Whoever wanders into these streets finds their
sordid shabbiness communicating itself: he escapes, cast down, wondering
who the folk are who live in those grey, lifeless cages; what they do,
what they think; how life strikes them. Even the very sparrows which fight
in the gutters for garbage are less lively than London sparrows usually
are; as for the children who sit about the doorsteps, they look as if the
grass, the trees, the flowers, and the sunlight of the adjacent Kensington
Gardens were as far away as the Desert of Gobi. Within this slice of the
town, indeed, life is lived, as it were, in a stagnant backwash, which
nothing and nobody can stir.
In an upper room of one of the more respectable houses in one of the
somewhat superior streets of this neighbourhood, a young man stood looking
out of the window one November afternoon. It was then five o'clock, and
the darkness was coming: all day a gentle, never-ceasing rain had been
bringing the soot down from the dark skies upon the already dingy roofs.
It was a dismal and miserable prospect upon which the watcher looked out,
but not so miserable nor so dismal as the situation in which he just then
found himself.
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