“Oh, I’m in your hands entirely,” replies Claude. His companion smiles grimly,—turning his head away, for they are passing under a lamp. “It’s only too good of you to take the trouble of entertaining a dull country-fellow like myself. Where do you propose taking me to next?”
“Oh, it isn’t far, and I’ll take you a short cut. I want you to see a skating-rink. You’ll see lots of human moths there, and very pretty specimens of lepidoptera some of them are, fluttering, or rather rolling, round the lamp of sin. These rinks are little more or less than places of assignation.”
The young men have left the whirring, noisy, lamplit crowds of Paddy’s Market during this conversation, and are making their way westward to George Street. The air is hot, and steamy with the butyric odours of a Saturday-night crowd. Crossing the wide rattling thoroughfare just mentioned, with its thousands of lights, and busy streams of thundering omnibuses and cabs, Claude and his companion push their way across the pavement,—crowded with purchasing humanity,—and find themselves suddenly in a new world. It is in this locality that one of the few nests of ancient rookeries that still remain in Sydney exists,—a menace breathing the foul odours of vice and sickness upon the rest of the city. Stately warehouses are, bit by bit, pushing these plague spots out of existence, and in a few more years they will happily be swept away. Here is before us an example of Dr. Johnson’s saying “that men are seldom better employed than when making money,”—commerce successfully waging a war of extermination against those fortresses of the city’s criminal population. A few gas lamps here and there, at long intervals, make the dark dreariness of the blank wall, and lightless broken windows of the tumble-down houses, more complete. Black, suspicious-looking alleys and lanes slink off to nowhere in particular from unexpected corners to right and left of the midnight passer-by, as if fearful of being noticed.
At the end of the dark silent street, by the flickering light of a solitary broken lamp, Claude reads, upon the dirty wall of a house, a notice to the effect that a collar-maker had once lived there. That he or any one else existed there now, and was within call, was hardly to be imagined, so lonely did the spot appear to be,—no lights at the windows, no sign of life, and no sound save the lessening roar of the great, hot, artery of traffic fast being left behind.
The two men walked quickly on, their hollow footsteps echoing over the broken pavements, and then another and still darker lane is crossed, surrounded by still more tumble-down wooden tenements. The place is a wilderness, long deserted, surely, by mankind; only peopled by ghostly cats, and half-starved supernatural dogs, that, at the sound of footsteps, slink off like shadows into fetid drains, or through broken doors and fences, under cover of the blackness beyond.
“Where the dickens are you taking me to?” presently asked Claude,—the sound of his voice making quite a pleasant relief to the dead silence around.
“Oh! we’re quite near to Liverpool Street now,” replies his companion. “It’s a dreary neighbourhood, this; is not it? By Jupiter, it’s warm walking too! I’ll take my coat off.” The speaker stops for a moment, and, divesting himself of his dust-coat, hangs it doubled over his left arm.
“There,” he cries, a few steps further on, pointing with his cane, “there are the lights of the rink.” At this moment the two men left the shadowy lane, and felt under their feet the surface of a well-kept street, a pleasant change after the broken ways they had just traversed. Above where they stand, and about a quarter of a mile off, the blue-white radiance of several electric lights show the location of the famous cosmopolitan rink.
The street they are in terminates as such some twenty feet from where they stand, and, changing to a well-paved road, rises upwards, on a wide, serpentine viaduct built upon arches, to the dim building-clad hill before them. A low wall has been built on either side to prevent passengers from falling off upon the pavement below. On the right hand side of the viaduct is a large cobble-stoned yard, covered with hundreds of boxes, crates, and empty barrels of all kinds. It is part of the railway goods station, and is at one point some twenty-five or thirty feet below the road upon the arches.
The faint earth-tremors of moving trucks and carriages, and the distant whirr of machinery, announces that there are persons not very far-off. But, save for a hansom cab that dashes by the spot, it is almost as lonely as the slums just left.