The hansom turned to the left up Clapperton Street, a very wide thoroughfare of houses with heavy porticoes, a very wide and very gray street, of a gray that almost achieved the effect of positive color, so insistent was it. Michael remembered that there had been a Clapperton Street murder, and he wondered behind which of those muslin curtains the poison had been mixed. It was a street of quite extraordinarily sinister respectableness. It brooded with a mediocre prosperity, very wide and very gray and very silent. The columns of the porticoes were checked off by the window of the cab with dull regularity, and the noise of the horse’s hoofs echoed hollowly down the empty street, to which every evening men with black shiny bags would come hurrying home. It was impossible to imagine a nursemaid lolling over a perambulator in Clapperton Street. It was impossible to imagine that anyone lived here but dried-up little men with greenish-white complexions and hatchet-shaped whiskers and gnawed mustaches, dried-up little men whose wives kept arsenic in small triangular cupboards by the bed.
“I wouldn’t mind having lodgings here,” said Barnes. He had caught sight of a square of cardboard at the farther end of the street. This was the outpost of an array of apartment cards, for the next street was full of them. The next street was evidently a little nearer to the period of final dilapidation; but Michael fancied that, in comparison with the middle-aged respectableness of Clapperton Street, this older and now very swiftly decaying warren of second-rate apartments was almost attractive. Street followed street, each one, as they drew nearer to Victoria Station, being a little more raffish than its predecessor, each one being a little less able to resist the corrosion of a persistently inquinating migration. Sometimes, and with a sharp effect of contrast, occurred prosperous squares; but even these, with their houses so uniformly tall and ocherous, delivered a presage of irremediable decadency.
Suddenly the long ranks of houses, which were beginning to seem endless, vanished upon the margin of a lake of railway lines. Just before the hansom would have mounted the slope of an arcuated bridge, it swung to the right into Leppard Street, S.W. The beginning of the street ran between two high brown walls crowned with a ruching of broken glass: these guarded on one side the escarp of the railway, on the other a coal yard. At the farther end the street swept round to an exit between two rows of squalid dwellings called Greenarbor Court, an exit, however, that was barred to vehicles by a row of blistered posts. Some fifty yards before this the wall deviated to form a recess in which five very tall houses rose gauntly against the sky from the very edge of the embankment. Standing as they did upon a sort of bluff and flanked on either side by blind walls, these habitations gave an impression of quite exceptional height. This was emphasized by the narrow oblong windows of which there may have been nearly fifty. The houses were built of the same brick as the walls, and they had deepened from yellow to the same fuscous hue. This promontory seemed to serve as an appendix for the draff of the neighborhood’s rubbish. The ribs of an umbrella; a child’s boot; a broken sieve; rags of faded color, lay here in the gutter undisturbed, the jetsam of a deserted beach.
“Here we are,” said Barnes. “Here’s Leppard Street that you’ve been so anxious to see.”
“It looks rather exciting,” Michael commented.
“Oh, it’s the last act of a Drury Lane melodrama I don’t think. Exciting?” Barnes repeated. “You know, Fane, there’s something wrong with you. If you think this is exciting, you’d go raving mad when I showed you some of the places where I’ve lived. Well, here we are, anyhow. Number One—the corner house.”
They walked up the steps which were gradually scaling in widening ulcers of decay: the handle of the bell-pull hung limply forward like a parched tongue: and the iron railings of a basement strewn with potato parings were flaked with rust, and here and there decapitated.
Barnes opened the door.
“We’ll take your bag up to my room first, and then we’ll go downstairs and talk to Ma Cleghorne about your room, that is if you don’t change your mind when you’ve seen the inside.”
Michael had no time to notice Barnes’ room very much. But vaguely he saw a rickety bed with a patchwork counterpane and frowzy recesses masked by cheap cretonnes in a pattern of disemboweled black and crimson fruits. After that glimpse they went down again over the grayish staircarpet that was worn to the very filaments. Barnes shouted to the landlady in the basement.