He was not to be checked in his mad career. Ever-new rocks did he find, out of which he smote the waters of his theories. Interrupted, he digressed, came to another subject, and without hesitation tore off the veil, putting to flight any ray of a possible hope of slow improvement, strangling every idea of peaceable reform, burying it under the burden of his impeachments... Then, when he had enveloped his hearers in the shadows of his despair, he whispered, stepping before them, the one word: “Revolution!” and left them alone in the night with this single star... So he had become the agitator whose words had always been most effective when born of the moment. Better than any one else Trupp knew how to break the lethargy of indifference, to kindle discontent, to awaken hatred and revolt. Therefore his work among the indifferent was always successful. He was not an organizer. So he avoided the clubs more and more. He liked to get out of the way of discussions. He did not know how to convince. When the rapture and the enthusiasm of the hour had fled, — in the dull monotony of the following day which made the struggle appear useless, the victory hopeless, — many of those whom he had carried away were seized anew and more powerfully by the gloomy feeling of the vanity of all effort, which snapped asunder the drawn chord of hope. He could point the way; he could not take the lead.
When Auban interrupted him, his feverish spirit seized upon another side of the conversation. He told of the children of this misery who are born in this and die in yonder corner, more than thirty in a hundred, before passing their first year, missed by no one, hardly known by their own mothers, never dressed, never enough to eat; of the fortunate ones who are spared a life of uncertainty, the slow death of starvation; of the high prices the poor must pay for everything they need — four, five shillings weekly rent to the landlord for the hole of a room alone, while the earnings of the whole family do not amount to ten, twelve; of the comparatively high school money which they are compelled to pay for their children, whom they need so much to help add a few pence weekly to their earnings; of their complete helplessness in all things, at the death of their relatives, for instance. Of late, dark rumors of frightful occurrences had reached the public, so impossible that everybody regarded them as the abortion of a distempered brain, of a sensational imagination. They were based on facts. Trupp confirmed them.
It was not a very uncommon thing for corpses to remain unburied for days in the same room where the rest of the family lived day and night.
“When I came here,” said Trupp, “a young man of about twenty had died. Of a fever; I think scarlet fever. At any rate, his disease was contagious. The husband was out of work; the wife consumptive. She coughed the whole day. They had four children; but the second, a girl, came home only when she found no other shelter. She and her brother were the only ones who occasionally brought something into the house. Besides, there is the old insane mother of the wife, who never leaves her corner in the room. Well, the son died. He had been ill eight days. Of course, no care, no physician, no food. The corpse remained on the same spot on which the sick boy had died. No one touched it. Instead of looking after work, the man ran a whole day from one magistrate to another. He was referred from one district to another; one had no cemetery, to the other he did not belong. He was a foreigner, could not easily make himself understood — in short, the body remained where it was, without a coffin, unburied. After three days, people in the house began to talk about the matter; after five, the stench came through the cracks of the door; after seven, it had grown so intolerable that the neighbors in the adjoining rooms revolted; only after eight days a policeman heard about the matter, and on the ninth finally, the corpse, in the last stage of putrefaction, was taken away! The papers published no reports about it. And why should they? It is all useless, anyway. — Nine days! That is easily told, but no imagination can in reality paint the picture of that room!”
He ceased for a moment. Auban was cold. He drew his cloak more closely round him, and looked at the light which was going out.
But Trupp had not yet finished. “Sometimes they throw a corpse into a corner of the yard, let what will become of it. Not far from here is a street, which is inhabited by thieves, pimps, murderers, rabble of the first order. There are crowds of children there. When one of them died recently, it was left where it lay. No one claimed it. Who the parents were no one knew. The woman who lived yonder told me of another case. Up there — above us — lives a drunkard. He has a wife and seven children. The woman works for the whole family. Recently one of the children died — of that dreadful disease for which science has no name, ‘slow exhaustion, in consequence of insufficient nourishment’ — do not the newspaper reports usually call it so? The woman takes her very last thing to the pawnshop, only to be able to buy a coffin and a few green branches. But before she can get enough together a few days pass. One evening the husband comes home; of course, completely drunk. The coffin is in his way. He takes it and throws it, with the corpse, through the window of the third story. The following day the women almost killed the man; but over their gin the men laughed about the ‘smart fellow.’ Such is East End life.”
