"Now, Miss Marriott and gentlemen," said Inspector Brown, "we will turn down here, if you please. I should like to show you one or two tenements."
As he spoke he turned to the right, down a narrow alley. Tall, grimy old houses rose up on either side of them, and there was hardly room for two members of the party to walk abreast. The flags upon which they trod were soft with grease and filth. The air was fœtid and chill. It was, indeed, as though they were treading a passage-way to horror!
The whole party came out into a court, a sort of quadrangle some thirty yards by twenty. The space between the houses and the floor of the quadrangle was of beaten earth, though here and there some half-uprooted flagstone showed that it had once been paved. The whole of it was covered with garbage and refuse. Decayed cabbage leaves lay in little pools of greasy water. Old boots and indescribable rags of filthy clothes were piled on heaps of cinders.
As they came into the square Mary shrank back with a little cry; her foot had almost trodden upon a litter of one-day old kittens which had been drowned and flung there.
The houses all round this sinister spot had apparently at one time, though many years ago, been buildings of some substance and importance. Now they wore an indescribable aspect of blindness and misery. There was hardly a whole window in any of the houses. The broken panes were stopped with dirty rags or plastered with newspaper. The doors of the houses stood open, and upon the steps swarms of children—dirty, pale, pallid, and hopeless—squirmed like larvæ. A drunken old woman, her small and ape-like face caked and encrusted with dirt, was reeling from one side of the square to another, singing a hideous song in a cracked gin-ridden voice, which shivered up into the cold, dank air in a forlorn and bestial mockery of music.
"What is this?" Mary said, turning round to the police inspector by her side.
"This, miss," said the bearded man grimly, "is called Taverner's Rents. Every room in these houses is occupied by a family; some rooms are occupied by two families. The people that live here are the poorest of the poor. The boys that sell newspapers, the little shoeless boys and girls who hawk the cheaper kinds of flowers about the streets, the cab-runners, the people who come out at night and pick over the dust-bins for food, those are the people that live here, miss. And there's a fairly active criminal population as well."
Mary shuddered. The inspector noticed her involuntary shrinking.
"Miss," he said, "you have only seen a little of it yet. Wait until I take you inside some of these places, then you will see what life in London can be like."
The clergyman, Mr. Conrad, broke in.