What Hyde Park is for carriages, it is for vans and carts. If timid people elect to walk along it, they must do so crossing from side to side, under the heads of great cart-horses to avoid the bales of goods, the reams of paper, the huge barrels, the heavy castings that come swinging down from the loop-holes of third and fourth stories, indifferent as to whether any-body or nobody is passing beneath.
All the lanes leading from it to the river are narrow and dingy and sunless, and Vedast Lane seems probably narrower and dirtier than most of its fellows, because many carts and waggons pass down it on their way to various huge warehouses, occupied by persons following different trades.
During all the working hours of the day, shouting and swearing and the lumbering of vans, and the trampling and slipping about of horses, cease not for one single instant; and it is notorious that the traffic of the whole lane was once stopped for four hours by a jibbing horse, who would probably have remained there until now, had a passer-by not suggested throwing a truss of straw under him and then setting fire to it, which produced such celerity of movement that the driver found himself in Bridge Street, having threaded the vehicles crowded together by the way, without let or hindrance, before he had sufficiently recovered his presence of mind to search about for his whip.
Arrived, however, at St. Vedast Wharf, the scene changes as if by magic. One moment the foot-passenger is in the gloom and dirt and riot of a narrow City lane, the next all clamour and noise seem left behind. Before him lies the Silent Highway, with its steam-boats, barges, and tiny skiffs threading their way in and out amongst the heavier craft.
Facing the river the imposing-looking warehouses of the General Chemical Company rear themselves story on the top of story. To the left lies London Bridge, the masts of the larger vessels showing at uncertain intervals between the stream of vehicles flowing perpetually over it, while to his right the old bridges and the new confuse themselves before him, so that he has to pause for a moment before answering the eager inquiries of a country cousin.
To look at the wharf, to look at the warehouses, to enter the offices, most people a few years back would have said,
"Here is a solvent Company. It must be paying large dividends to its shareholders."
Whereas the true history and state of the General Chemical Company chanced to be this:
When in the palmy days of "promoting," long before Black Friday was thought of, while the Corner House was a power in the City, the old and long established business (vide prospectus of the period) of Henrison Brothers was merged into the General Chemical Company, Limited, with a tribe of directors, manager, sub-manager, secretary, and shareholders,—probably no one, excepting Mr. Henrison and his brothers and the gentlemen who successfully floated the venture, was aware that the old and highly respectable house was as near bankruptcy as any house could well be.
Such, however, was the case, but a considerable time elapsed before the directors and the shareholders found that out.