Rogues and Vagabonds. George R. Sims

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СКАЧАТЬ I can’t,’ answered Marston; ‘I’m a stranger myself.’

      ‘Well, Would you mind looking for me? My coachman can’t see the names written up at the corners from the road, and I can’t tramp up and down the neighbourhood in the rain—I should get wet.’

      ‘What about me?’ asked Marston, with an offended tone in his voice.

      The occupant of the carriage gave a short little laugh.

      ‘My good friend, I don’t think a little more rain will do you much harm; you don’t appear to have been under an umbrella lately.’

      Marston remembered that he was a penniless outcast, soaked to the skin; for the moment he had forgotten it, and fancied he was a gentleman walking home.

      ‘What do you want me to look for?’ he said, altering his tone.

      ‘Little Queer Street, No. 15; and if you find it I’ll give you a shilling.’

      Marston walked up one side street and down another, peering through the fog towards those wonderful arrangements in white and black with which the Board of Works are good enough to label the street corners, and which are so high up and so small that an ordinary-sighted person requires a ladder and a magnifying glass before he can tell what they are, and at night even this would be insufficient unless accompanied by an electric light.

      After much wandering up and down, and straining of the eyeballs and cross-examination of a solitary policeman, who was standing up out of the wet, and enjoying a quiet pipe down a particularly deserted side street, Marston discovered where Little Queer Street was, and ascertained which side of the way and which end was honoured by the presence of that No. 15, which was evidently about to be visited by a gentleman who kept his carriage.

      He came back with the intelligence, and communicated it to the coachman.

      ‘Wait a minute, Cook, I haven’t rewarded this poor fellow for his trouble,’ said the doctor, for the coachman was whipping up the horses, without waiting for such a trifle.

      The doctor fumbled first in his trousers pockets, then in his waistcoat, and then in his overcoat.

      ‘Cook,’ he exclaimed, presently, ‘have you got a shilling?’

      ‘No, sir.’

      ‘Dear me, how very peculiar! no more have I. My good man I’m very sorry—most extraordinary thing—but I’ve come out without any money. Here, however, is my card. Call to-morrow and I will leave a shilling with the servant for you. Drive on, Cook.’

      Cook, the coachman, whipped up his horses and shot off, splashing Marston with mud, and leaving him crestfallen and disappointed in the middle of the road, with a card in his hand.

      ‘My luck!’ he said, as the light of the carriage vanished in the mist; ‘my infernal luck! That shilling would have been a bed and breakfast. I earned that shilling, and I never wanted it more in my life. What the dickens does a two-horse doctor do here, I wonder! I thought he was sent by Providence to give me a shilling, at first. Bah! Providence turned me up long ago. Let’s look at the card.’

      He came out of the roadway, and stood under a lamp-post to read the name of his debtor.

      The light flickered and blew to and fro in the night air, and the rain, driven against the glass, made a mist through which the rays fell feebly. But feebly as they fell on the small piece of pasteboard and the face of the man who read it, they showed the sudden gleam of joy that flashed into his white damp face.

      For a moment he stood speechless as one dazed; then he read the card aloud, to make sure that he was not dreaming:

      ‘Dr. Oliver Birnie,

      ‘The Lodge,

      ‘Lilac Tree Road,

      ‘St. John’s Wood.’

      ‘Oliver Birnie!’ he exclaimed, triumphantly. ‘And keeps a carriage and pair! By Jove! Providence has not deserted me. I’m glad I didn’t recognise him in the dim light of carriage lamps, or I should have cried out and betrayed myself. I can do better by waiting, perhaps. Ah, Mr. Oliver Birnie! it isn’t a shilling I’ve earned to-night—it’s many and many a golden pound. I’ve one bird safe, at any rate. Now I’ve only Gurth Egerton to find. If he’s gone up in the world too, you are all right for a little while, Ned Marston.’

CHAPTER IV. NO. FIFTEEN, LITTLE QUEER STREET.

       Table of Contents

      Little Queer Street, Seven Dials, is not a particularly nice street to live in, but as every house in it is inhabited to the utmost extent of its inhabitable capacity, it is evidently a street in which a great many people are very glad to live.

      Squalor and vice and misery, and everything that can make life horrible, find their way into Little Queer Street, but fail to frighten the inhabitants. Dirt they like—it suits them; most of them have been brought up from infancy in close contact with it, and would feel uncomfortable without it. As to vice and misery, they have seen so much of them that any terror such things might once have possessed has long since worn off. They may be real spectres to some people, but to them they are only clumsy turnip-headed bogies, and he must be a very young native of the locality indeed who would betray the suspicion of a shudder at the sight of either.

      All day long the muddy roadway is blocked with costers’ barrows, who drive a roaring trade in cheap crockery, stale vegetables, doubtful meat, and still more doubtful fish, which one class looks upon as abominations, and another holds in high esteem as luxuries.

      There are shops, too, in Little Queer Street. Such shops! Dusty, dirty, barn-looking rooms, where sallow-faced women sit, dishevelled and ragged, amid old boots and shoes, tumbled and dirty dresses, old coats, and promiscuous heaps of cast-off wearing apparel.

      Sometimes the shop is not large enough to contain the varied assortment of ‘goods’ in which the proprietor deals, and a portion of the narrow pavement is taken into the service.

      Rows of boots—very much worn at the heels, and very shabby about the uppers, but thickly coated with a blacking which is rather sticky than shiny—stand in military array to tempt the shoeless.

      But though the habits and customs and source of income of the inhabitants of the lower portion of the houses in Little Queer Street are thus openly demonstrated, the rest is all mystery. How the second, third, and fourth floors get their living, what they are, and what they do, it would be a difficult matter to explain. Most of them evidently have very small incomes and very large families. There are more children of all sizes and conditions in Little Queer Street than in any other street in the United Kingdom.

      Almost every female carries a baby, and some females carry two. There are children in heaps at the corner of the street, children on the doorsteps, children in the gutter, children under the wheels of hansom cabs, up the lamp-posts, hanging over the window-sills, crowding the staircases, lying in the areas, rolling with the cabbage-stalks under the stalls, swarming and crawling all day long among the crowd, laughing, crying, screaming, and playing, unheeded, uncared for, unowned.

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