But if the life and the picturesqueness of the Highway in some sort disguised its squalor, they made the more hideously apparent the abomination of the by-streets: which opened, filthy and menacing, at every fifty yards as we went. The light seemed greyer, the very air thicker and fouler in these passages; though indeed they formed the residential part whereof the Highway was the market-place. The children who ran and tumbled in these places, the boy of nine equally with the infant crawling from doorstep to gutter, were half naked, shoeless, and disguised in crusted foulness; so that I remember them with a certain sickening, even in these latter days; when I see no such pitiably neglected little wretches, though I know the dark parts of London well enough.
At the mouth of one of these narrow streets, almost at the beginning of the Highway, Grandfather Nat stopped and pointed.
It was a forbidding lane, with forbidding men and women hanging about the entrance; and far up toward the end there appeared to be a crowd and a fight; in the midst whereof a half-naked man seemed to be rushing from side to side of the street.
"That's the Blue Gate," said my grandfather, and resumed his walk. "It's dangerous," he went on, "the worst place hereabout—perhaps anywhere. Wuss'n Tiger Bay, a mile. You must never go near Blue Gate. People get murdered there, Stevy—murdered—many's a man; sailor-men mostly; an' nobody never knows. Pitch them in the Dock sometimes, sometimes in the river, so's they're washed away. I've known 'em taken to Hole-in-the-Wall Stairs at night."
I gripped my grandfather's hand tighter, and asked, in all innocence, if we should see any, if we kept watch out of window that night. He laughed, thought the chance scarce worth a sleepless night, and went on to tell me of something else. But I overheard later in a bar conversation a ghastly tale of years before; of a murdered man's body that had been dragged dripping through the streets at night by two men who supported its arms, staggering and shouting and singing, as though the three were merely drunk; and how it was dropped in panic ere it was brought to the waterside, because of a collision with three live sailors who really were drunk.
One or two crimps' carts came through from the docks as we walked, drawn by sorry animals, and piled high with shouting sailors and their belongings—chief among these the giant bolster-bags. The victims went to their fate gloriously enough, hailing and chaffing the populace on the way, and singing, each man as he list. Also we saw a shop with a window full of parrots and monkeys; and a very sick kangaroo in a wooden cage being carried in from a van.
And so we came to the London Dock at last. And there, in the sugar-sheds, stood more sugar than ever I had dreamed of in my wildest visions—thousands of barrels, mountains of sacks. And so many of the bags were rat-bitten, or had got a slit by accidentally running up against a jack-knife; and so many of the barrels were defective, or had stove themselves by perverse complications with a crowbar; that the heavy, brown, moist stuff was lying in heaps and lumps everywhere; and I supposed that it must be called "foot-sugar" because you couldn't help treading on it.
It was while I was absorbed in this delectable spectacle, that I heard a strained little voice behind me, and turned to behold Mr. Cripps greeting my grandfather.
"Good mornin', Cap'en Kemp, sir," said Mr. Cripps. "I been a-lookin' at the noo Blue Crosser—the Emily Riggs. She ought to be done, ye know, an' a han'some picter she'd make; but the skipper seems busy. Why, an' there's young master Stephen, I do declare; 'ow are ye, sir?"
As he bent and the nose neared, I was seized with a horrid fear that he was going to kiss me. But he only shook hands, after all—though it was not at all a clean hand that he gave.