With a ceremonious gesture signifying that he assumed the young sir's
consent, Big James turned away. He had displayed to Edwin the poverty
and the futility of the Blood Tub. Edwin would perhaps have liked to
stay. The scenes enacted on the outer platform were certainly tinged
with the ridiculous, but they were the first histrionics that he had
ever witnessed; and he could not help thinking, hoping, in spite of his
common sense, that within the booth all was different, miraculously
transformed into the grand and the impressive. Left to himself, he
would surely have preferred an evening at the Blood Tub to a business
interview with Mr Enoch Peake at the Dragon. But naturally he had to
scorn the Blood Tub with a scorn equal to the massive and silent scorn
of Big James. And on the whole he considered that he was behaving as a
man with another man rather well. He sought by depreciatory remarks to
keep the conversation at its proper adult level.
Big James led him through the market-place, where a few vegetable,
tripe, and gingerbread stalls--relics of the day's market--were still
attracting customers in the twilight. These slatternly and picturesque
groups, beneath their flickering yellow flares, were encamped at the
gigantic foot of the Town Hall porch as at the foot of a precipice. The
monstrous black walls of the Town Hall rose and were merged in gloom;
and the spire of the Town Hall, on whose summit stood a gold angel
holding a gold crown, rose right into the heavens and was there lost.
It was marvellous that this town, by adding stone to stone, had upreared
this monument which, in expressing the secret nobility of its ideals,
dwarfed the town. On every side of it the beer-houses, full of a
dulled, savage ecstasy of life, gleamed brighter than the shops. Big
James led Edwin down through the mysteries of the Cock Yard and up along
Bugg's Gutter, and so back to the Dragon.