“Yes, awfully,” she agreed, and they walked some way in silence. “They are nicer houses down here if they weren’t so dirty, aren’t they?” she said presently, looking up at the windows as they passed along a street to which some bygone architect had bequeathed an indestructible dignity. Their restful proportions and large windows gave her a sudden sense of relief after the turrets and variegated excrescences, coloured bricks disposed in geometrical patterns, and twisted ironwork that adhered to the semi-detached quarter they had passed through.
“Yes,” said her father. “I expect all the old turpitudes—pious founders and all that—lived down here. Our place was probably a marsh or a coal mine or something, till the influence of the Late Lamented overtook it. A man I met yesterday was talking about slaves. They were up to all sorts of games down at their warehouses. The negro still flourishes apparently,” he added, as a group of black men passed them and turned down a narrow street, where tousled women stood at their doors, and children screamed in the gutter. They crossed over a thoroughfare at which main streets intersected one another, and accommodation for sailors was advertised by mission rooms, clubs, public-houses, slop shops, and reiterated offers of beds. Blocks of shops, shipping bureaus and warehouses split up further on into single gigantic buildings, the offices of the state and of great trading companies, full as beehives, and glittering with prosperity; all the organism of a seaport in touch with continents. The sea air was fresh in their faces.
“That’s good,” said Cyril. “We’ll go and hang about.”
They went precariously down a sloping bridge, slippery with mud from the feet of a stream of hurrying workers intent on their home affairs which lay on the other side of the river, and stood by a line of iron chains that stretched indefinitely along the gently heaving planks of the stage to which the ferry boats were moored. A red sun hung above the chimneys on the opposite side in a slight fog that was creeping up the river, and, from mysterious shapes behind this veil, hooters, syrens and clanging bells answered one another in warnings to the capering atoms of whom the drowning of even one would affect, in some degree, the life of the city.
“Do you know,” said Teresa presently, “that I haven’t seen a single person—what we used to call ‘person’—since we came out; nothing but the kind of people who make crowds.”
“That’s because you don’t know them,” said Cyril. “I saw a millionaire get off the boat a minute ago, ‘walking quite unaffectedly,’ as the newspapers say.”
“No, but the dressed people,” said Teresa, “you know what I mean. Where are they?”
“My dear, how should I know?” he replied carelessly. “That’s what I tried to explain to your mother before we came; I thought it would put her off. But I shouldn’t be in the least surprised if she took up philanthropy.”
“Do you mean that she’d go on committees?” Teresa asked awestruck.
“She might quite well, and if I were the committee I should just tell her what I wanted done, and leave her to do it her own way. You’d find it would work out in the end.”