At the end of a
long discourse, full of those "sickening details" in which women of her
class delight, she summed up her case with a brief but telling epitome of
his career, to the effect that he never smoked, nor drank, nor swore, but
that he "only gave one sniff and died;" and I, determined to escape from
the inevitable sequel, when Wattles senior's vices would be declaimed in
contrast to the son's virtues, beat a hasty retreat. A few scraps of this
anticlimax, mingled with hiccups and sobs, wafted after me as I wended my
way up the uneven wooden stairs. At the top of these a perilous-looking
ladder gave access to a trap-door, through which I dexterously made my way
into Giannoli's room.
The interior was familiar to me--a squalid little den, some ten feet
square, whose dirty, brown-paper-patched window looked out over the
chimneys and yards of the "Little Hell" district. In one corner of the
room was a mysterious cupboard, through which a neighbouring chimney
contrived to let in a constant supply of filthy black smoke. The bare
unwashed boards were rotting away, and at one spot the leg of the bed had
gone through the floor, to the considerable alarm of its dormant occupant.
The wall-paper, which had once been a gorgeous combination of pink and
cobalt and silver, was tattered and discoloured, and so greasy that one
might imagine that generations of squalid lodgers had made their meals off
it. The furniture consisted of a small table, now covered with a perpetual
litter of papers; a ramshackle wash-hand stand, on which a broken
vegetable dish served as a receptacle for soap and such objects; a bed,
which bred remarkable crops of fleas, and to which clung an old patchwork
quilt, but which was otherwise poor in adornment; a chair, and an old
travelling-box.
Pages:
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201