Auban rose.
“Enough, Otto,” he said. “Can you show me the street of which you just spoke?”
“Now? — I guess not! We should not get away again with a whole skin.”
“Then let us go.” As they stood by the door, he looked Trupp in the eye. “You will surely not continue to live here?”
“Why not? — Am I perhaps better? Have I earned more than those poor? — One more or less matters nothing.”
“Yes, it does. One less in filth is always better than one more.” ...
As they stood in the narrow entry, the door opposite was opened. A thin streak of light faintly illumined the passage, and showed the person emerging to be a young woman. She muttered something as she saw Trupp. It sounded like an entreaty, and she pointed to the room. A suffocating, musty, corrupted vapor met the men as they approached — the vapor of clothing that had never been aired, of decaying straw, spoiling food, mixed and impregnated with the miasms of loathsome diseases produced by that uncleanliness which covered everything, — the walls, the floor, the windows. In the cloud of vapor which, despite the cold, warmed the room that could not be heated, a bed was distinguishable which took up the whole length of a wall. On this bed rose a figure that would surely not have been regarded as a human being if it had not hurled towards the door a flood of incoherent abuse: his face entirely disfigured by vice, disease, drunkenness, his head bound up by a dirty, blood-soaked rag, emaciated, his exhausted limbs hardly covered by rags, the man resembled more a dead than a living person. He fell back with a rattling sound, exhausted by the exertion of his aimless wrath. Trupp spoke to the woman. Auban only heard that it was a case of taking the sick man to the hospital, — the paradise of poverty. He felt tired and stupefied, and walked ahead. Trupp soon followed. He had to lead his friend by the arm, so full of holes was the creaking floor of the passage, so worn out the stone flagging of the stairs. “That is also one of those whom the police can take to the poorhouse every day — they have ‘no visible means of existence’! They are terribly afraid of it,” said Trupp.
The lighted yard was deserted as before. One might have believed that all those houses enclosing it were uninhabited, it was so still; there was no sign of life.
“It is always so,” said Trupp. “During the day the children are never noisy in their play.”
There was a group of people at the corner of the next street. They were talking together in a lively manner. Some of them were evidently very much excited. As Auban and Trupp drew nearer, a woman came toward them. She was screaming for a physician. The crowd readily made way for them. They passed through a gateway. A yard, half dark, narrow, dirty, lay before them. Here also was a group of men and women, with children clinging to them. In regular paces, two policemen were walking up and down, as far as the space permitted.
Auban was about to turn back again, when his eyes fell on a lantern which stood on the ground, and cast a dull light on a heap of straw, on which lay a human form. No one hindered him as he stepped closer. The people standing round crowded forward; the policemen paced up and down. Auban was taken for a physician. The corpse lying before them was that of a man of about fifty. It lay on the back, the arms half stretched out and hanging down on both sides, the open eyes turned upwards. The body of the dead man was covered only by a long, black coat. It was open and lay against the naked flesh, with the collar drawn up and enclosing the neck. From his tattered, dirty, and threadbare black trousers, his naked feet protruded, covered by blue frost-marks and filth. His worn silk hat with a ragged rim had rolled away. His unkempt gray hair had fallen over his forehead; the left hand of the dead man was clenched.
Auban bent over him. The body was frightfully emaciated: the ribs of his chest protruded sharply; the joints of his hands and feet were so narrow that a boy’s hand might have encircled them. His cheeks were fallen in, and his cheek-bones stood out prominently; his nose was sharp and thin; his lips entirely bloodless, and a little opened as if in pain; the projecting teeth apparently in good condition. The temples and the region of the throat were deeply sunken — the corpse appeared as if it had been lying for months in a dry place, so thin and tight the yellowish skin covered the bones.
Auban looked up to the policeman who was standing beside him.
“Starved?” he asked in a low voice.
The policeman nodded, stolid and indifferent. — Starved! A thrill of excitement ran through the crowd standing round, who had noiselessly followed every movement of Auban. The word passed from lip to lip, and each spoke it in a different tone of fear and horror, as if each had heard his own death sentence. The children clung more closely to the women, these more closely to the men. A young fellow uttered a scornful, loud cry; he was pushed away. The whole group was thus set into commotion. They jostled each other: each wished to cast a glance at the dead man.
