CHAPTER V
IN THE HIGHWAY
The Hole in the Wall being closed, its customers went their severalways; the sailors, shouting and singing, drifting off with their retinuealong Wapping Wall toward Ratcliff; Mr. Cripps, fuller than usual offree drinks--for the sailors had come a long voyage and wereproportionally liberal--scuffling off, steadily enough, on the way thatled to Limehouse; for Mr. Cripps had drunk too much and too long ever tobe noticeably drunk. And last of all, when the most undecided of thestragglers 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 ofthe noisy sailors.
The night was dark, and the streets. The lamps were few and feeble, andangles, alleys and entries were shapes of blackness that seemed moresolid than the walls about them. But instead of the silence thatconsorts with gloom, the air was racked with human sounds; sounds ofquarrels, scuffles, and brawls, far and near, breaking out fitfully amidthe general buzz and whoop of discordant singing that came from allWapping 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 byits side, spanning the channel that joined two dock-basins. The paleman, passing along in the shadow of the footpath, stopped in an angle.Three policemen were coming over the bridge in company--they went inthrees in these parts--and the pale man, who never made closeracquaintance with the police than he could help, slunk down by thebridge-foot, as though designing to make the crossing by way of thenarrow 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 withShadwell High Street, and just before him stood Paddy's Goose. The housewas known by that name far beyond the neighbourhood, among people whowere unaware that the actual painted sign was the White Swan. Paddy'sGoose was still open, for its doors never closed till one; though therewere a few houses later even than this, where, though the bars werecleared and closed at one, in accordance with Act of Parliament, thedoors swung wide again ten minutes later. There was still dancing withinat Paddy's Goose, and the squeak of fiddles and the thump of feet wereplain 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 suddenburst 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, ora 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 streetfiddlers was the greater as the early houses closed. Scarce eighty yardsfrom Blue Gate stood Blind George, fiddling his hardest for a partydancing in the roadway. Many were looking on, drunk or sober, withapproving shouts; and every face was ghastly phosphorescent in the glareof 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 tothe waist. At this the crowd turned from the dancers, and the negro ranyelping 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 draggedhim 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 hispockets. The sailor was dazed, and made no difficulty; till the thiefgot to the end of the search in a trouser pocket, and thence pulled ahandful 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 witha 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 maninstantly gathered up. He looked from the money to the man, who layinsensible, with blood about his ear; and then from the man to themoney. Then he stuffed some few of the shillings into the sailor'snearest 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 bleedingsailor, thrust the rest of the silver into the pocket, and finallyvanished into the night. For, indeed, though the pale man was poor, andthough he got a living now in a way scarce reputable: yet he had oncekept a chandler's shop. He had kept it till neither sand in the sugarnor holes under the weights would any longer induce it to keep him; andthen he had fallen wholly from respectability. But he had drawn aline--he had always drawn a line. He had never been a thief; and, with alittle struggle, he remembered it now.
Back in Blue Gate the screams had ceased. For on a black stair a largebony 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 ifshe 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 ArbourSquare!"
"O! O!" the woman gasped. "I fell on it, Dan! I fell on it! I fell on itin the dark!..."
* * * * *
There was nothing commoner in the black streets about the Highway thanthe sight of two or three men linked by the arms, staggering, singingand bawling. Many such parties went along the Highway that night, manyturned up its foul tributaries; some went toward and over the bridge bythe lock that was on the way to the Hole in the Wall. But they werebecome 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 thathad 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 songof these men--or rather of two of them, who sang the louder because ofthe silence of the man between them; and no other voices were soill-governed as theirs. The man on the right was large, bony andpowerful; he on the left was shorter and less to be noticed, except thatunder some rare and feeble lamp it might have been perceived that hisface 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 draggedbetween them? His feet trailed in the mire, and his head, hidden by aragged hat, hung forward on his chest. So they went, reeling ever wherethe shadows were thickest, toward the bridge; but in all their reelingsthere was a stealthy hasting forward, and an anxious outlook that wentill with their song. The song itself, void alike of tune and jollity,fell off altogether as they neared the bridge, and here they went thequicker. They turned down by the bridge foot, though not for the reasonthe 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 everknew; with no more than a cry here or there, a distant fiddle, and thefaint hum of the wind in the rigging of ships. Off in Blue Gate thewoman sat on the black stair, with her face in her hands, waiting forcompany before returning to the room where she had fallen over somethingin the dark.