CHAPTER ONE


THE PRETTY PAWNBROKER

On the southern edge of the populous parish of Paddington, in a
parallelogram bounded by Oxford and Cambridge Terrace on the south, Praed
Street on the north, and by Edgware Road on the east and Spring Street on
the west, lies an assemblage of mean streets, the drab dulness of which
forms a remarkable contrast to the pretentious architectural grandeurs of
Sussex Square and Lancaster Gate, close by. In these streets the observant
will always find all those evidences of depressing semi-poverty which are
more evident in London than in any other English city. The houses look as
if laughter was never heard within them. Where the window blinds are not
torn, they are dirty; the folk who come out of the doors wear anxious and
depressed faces. Such shops as are there are mainly kept for the sale of
food of poor quality: the taverns at the corners are destitute of
attraction or pretension. Whoever wanders into these streets finds their
sordid shabbiness communicating itself: he escapes, cast down, wondering
who the folk are who live in those grey, lifeless cages; what they do,
what they think; how life strikes them. Even the very sparrows which fight
in the gutters for garbage are less lively than London sparrows usually
are; as for the children who sit about the doorsteps, they look as if the
grass, the trees, the flowers, and the sunlight of the adjacent Kensington
Gardens were as far away as the Desert of Gobi. Within this slice of the
town, indeed, life is lived, as it were, in a stagnant backwash, which
nothing and nobody can stir.