The policemen resumed their walk, occasionally casting a scrutinizing look at some individual in the crowd.
Auban had risen from his kneeling position. The hand of the dead man had fallen back flaccidly after he had raised it. There was no longer a trace of life in the lifeless body.
As he was about to turn, he suddenly felt Trupp’s iron grasp on his arm. He looked up and saw a thoroughly troubled face. Trupp’s eyes were fixed upon the dead man in rigid fright and speechless amazement, as if he recalled to him some dreadful memory.
“Do you know him?” asked Auban.
Trupp made no answer. He steadily gazed at the corpse.
The dead man lay before them, and it suddenly seemed not only to Trupp, but also to Auban, as if a last ray of life were returning into his broken eyes, and as if they were now telling in silent speech for the last time the history of their life: the history of a descent from high to low...
Trupp pulled his friend away, startled from his thoughts. The crowd looked after them in dull expectation, as they still believed Auban to be a physician. Only the two policemen continued pacing up and down, unconcerned: presently an officer would come with a wagon, and tomorrow the dead would lie on the marble slab of a dissecting-table...
On the street Trupp said rapidly, with a voice still choked with fear: —
“I saw him — once — it was four weeks ago — in Fleet Street... He was coming down that street — towards me — just as he lay there: without shoes, without a shirt, but with a tall hat and black gloves. The sight of him was not ridiculous; on the contrary, it was frightful. He looked like death personified — emaciated like a skeleton — like a shadow! — so he slunk along the wall, looking straight ahead, observing no one and unobserved by any. — My feeling told me I should not do it; but I recognized hunger, and so I went up to him and asked him something. He did not understand me. I doubt if he heard me at all. But when I gave him a shilling, he cast a glance on the money, then one on me as if he wanted to strangle me on the spot, and flung what I had given him — my last shilling — to the next street urchin. — I was of course so astonished that I let him go...”
Auban shook his head.
“Is it really the same man?”
“Could we forget that face after we have once seen it?”
Auban remained silent. It was a strange coincidence, but it was not impossible. Trupp might be mistaken. But Auban did not himself believe that he was under a delusion.
He too was greatly agitated. That face — no, one could not forget it after having once seen it. But sadder than the bloodless cheeks and the reproachful eyes had been to him the emaciation of those enfeebled, completely exhausted, famished limbs. Hunger must have labored long and patiently before death could extinguish the blazing flames of that life! ...
Weeks ago passing all ordeals through the strength of pride, it succumbed only to-day; he had retreated into a corner, the dirtiest, most hidden of all — there, unseen by any of those millions, he had broken down; there, unheard by any, he had breathed his last sigh, — tired, perplexed, stupefied, sick, despairing, he had — starved!
“Starved! ... Starved! ... Starved! ...”
Again and again Trupp muttered that word to himself.
Then aloud to Auban: —
“To see that we had indeed not expected! — Look, how everything justifies me! But the vengeance we shall take will efface everything!”
“Except folly,” thought Auban. But of course he did not say it now.
“There can be no blame: what has the blind done that he is blind? — Only folly, folly everywhere — yes, and it will take a terrible revenge! ...”
Suddenly they stood at the entrance to the large, broad living stream of Whitechapel Road.
They had been walking till now without knowing where. Absorbed in what they had seen, they forgot all else. Now they were startled by the light that suddenly flooded them. They looked about. Everything was as it had been two hours ago. Again the lights! Again life, flowing, rushing life, ever and ever again conquering life after the terrors of death!
“To the club!” said Auban. It was the first word that he spoke. He was tired, hungry, but outwardly and inwardly calm, congealed as it were. Trupp was neither thirsty nor exhausted. While he changed his course with the confidence of habit and crossed Commercial Road, he looked before him gloomily, apparently cold, but stirred by indignation, tortured by a dull pain.
They had only a few minutes more to walk. A street lay before them, enveloped in the darkness of the evening, illumined by not a single light. It was Berner Street, E.C. The houses ran into one another; doors and windows were hardly to be distinguished in the shadows of the night. Only one well acquainted here could have found a given house. Auban felt his way with his cane rather than walked.
