A young girl with eyes like the fish-pools of Heshbon sits outside a butcher's shop on an upturned crate. Her fingers are covered in rings, and when she laughs she throws back her fuzzy head, exposing her plump, olive-coloured throat, as Moons of Delight have been doing throughout the history of the Orient.
She is beautiful after her kind. In five more years, however, she will look like a side-show. Her lithe grace, her round face, her firm, white neck will be submerged in regrettable tissue. The eye passing over her façade will find it impossible to excavate her recent beauty. She will be like a thin girl who somehow has been merged with a fat woman. She will be "herself with yesterday's ten thousand years,"—and yesterday winning all along the line. That is the burden of the Jewess.
However, at the moment she is ripe as a peach is ripe before it falls naturally into the hand. Were I a Sultan, swaying above the street in a litter, I would roll a lazy eye in her direction, make a minute movement of a jewelled finger, and, later at the palace, I would address her:
"Moon of Great Beauty and Considerable Possibility," I would say, "whither comest them, O Radiance, and who is thy father?"
Whereupon she would spit at me with her eyes and reply:
"Cancher see I'm respectable ... cancher? You're a nice chep, you are, sitting up there dressed like a dorg's dinner and talkin' like thet ... lemme go..."
For though her eyes are the eyes of Ruth among the alien corn, her larynx is that of Bill Sykes. The street in which she sits, shedding this varied atmosphere, is lined on either side by a row of rough booths. It is a mere track between two bright hedges of merchandise. Here the fruit-sellers expose their pyramids of red-gold oranges, their African plums, their pineapples; there the sellers of shoes wait patiently beneath their pendulous racks. The sellers of cloth walk up and down with bright, stabbing colours, daringly mixed, slung across their shoulders, and the drink merchants, with their cooling brews—never absent from an Oriental market—stand beside their ample golden globes.
Through this lane of bright colour moves the crowd—the women young, straight, and mostly beautiful in a dark, passionate way; the old women fat and round; the men sallow, bearded, and incredibly wrinkled. Among them crowd the abject creatures so well known in the East, who clutch a handful of vegetables or three inferior lemons with which they try to undersell the regular merchants.
Where is it? It might be Cairo, Bagdad, Jerusalem, Aleppo, Tunis, or Tangier, but, as a matter of fact, it is Petticoat Lane in Whitechapel—a penny ride from Ludgate Hill!
As I walked through Petticoat Lane I thought that if we had a sunny climate this part of Whitechapel would become one of the famous show-places of the world. Here you have the East without its lepers, without small-pox, without the flies, without the impertinent stinks. This is the scene of rich and amusing variety which, were it only a few thousand expensive miles from London, under a blue sky, would attract the attention of the artist and the traveller.