The
streets swarmed with them; and with men and women between the ages of
sixteen and forty. One rarely lived longer than that in the Five
Points. Some were shrieking and fighting, others were horribly quiet.
Men and women lay drunk in the streets or hunched against the
dripping walls, their mouths with black teeth or no teeth hanging
loosely, their faces purple or pallid. Screams came from one of the
tenements, but neither of the two detectives escorting the party
turned his head.
Madeleine had imagined nothing like this. Her only acquaintance with
vice had been in the dens and dives of San Francisco, and she had
pictured something of the same sort intensified. But there was hardly
a point of resemblance. San Francisco has always had a genius for
making vice picturesque. The outcasts of the rest of the world do
their worst and let it go at that. Moreover, in San Francisco she had
never seen poverty. There was work for all, there were no beggars, no
hungry tattered children, no congested districts. Vice might be an
agreeable resource but it was forced on no one; and always the
atmosphere of its indulgence was gay. She had witnessed scenes of
riotous drunkenness, but there was something debonair about even
those bent upon extermination, either of an antagonist or the
chandeliers and glass-ware, and she had never seen men sodden save on
the water front.
Pages:
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207