Here was located the club of the Jewish revolutionists of the East End. Trupp stood before the door and pulled the iron knocker. It was opened at once. Heads emerged from a room on the right, friendly hands were extended to Trupp when he was recognized. Auban saw with what pleasure he grasped the hands and shook them again and again. He himself had not been here for a year. He doubted whether he would see any familiar faces. But he had hardly mingled with the lively groups which filled the small low rooms of the basement, some standing, some sitting round the tables and on the benches, when he felt a hand upon his shoulder and looked into the face of an old comrade whom he had not seen for years, not since his years of storm and stress in Paris.
“Auban!”
“Baptiste!”
Memories flew up like a flock of birds whose cage is suddenly opened by the hand of accident.
Except the “Morgenröthe,” the third section of the old Communistic Workingmen’s Educational Society, the “International Workingmen’s Club” was the only club of revolutionary Socialists in the East End. The members, about two hundred of them, consisted mostly of Russian and Polish immigrants. The whole of Whitechapel, which for the most part was inhabited by their countrymen, constituted their wide field of propagandism.
Auban asked his friend to translate for him portions of the paper which the club published weekly at a great sacrifice, assisted by no one, bitterly hated and persecuted by the wealthy Jews of the West End (who once even succeeded by bribery in temporarily suppressing the paper). It was called “The Worker’s Friend,” and was printed with Hebrew letters in that queer mixture of the Polish, German, and English idiom, which is chiefly spoken by the Polish emigrants and understood only with difficulty by others.
Trupp was in the midst of a group of lively talking people. They asked him to speak. He evidently had no desire to. But he consented, and followed them to the upper hall, after he had hastily drunk a glass of beer.
Auban remained sitting, and ordered something to eat. The acquaintance who had recognized him overwhelmed him with questions. They learned many things from each other: one of their friends had been cast ashore here, another there, by the great, mighty wave of the movement. In the course of those few years everything had been moved out of its position, had changed, had taken on a new aspect.
Auban grew more serious than he had been. He felt again the whirr of the wheel rolling on and on, the tramp of the crushing footstep that had also passed over him... No sword was any longer suspended above him. He no longer feared anything, since he battled only for himself. But still the drops of pain were flowing from the scars of his iron heart.
They talked of their former friends. One of them had been shown up as a decoy? Was it possible? None of them would have thought that. “He was a scoundrel.”
“Perhaps he was only unfortunate,” suggested Auban. But the other would not hear of that.
Thus they talked together for an hour.
Then they ascended the narrow stairs to the hall, which was completely packed with people. It was of medium size and held hardly more than a hundred and fifty persons. Plain benches without backs stretched through it crosswise and along the walls. Everywhere extreme poverty, but everywhere also the endeavor to overcome poverty. On the walls hung a number of portraits: Marx, Proudhon, Lassalle overthrowing the golden calf of capitalism; a cartoon in a black frame: “Mrs. Grundy” — the stingy, greedy, envious bourgeoisie, which, laden with treasures of all sorts, refuses the starving the pittance of a penny...
At the front the room was enclosed by a small stage. There Trupp was standing beside the table of the chairman. He spoke in German. Auban pushed a little forward to see him. He could understand only a few words; he could hardly guess what he was saying. Was he telling of his experiences that evening? ... Auban felt the tremendous passion flooding the meeting in hot waves from that point. Breathless, anxious not to lose a single word, they hung on the lips of the speaker. An electric thrill passed through those young people, hardly out of their teens; those women tired and crushed by the burden of their ceaseless toil; those men who, torn away from their native soil, had found each other here doubly and trebly disappointed. Rarely had Auban seen such devotion, such burning interest, such glowing enthusiasm as shone from those faces. He knew them. Questions that among the children of the West would have at most formed matter for calm, indifferent interchange of opinion, were discussed here as if life and death depended on them; in contrast with their own sorrowful, depressed, narrow life only the ideal of paradise! Nothing else! Highest perfection in Communism: above all, peace, fraternity, equality! Christians, idealists, dreamers, fools — such were those Jewish revolutionists of the East End — step-children of reason, banner-bearers of enthusiasm.
Trupp closed. They were preparing for the discussion.
“Be egoists!” Auban would like to have shouted at them. “Be egoists! Egoism is the only weapon against the egoism of your co-religionist exploiters; there is no other. Use it: cool, determined, superior, calm, and you are the victors!”
