too much and too long ever to
be noticeably drunk. And last of all, when the most undecided of the
stragglers from Captain Nat Kemp's bar had vanished one way or another,
the pale, quiet man moved out from the shadow and went in the wake of
the noisy sailors.
The night was dark, and the streets. The lamps were few and feeble, and
angles, alleys and entries were shapes of blackness that seemed more
solid than the walls about them. But instead of the silence that
consorts with gloom, the air was racked with human sounds; sounds of
quarrels, scuffles, and brawls, far and near, breaking out fitfully amid
the general buzz and whoop of discordant singing that came from all
Wapping and Ratcliff where revellers rolled into the open.
A stone's throw on the pale man's way was a swing bridge with a lock by
its side, spanning the channel that joined two dock-basins. The pale
man, passing along in the shadow of the footpath, stopped in an angle.
Three policemen were coming over the bridge in company--they went in
threes in these parts--and the pale man, who never made closer
acquaintance with the police than he could help, slunk down by the
bridge-foot, as though designing to make the crossing by way of the
narrow lock; no safe passage in the dark. But he thought better of it,
and went by the bridge, as soon as the policemen had passed.
A little farther and he was in Ratcliff Highway, where it joined with
Shadwell High Street, and just before him stood Paddy's Goose. The house
was known by that name far beyond the neighbourhood, among people who
were unaware that the actual painted sign was the White Swan. Paddy's
Goose was still open, for its doors never closed till one; though there
were a few houses later even than this, where, though the bars were
cleared and closed at one, in accordance with Act of Parliament, the
doors swung wide again ten minutes later. There was still dancing within
at Paddy's Goose, and the squeak of fiddles and the thump of feet were
plain to hear. The pale man passed on into the dark beyond its lights,
and soon the black mouth of Blue Gate stood on his right.
Blue Gate gave its part to the night's noises, and more; for a sudden
burst of loud screams--a woman's--rent the air from its innermost deeps;
screams which affected the pale man not at all, nor any other passenger;
for it might be murder or it might be drink, or sudden rage or fear, or
a quarrel; and whatever it might be was common enough in Blue Gate.
Paddy's Goose had no monopoly of music, and the common plenty of street
fiddlers was the greater as the early houses closed. Scarce eighty yards
from Blue Gate stood Blind George, fiddling his hardest for a party
dancing in the roadway. Many were looking on, drunk or sober, with
approving shouts; and every face was ghastly phosphorescent in the glare
of a ship's blue-light that a noisy negro flourished among the dancers.
Close by, a woman and a man were quarrelling in the middle of a group;
but the matter had no attention till of a sudden it sprang into a fight,
and the man and another were punching and wrestling in a heap, bare to
the waist. At this the crowd turned from the dancers, and the negro ran
yelping to shed his deathly light on the new scene.
The crowd howled and scrambled, and a drunken sailor fell in the mud.
Quick at the chance, a ruffian took him under the armpits and dragged
him from among the trampling feet to a near entry, out of the glare.
There he propped his prey, with many friendly words, and dived among his
pockets. The sailor was dazed, and made no difficulty; till the thief
got to the end of the search in a trouser pocket, and thence pulled a
handful of silver. With that the victim awoke to some sense of affairs,
and made a move to rise; but the other sprang up and laid him over with
a kick on the head, just as the pale man came along. The thief made off,
leaving a few shillings and sixpences on the ground, which the pale man
instantly gathered up. He looked from the money to the man, who lay
insensible, with blood about his ear; and then from the man to the
money. Then he stuffed some few of the shillings into the sailor's
nearest pocket and went off with the rest.
The fight rose and fell, the crowd grew, and the blue light burned down.
In twenty seconds the pale man was back again. He bent over the bleeding
sailor, thrust the rest of the silver into the pocket, and finally
vanished into the night. For, indeed, though the pale man was poor, and
though he got a living now in a way scarce reputable: yet he had once
kept a chandler's shop. He had kept it till neither sand in the sugar
nor holes under the weights would any longer induce it to keep him; and
then he had fallen wholly from respectability. But he had drawn a
line--he had always drawn a line. He had never been a thief; and, with a
little struggle, he remembered it now.
Back in Blue Gate the screams had ceased. For on a black stair a large
bony man shook a woman by the throat, so that she could scream no more.
He cursed in whispers, and threatened her with an end of all noise if
she opened her mouth again. "Ye stop out of it all this time," he said,
"an' when ye come ye squall enough to bring the slops from Arbour
Square!"
"O! O!" the woman gasped. "I fell on it, Dan! I fell on it! I fell on it
in the dark!..."
* * * * *
There was nothing commoner in the black streets about the Highway than
the sight of two or three men linked by the arms, staggering, singing
and bawling. Many such parties went along the Highway that night, many
turned up its foul tributaries; some went toward and over the bridge by
the lock that was on the way to the Hole in the Wall. But they were
become fewer, and the night noises of the Highway were somewhat abated,
when a party of three emerged from the mouth of Blue Gate. Of them that
had gone before the songs were broken and the voices unmelodious enough;
yet no other song sung that night in the Highway was so wild as the song
of these men--or rather of two of them, who sang the louder because of
the silence of the man between them; and no other voices were so
ill-governed as theirs. The man on the right was large, bony and
powerful; he on the left was shorter and less to be noticed, except that
under some rare and feeble lamp it might have been perceived that his
face was an ugly one, with a broken nose. But what reveller so drunk,
what drunkard so insensible, what clod so silent as the man they dragged
between them? His feet trailed in the mire, and his head, hidden by a
ragged hat, hung forward on his chest. So they went, reeling ever where
the shadows were thickest, toward the bridge; but in all their reelings
there was a stealthy hasting forward, and an anxious outlook that went
ill with their song. The song itself, void alike of tune and jollity,
fell off altogether as they neared the bridge, and here they went the
quicker. They turned down by the bridge foot, though not for the reason
the pale man had, two hours before, for now no policeman was in sight;
and soon were gone into the black shadow about the lock-head....
It was the deep of the night, and as near quiet as the Highway ever
knew; with no more than a cry here or there, a distant fiddle, and the
faint hum of the wind in the rigging of ships. Off in Blue Gate the
woman sat on the black stair, with her face in her hands, waiting for
company before returning to the room where she had fallen over something
in the dark.