“Where does it come from?”
“O! India and the Malay Archipelago and thereabouts.”
“Could I, do you think, procure a specimen of it—unstuffed; its skin, I mean?”
“Dozens, I have no doubt. Any taxidermist could do your business.”
“Thanks immensely, Dereham; I’m sorry to have bothered you.”
“Don’t mention it. What’s in the wind now?”
Gilead laughed, shook hands, and bolted.
A couple of days later he walked into Lower Marsh Street, with a brown-paper parcel under his arm.
It was a dreary depressing morning, brown grease under foot and brown fog in the air. The street from its appearance might have been sinking into the ooze and slime of the old Lambeth marshes from which it took its name. The basement windows of its houses were blinded with mud; a steady precipitate of soot descended upon it from impenetrable glooms. The moist squalor of the scene, the low unclassified shops, the shambling traffic and half stealthy half sinister aspect of a majority of the populace, wrought sombrely upon the young man’s spirits. It was in such places, he reflected, that the breed of human carrion-flies was hatched, swarming, to poison civilization, out of these bodies contaminate and decomposing carcases of houses. A sense of foreboding was already on him as he paused in front of a seemingly unoccupied shop and read, written on the head-board over its closed door and empty window: 14a J. Jenniver Clear-starcher 14a.
Of all trades the least appropriate, one might have thought, to the district. Gilead, hesitating a moment, looked about him. It came to him suddenly how empty the street was of policemen. He had not remembered, to be sure, its contiguity to the New Cut. He was standing in the close vicinity of penny gaffs and penny dreadfuls, of the indigenous coster and the cosmopolitan flat-catcher, of brokers’ shops, Sunday trading, chronic drunkenness, buffetted faces and vice in its most sodden aspect. But, if the realization gave him a thrill, it left his nerves unshocked. He was always imperturbable in his unselfconscious sanctity of motive. He felt his strength to be “as the strength of ten” because his heart was pure—though he did not, like Sir Galahad, applaud the fact in the first person.