But he did not express his thoughts. The time when he himself, inspired and inspiring, had stood by the surging waves of excited masses had been followed by years of study. His course included but one study: men. Since he understood them, he knew that the effect of the spoken word is the greater, the more general, the more ideal it is, the farther it goes to meet the vague desires of the heart. It is the phrase that is everywhere received with wild joy by the crowds; the clear, sober word of reason, stripped of tinsel, addressing itself to individual interests, denying all moral commands of duty, dies away without being understood, and without effect.
Had not that been brought home again to him only last Sunday?
Therefore, if he should speak to-day, he would again reap only misunderstanding, instead of joyful applause.
The discussion was in full swing. Almost everyone who approached the speaker’s table spoke with the most glowing zeal to convince, to persuade: not a word was lost.
Trupp retreated to the background of the hall. There he was again surrounded on all sides. They wished to be enlightened on this or that point of his speech. He replied to each. — Auban had sat down. His acquaintance had left him. He did not understand a word. He saw the excited faces that hovered about him through a thin veil of tobacco smoke.
“To-day flaming enthusiasm, tomorrow sobering up and discouragement... To-day Haymarket, tomorrow the gallows... To-day revolution, tomorrow a new illusion and its old authority!” he thought.
Trupp asked him if he would go with him to the “Morgenröthe.” There was a meeting at that place, and he wished to speak there also. Auban let him go alone.
The workingmen’s Marseillaise was sung. The gathering began to break up. The crowd mingled together.
A tall, broad-shouldered German comrade, with a blonde beard and hair, his glass in his hand, with his head raised, sang in a clear, firm voice, giving the keynote, as it were, the first stanza of the song over the heads of the others: —
Wohlan, wer Recht und Freiheit achtet,
Zu unserer Fahne steht zu Hanf!
Ob uns die Lüge noch umnachtet,
Bald steigt der Morgen hell herauf!
Ein schwerer Kampf ist’s, den wir wagen,
Zahllos ist unserer Feinde Schaar —
Doch ob wie Flammen die Gefahr
Mög’ ülber uns zusammenschlagen,
Tod jeder Tyrannei!
Die Arbeit werde frei!
Marsch, marsch,
Marsch, marsch!
Und wär’s zum Tod!
Denn unsere Fahn’ ist roth!
All joined in the refrain.
Auban hummed the French words of the Marseillaise... How many times already had he heard it, how many times already joined in singing it? In hope, in revolt, in despair, in the confidence of victory? Who had not already sung it?
Auban chanced to see how the eyes of a young man — he was evidently a Pole or a Russian — were suspiciously resting on his strange form. He could not help smiling.
Should he tell him who he was? — They did not know him any more. But still the mere mention of his name would have sufficed to at once put to flight all doubt and suspicion.
But he refrained from doing it. He looked at his watch: he must not stay much longer, if he still wished to catch the last train of the underground road for King’s Cross at Aldgate.
He went. They had reached the closing stanza of the song. They sang: —
Tod jeder Tyrannei!
Die Arbeit werde frei!
Marsch, marsch,
Marsch, marsch!
Und wär’s zum Tod.!
Denn unsere Fahn’ ist roth!
Denn unsere — Fahn’ ist — roth!
Denn unsere — Fahn’ — ist — roth!
Auban stood on the street. It was pitch dark. With difficulty he felt his way to where the great streets converged. But before he had yet reached the first gaslights, an enormous building suddenly rose before him in the darkness: in four rows, one above the other, twelve, fourteen, twenty brightly illuminated windows... It was one of the large factories of which there are from forty to fifty in every parish of the East End of London. Was it a silk factory? Auban did not know.
That building, ugly, coarse, ridiculous in shape, a four-cornered monstrosity with a hundred red, glowing eyes, with the flitting shadows of human forms and the gigantic limbs of the machinery behind them, was it not the glaring symbol of the age, the characteristic embodiment of its essential spirit: industry?
The culmination of the evening was reached when Auban stood again on the spot where the two giant streets converge. Already here and there excessive fatigue was beginning to merge in the stillness of Sunday. Soon the public houses were to close. More and more the people constituting the great stream of humanity were disappearing in the side-streets.
