‘Now, gentlemen, please!’
This time the landlord put a little more determination into his warning note, and gave the sign to the potman to lower the gas and fidget with the front door.
Reluctantly the gentlemen and ladies drained their glasses, wiped their lips, and shook themselves together preparatory to turning out into the night. Coat-collars were turned up, shawls were flung over battered bonnets, hands were thrust deep into trousers pockets, there was a little laughing, more growling, and a great deal of swearing, mixed with maudlin farewells and some rough horseplay, and then the motley crowd of drinkers oozed through the swing doors, melted gradually, and vanished.
Where to?
To foul alleys and rookeries, to cellars and human kennels, to low lodging-houses and tumble-down hovels.
The lights of the Blue Pigeons go out one by one, silence steals over the street, and the great crowd of drinkers separates, and each component part of it wends his or her way to some place which is ‘home,’—some place—mean, vile, and awful though it be—which contains the scanty household gods and something near and dear.
Although the Blue Pigeons is within a stone’s throw of the Seven Dials, its immediate vicinity is wrapped in silence when the clock strikes one. As a rule the sounds of revelry and riot linger in the narrow streets long after the public has disgorged its prey, and men and women stand about at the street corners, and joke and laugh and quarrel, despite the rough injunction to move on bestowed upon them by the especial policeman told off to superintend their conduct.
To-night the rain is so pitiless and the air so keen and merciless that the lowest and meanest of the populace have hurried off to such shelter as they can find. A thick fog, too, has begun to settle down upon the scene of desolation, and it is not a time for the proverbial dog to be out of doors.
But there is one customer who still hovers about the closed doors of the “Blue Pigeons.”
He had been inside from nine until closing time, and has come out at the last moment with the rest.