Page:The Mating of the Blades.djvu/52

 scarlet spree amongst the pubs and the girls of sneering Limehouse.

Silence folded about him like a cloak as he passed into deserted St. Katherine's; the stark, humming silence of a great city asleep. The black London evening dawn huddled the houses together in gray, shapeless groups. Lights flickered up, were quickly shuttered.

Then the houses whispered secrets to each other—secrets into the trooping shadows. …

The squeaking, grating tread of some night wanderer shuffling along on patched shoes vanished into the memory of sound, while the east wind came booming up the Thames, trailing a mantle of diaphanous, ochreous fog and dimming the houses with a veil almost of romance.

Romance of the Docks, where brown Laskar and sooty Seedee-boy and yellow Chinaman finds that his money gives him the rollicking, ribald waterfront equality which the forecastle denies him!

Romance that starts with a double drink of gin and perhaps a chandoo pipe in the back room of a Wapping tavern and winds up, quite possibly, in a perambulator with a half-breed child peeping out, wonderingly, protestingly!

Brutal, sordid romance—romance of knife and pistol and thudding blackjack!

Blood-stained romance. …

“Help!”

The cry stabbed through the air; shivered; choked;