But still the throng was almost impenetrable. In feverish haste most of them drained the last flat drops of the flat drink of their Saturday spree.
Aldgate could be reached in less than five minutes. There was still half an hour for Auban before the last train of the underground road for King’s Cross would leave Aldgate Station, and overcome by an inward force against which he was helpless, he turned once more into one of the northern side-streets, into a night full of peculiar mystery...
Only a few lanterns were still burning here, only few people passed by him. Then he came upon streets running crosswise. He turned toward the west.
He passed a group of young people. They were carrying on a dispute in a low voice, in order not to attract the attention of a policeman, and took no notice of Auban. He kept close to the wall.
A light shone from a grated window. He stopped and looked through the dirt-covered panes. It was the kitchen, the common kitchen of a lodging-house which he saw, the common waiting-room for all frequenters before they retire to the sleeping-place rented for one night.
The room was overcrowded. More than seventy persons must have been there; they lay, sat, and stood around in smaller and larger groups: some cowered in the corners. A large number thronged round the fireplace. There they prepared their food, — tea, a bit of fish, the remains of meat. Each was awaiting his turn. As soon as one made room by the fire, another took his place. The spare fire did not give out much heat, for many were cold in their rags and crowded closely together.
There was only one table in the middle of the room. Bent over it, head beside head, most of them were already asleep in confused disorder, — men, women, and children together. Only a few ate there, and on the narrow benches along the walls. But the table was strewn with dirty tin dishes, — cups, bowls, plates, — which the exhausted ones had pushed away before sleep overcame them. The floor was covered with refuse of every kind; children who had slipped away from the laps of their sleeping mothers crept round like little blind dogs.
The faint glimmer of the embers hardly illumined the room. Two smoking lamps on the walls were going out.
Nothing that he had seen to-day, nothing that he had ever seen in the East End, had made a deeper impression on Auban than the silent, gloomy, dismal picture of that room.
Was it the late hour that was having its effect on him? Was it his overheated brain, exhausted by long hours of exertion, which produced that abortion? Or did that which he had so often seen come close to him now that he was alone: this night scene of the abandoned life of the outcasts?
He held his breath while he penetrated every corner of the picture with his eyes.
No imagination could have fancied a more disconsolate room, and in it a more grotesque grouping, than was presented here: the white-haired old man, whose cane had dropped from his hand while he fell asleep with his head bent forward; the young girl who was staring before her while her pimp covered her with abuse; that entire family forming a group: the father evidently out of work, and the mother in despair over their situation, quieting the children who were quarrelling about a broken dish; those sleeping rows — they seemed as if dead...
And above them all the gloomy cloud of eternal filth and eternal hunger. No longer any joy, any charm, any hope ... thus day after day ... thus night after night...
Auban forcibly tore himself away from the picture without color, without outline, without tone.
He knew those lodging-houses where one found shelter for single nights. But white letters on the red walls gave the additional information: threepence, fourpence, and sixpence a night. For sixpence — those were the “chambers” where one got his own bed, whose linen was changed once at least every few weeks, after it had served twenty different bodies. For fourpence they slept in rows, closely crowding upon each other, utilizing the space to the fullest extent. For threepence, finally — that was the large room with the empty benches on which one slept, or the kitchen where one remained on the spot where one fell asleep: protected against nothing but the icy cold of the night and the fatal dampness of the street pavement...
A man staggered out of the door. He had been turned away because he could not pay. Auban wished to speak to him, to help him, but he was completely drunk. He staggered on backwards and forwards, knocked about with his hands, and felt his way along the walls of the houses, muttering and reeling — into the night which devoured him.
Auban also walked on. He had forgotten where he was and at what hour.
Suddenly he reflected. He must retrace his steps to assure himself that he was on the right way. There was the street into which he had turned, — therefore straight ahead, again towards the west...
From that point only an unsteady light every hundred paces. The streets grew narrower and narrower. The pavement worse and worse, larger and larger mud pools and rubbish heaps...
But Auban did not wish to go back again.
The door of a house stood open. Another lodging-house, but an unlicensed one. One of the notorious rookeries, as the people call them. It was overcrowded. The entire narrow, steep stairway, as far as Auban could see, covered with crouching dark human bodies. Over and beside each other, like corpses thrown on a heap, so they lay there. As far as the street, on the threshold even, they were cowering. Nothing was any longer plainly recognizable; the skin, peeping from under the rags and tatters, was as dirty as they were, soaked with dampness, filth, and disease...
