So I began to walk. With no clear idea of where I was within London, still less of where I might be going, I let my feet carry me away from the docks, along one narrow, deserted way after another, keeping always to the shadows. Somewhere, I knew, there existed a place, a condition, wherein I could rest... some haven must exist for me, else I never could have lived at all. But still my battered memory would not produce the vital information.
Meanwhile I had a secondary need, and toward its satisfaction I could try to make a conscious plan. I looked for a chance to obtain clothing as I prowled on, my money still clutched in my hand.
Although the time was now past midnight—about the time I left the docks, I heard church clocks tolling twelve—not all the streets of the East End were yet asleep. Throngs of the poor working folk, the unemployed, the beggars, thieves, and prostitutes still walked the pavements of these lighted thoroughfares, and many of their shop doors were still open. Laughter drifted to my ears, and music, ground out on a hand-organ by a street entertainer.
I paused, in a gloomy vantage point, to watch. Past the mouth of my dark mews there rumbled wagons, whose horses pricked their ears in my direction but then turned away their heads in silence, keeping a secret from their masters. The smells of gin and beer, tobacco and cheap perfume came mingling softly with the night’s new fog. I was standing, although I did not know it at the time, in Shadwell, not far from the noisome slums of Whitechapel. It was not a part of London that would have been familiar to me even had I been in full possession of my faculties.
Farther toward the gaslit regions I could not venture naked, and so turned back to midnight territory. Here the night was not entirely silent either. And the way was far from uninhabited, though it looked empty at first glance. When I focused my keen senses and my keener purpose, I could detect in almost every quarter wheezy breathing and the movement, in uneasy sleep, of ragged limbs. These came from almost any spot that offered some concealment and the promise of a little shelter against rain and wind—a doorway here, a row of dustbins there, a hedge across the way.
Although in December the situation might have been quite different, on such a balmy night in early June there were great throngs of London vagabonds, of both sexes and all ages, who preferred the risks of freedom to the gray walls of workhouse or charitable shelter. With an effortless stealth that kept my own presence unseen and unheard, I slid from one secreted sleeper to the next, inspecting them and passing on. Only a cat upon a windowsill reacted to my soft passage, with a faint snarl of vague concern. She quieted when I had looked into her yellow eyes.
So many derelicts were abroad hereabouts that it took me only a few minutes to locate a sleeping man whose physical measurements quite closely approximated my own. He was a-shudder already with some nightmare, his long limbs trembling, as I reached inside the angle of the disused doorway where he slept, and hauled him to his feet, with such a good grip on his collar that the seams of the ragged coat I coveted at once began to yield.
“Softly!” The word hissed from my lips in low but fierce command. I had seen that my client’s mouth was opening, even before his eyelids began to flutter, and his larynx was in a preparatory state of vibration, tuning up for a mad scream of terror.
“Softly!” I urged him. “And those dreams of wealth that you must sometimes nurse shall find at least modest fulfillment. But the first loud sound you utter must be drowned out at once by the sharp crackling of your own bones-and that is such a revolting noise that I grow angry if I am forced to listen to it. Surely you will not choose to anger me?”
Whilst I was reasoning with him thus, his eyes opened in the worn leather of his face—they seemed to go on opening forever—and fixed on me. The few bad teeth remaining in his mouth were like to break themselves with chattering. And his trembling legs, their joints at every moment seeking a new angle, seemed utterly unable to support his meager weight. But fortunately—for both of us, perhaps—the scream still hung unvoiced within his throat.
Having made sure of this, I eased my grip a trifle, to let his own feet assume most of their rightful load. “I mean you no harm, my man,” I went on. “I simply require your rags, or those of someone of your shape, and I see no reason why you should not be the one to benefit from my generosity. In payment for the abominable clothing you are wearing, I offer this.” And between thumb and forefinger, I held up a gold sovereign. “A fair price, is it not?”
It was of course a princely overpayment. Yet I was forced to repeat my offer several times before the oaf could master his terrors sufficiently to stammer out a crude agreement. So protracted was this delay, and the fumble-fingered unbuttoning which followed, that I came near letting him fall back to the pavement, and going on my way in search of someone brighter with whom to trade.
In glancing back over the account of this event I have just written, I am convinced that some of my
