CHAPTER XI
A MEETING OF THE ORDER
A man in a fur-lined overcoat—thin, shrunken, and worn—stood on the pavement in a little street in Camberwell, looking about him in evident disgust. Before him stretched a long row of six-roomed houses, smoke-begrimed, hideously similar, hideously commonplace. The street was empty save for the four-wheeled cab from which he had just alighted, and which was now vanishing in a slight fog, a milkman and a greengrocer's boy in amicable converse, and a few dirty children playing in the gutter. Nothing could be more depressing, or more calculated to unfavorably impress a stranger from a southern land visiting the great city for the first time. It was a picture of suburban desolation, the home of poverty-stricken philistinism, uncaring and uncared for. In Swinburne's words, though with a different meaning, one saw there, without the necessity of further travel, "a land that was lonelier than ruin."
The little old man who had alighted from the cab, stood for a moment or two looking helplessly around, half surprised at what he saw, half disgusted. Such monotonous and undeviating ugliness was a thing which he had never dreamed of—certainly he had never encountered anything like it. Was it possible that he had made a mistake in the address? He drew a scrap of paper from his pocket and consulted it again. The address was written there plainly enough—85, Eden Street, Camberwell. He was certainly in Eden Street, Camberwell, and the figures on the gate-post opposite him, worn and black with dirt, were unmistakably an eight and a five. With a little shudder he pushed open the gate, and walked through the narrow strip of untidy garden to the front door. The bell he found broken and useless, so he knocked softly at first, and then louder against the worn panels.
It was some time before an answer came. Several of the neighbors appeared upon their doorsteps, and took bold and somewhat ribald stock of the visitor. A young person of eighty-one, who was considered the wit of the neighborhood, made several very audible remarks, which produced a chorus of gigglings, on the subject of his clothes and foreign appearance. But he stood there as though he had been deaf, his hands thrust down into the loose pockets of his overcoat and his deep-sunken eyes fixed wistfully but not impatiently upon the closed door. He was a mute picture of resignation.
At last, after his third summons, the door was slowly and cautiously opened, and the astonished visitor beheld, for the first time in his life, a London maid-of-all-work. The astonishment seemed perfectly mutual. He, with his parchment dried face, white hair and eyebrows, and piercing black eyes only a little dimmed by time, muffled up to the throat in furs, and unmistakably a foreigner, was as strange to her as her appearance was to him. He looked at her black hands, her face besmeared with dirt, and with her uncombed hair hanging loose around it, at the tattered and soiled print gown looped up on one side and held together on the other by pins, and at the white-stockinged feet showing through the holes in her boots. What an object it was! It was fortunate for him that the twilight and fog concealed, partially at any rate, the disgust in his face.
"Is—Mr. Bartlezzi in?" he inquired, as soon as he could find words to speak at all.
"Lawk-a-mussy! I dunno," the girl answered in blank bewilderment. "He don't have no visitors, he don't. You ain't taxes, are you?"
"No!" he answered, somewhat at a venture, for he did not catch her meaning.