Auban shuddered. He hurried on. A cross street; then a high wall; a monstrous seven-story tenement house, suddenly rising out of the darkness like a giant. He passed it. Straight ahead — towards the west.
In the next street again a number of stragglers, but scarcely recognizable: shadows painted on the walls, or sitting in the house doors petrified. No noise, no talk, no laughter, no singing ... the stillness of the grave.
Auban began to doubt whether he was on the right way. Again the streets grew completely deserted.
But he knew this region. Had he not been here in the daytime? Everything seemed changed. That wall on the left — he had never seen it. Had he gone wrong? — Impossible! He taxed his excited brain, almost to bursting, while he stood still. He reflected — it must be so and could not be otherwise; if he turned toward the left, toward the south, he must reach Whitechapel High Street in three minutes; if he walked straight on towards the west, he must in the same length of time reach Commercial Street...
Forward, then, straight ahead! ...
He felt only now how tired he was. His lame leg pained him. He would rather lie down on the ground and sleep.
But he called his will to his aid and walked on.
A thought came to him: suppose he should now be attacked — who would hear his calls for help? — Nobody. He had no other weapon with him than his cane, which was beginning to weigh heavily in his hand. — If anybody should meet him and recognize a stranger in him, it was hardly conceivable that he should let the chance of robbing him pass by...
An entirely new feeling possessed him. It was not fear. It was rather the abhorrence of the thought of being attacked by a wild animal in human form in this night, in this filth, in this solitude, and compelled to engage in a struggle for life and death.
He saw how careless it had been of him to challenge this almost unavoidable danger. He remembered now, too, that he was on the very street at the entrance of which a policeman had told him a while ago, as he probably told every well-dressed man, to keep away from it.
Auban hurried on as fast as he could. But the wall seemed to be endless. The darkness was impenetrable. He could not have told the difference between a man and a wall at ten paces.
He held his cane with an iron grasp, without supporting himself on it. He fancied every moment that he saw a robber emerging from the darkness, feeling him at his throat or by his side... But he was determined to sell his life dearly at least.
He ran and swung his cane before him. Perspiration dropped from his forehead. His horror increased...
Where was he? — It was no longer Whitechapel. It was a night without beginning and end; the fathomless depth of an abyss...
Suddenly his cane struck against a wall. And now Auban could again distinguish houses and windows on his right. A short street opened, faintly illumined by a single lantern, and so narrow that no wagon could have passed through it. It led into a longer one...
Suddenly the whole width of Commercial Street lay before Auban. In five minutes he stood panting under the round glass globe of the light which illumined the entrance to the ticket-offices and the stairs leading below.
He had reached the last point of this day’s walk, Aldgate Station.
He still had just ten minutes before the departure of his train.
The whole way from the Club had not taken more than half an hour. Auban felt as if hours had passed since the song of the Marseillaise had vibrated in his ear...
While he was resting to quiet his wild pulses, while the street vendors before him were removing their boards and boxes with the remains of their wares, and round him men were jostling and pushing each other in unconscious intoxication and feverish haste, he once more turned his eyes towards the east... And in a flash the picture he had been longing to shape rose before him: the enormous mouth of the gigantic body of East End — such was Whitechapel, which lay yawning before him. Whatever came near its poisoned breath staggered, lost its hold, was crushed by relentless yawning, and devoured, while all the sounds of misery, from the rattle of fear to the sighs of hunger, died away in the pestilent darkness of its abyss. And all the countries of the entire world threw their refuse into that greedy mouth, so that at last that terrible, forceless, insatiable body might satisfy itself, whose hunger was immeasurable and seemed constantly to be increasing...
And while Auban retreated before the vapor, he suddenly saw in the last minute still remaining to him the grand vision of coming events: that gigantic mouth opened wide its foaming jaws and vomited forth in choking rage an enormous slimy wave of rubbish, filth, and corruption over London... And — like a tottering mountain, — that nauseating wave buried everything: all grandeur, all beauty, all wealth... London was now only an infinite lake of rottenness and corruption, whose horrible vapors infected the heavens and slowly destroyed all life...