The “neighborhood” was Tedworth Square, London, “quite the other side of Mayfair,” and leading to some queer streetlets and lanes.
“London’s Fifth Avenues,” mused Mark, “remind me of a sable coat (such as Pauline Bonaparte used to wear) edged with cat-skin: There are always Hell-kitchens within hailing distance.
“Well, at that time my girls had a friend living in Clapham, and nightly she walked me ten or more blocks to her bus through one of those Hell-kitchens lined with fried-fish shops and other ill-smelling emporiums for acquisitioning lucre.”
He turned to an English friend:
“Maybe ‘lined’ isn’t correct, for the fish shops were all on one side of the lane, and naturally I ambled along the other. I thought I was safe there, but of course I wasn’t, for the smells zigzagged across the pavement and followed me like a rotten conscience. My haven of safety, or comparative safety, from the rancid oil compost was an undertaker’s shop at the lane’s extreme end. When I got there, I used to hoist up my coat-tails and skip across the street right into the Public ’Ouse opposite for a Scotch. Naturally I took more or less interest in that cemetery-correspondence school. From a notice posted, I learned that it was under ‘new management’—I call that an ingenious appeal for corpses, don’t you?
“Well, it wasn’t merely an office, the carpentry was right at the tail of the roll topper; there, night after night, an old, sad-faced man sat, looking for customers. Now, the English metropolis is reputed the healthiest city in the world, which proves that the legend about cleanliness being nearest to godliness is blooming rot, for London is ten times dirtier than Berlin, seven and a half times dirtier than New York and six times dirtier than the best parts of Paris. Anyhow, that man-hyena, hungry for worm-food, didn’t enjoy the low rate of mortality one single bit. I could see that every time I eyed him, and I lamped him regularly before I waltzed into the gin-mill to drown the fried-fish smell.”
“And did one Scotch suffice for the operation?” asked Mr. Bell.
Mark looked at Mrs. Clemens and lied brazenly: “Yes, of course.” But as she had risen to go out and was walking toward the door, he added in an undertone: “One Scotch was like taking a bottle of perfume from the ten-cent store into a glue factory to paralyze the Cologne smell of a four-acre establishment of that sort.”
“To resume,” resumed Mark, “seeing each other nightly for a week or a week and a half, that undertaker chap and this here yellow journalist of literature got on famously, and our acquaintance, though by eyesight only, gradually blossomed into real brotherhood. Whenever I clapped eyes on the poor devil, I used to think: ‘I do wish some one would have the heart to die. Why don’t the Gloomy Dean or His Grace of Canterbury oblige the poor shark?’
“And no doubt, observing my gray locks and general decrepitude, he calculated: ‘Time for him to kick the bucket—hope his wife will give me a chance to measure him for a ten-guinea wooden coat—yes, he looks good for ten guineas.’