Henry followed.
Around Wardour Street they hung all the shabby and tattered traditions of the poor degraded costume romance, but in its actual physical furniture there are not even trappings. There is nothing but Cinema offices, public houses, barber shops, clothes shops and shops with windows so dirty that you cannot tell what their trade may be. It is a romantic street in no sense of the word; it is not a kindly street nor a hospitable, angry words are forever echoing from wall to wall and women scream behind shuttered windows.
Henry had no time to consider whether it were a romantic street or no. The feather waved in front of him and he followed. He had by now forgotten that he was hatless and dirty. A strangely wistful eagerness urged him as though his heart were saying with every beat: "Don't count too much on this. I know you expect a great deal. Don't be taken in."
He did expect a great deal; with every step excitement beat higher. Their sudden reappearance when he had thought that he had lost them seemed to him the most wonderful omen. He believed in omens, always throwing salt over his left shoulder when he spilt it (which he continually did), never walking under ladders and of course never lighting three cigarettes with one match.
Some way up Wardour Street on the left as you go towards Oxford Street there is a public house with the happy country sign of the Intrepid Fox. No one knows how long the Intrepid Fox has charmed the inhabitants of Wardour Street into its dark and intricate recesses—Tom Jones may have known it and Pamela passed by it and Humphrey Clinker laughed in its doorway—no one now dare tell you and no history book records its name. Only Henry will never until he dies forget it and for him it will always be one of the most romantic buildings in the world.
It stood at the corner of Wardour Street and a little thoroughfare called Peter Street. Henry reached the Intrepid Fox just as the Flaming Feather vanished beyond the rows of flower and vegetable stalls that thronged the roadway. Peter Street it seemed was the market of the district; beneath the lovely blue of the evening the things on the stall are picturesque and touching, even old clothes, battered hats, boots with gaping toes and down-trodden heels, and the barrow of all sorts with dirty sheets of music and old paper-covered novels and tin trays and cheap flower-painted vases. In between these booths the feather waved. Henry pursuing stumbled over the wooden stands of the barrows, nearly upset an old watery-eyed woman from her chair—and arrived just in time to see the three pursued vanish through a high faded green door that had the shabby number in dingy red paint of Number Seven.
Number Seven was, as he at once perceived, strangely situated. At its right was the grimy thick-set exterior of "The City of London" public house, on its left there was a yard roofed in by a wooden balcony like the balcony of a country inn, old and rather pathetic with some flower-pots ranged along it and three windows behind it; the yard and the balcony seemed to belong to another and simpler world than the grim ugliness of the "City of London" and her companions. The street was full of business and no one had time to consider Henry. In this neighbourhood the facts that he was without a hat and needed a wash were neither so unusual nor so humorous as to demand comment.
He stood and looked. This was the time for him to go home. His romantic adventure was now logically at an end. Did he ring the bell of Number Seven he had nothing whatever to say if the door were opened.
The neighbourhood was not suited to his romantic soul. The shop opposite to him declaring itself in large white letters to be the "Paris Fish Dinner" and announcing that it could provide at any moment "Fish fried in the best dripping" was the sort of shop that destroyed all Henry's illusions. He should, at this point, have gone home. He did not. He crossed the road. The black yard, smelling of dogs and harness, invited him in. He stumbled in the dusk against a bench and some boxes but no human being seemed to be there. As his eyes grew accustomed to the half light he saw at the back of the yard a wooden staircase that vanished into blackness. Still moving as though ordered by some commanding Providence he walked across to this and started to climb. It turned a corner and his head struck sharply a wooden surface that suddenly, lifting with his pressure a little, revealed itself as a trap-door. Henry pushed upwards and found himself, as Mrs. Radcliffe would say "in a gloomy passage down which the wind blew with gusty vehemence."