uesomeness, for
ever since Mrs. Pearcey's blood-soaked perambulator Kentish Town had
held for him a macaber significance: of the hellish portals mystery and
gruesomeness were essential attributes. The drive was for a long time
tediously pleasant in the June sunshine; but when the cab had crossed
the junction of the Euston Road with the Tottenham Court Road, unknown
London with all its sly and labyrinthine romance lured his fancy onward.
Maple's and Shoolbred's, those outposts of shopping civilization, were
left behind, and the Hampstead Road with a hint of roguery began. He was
not sure what exactly made the Hampstead Road so disquieting. It was
probably a mere trick of contrast between present squalor and the
greenery of its end. The road itself was merely grim, but it had a
nightmare capacity for suggesting that deviation by a foot from the
thoroughfare itself would lead to obscure calamities. Those bright
yellow omnibuses in which he had never traveled, how he remembered them
from the days of Jack the Ripper, and the horror of them skirting the
Strand by Trafalgar Square on winter dusks after the pantomime. Even now
their painted destinations affected him with a dismay that real people
could be familiar with this sinister route.

Here was the Britannia, a terminus which had stuck in his mind for years
as situate in some gray limbo of farthest London. Here it was, a tawdry
and not very large public-house exactly like a hundred others. Now the
cab was bearing round to the right, and presently upon an iron railway
bridge Michael read in giant letters the direction Kentish Town behind a
huge leprous hand pointing to the left. The hansom clattered through the
murk beneath, past the dim people huddled upon the pavement, past a
wheel-barrow and the obscene skeletons and outlines of humanity chalked
upon the arches of sweating brick. Here then was Kentish Town. It lay to
the left of this bridge that was the color of stale blood. Michael told
the driver to stop for one moment, and he leaned forward over the apron
of the cab to survey the cross-street of swarming feculent humanity that
was presumably the entering highway. A train roared over the bridge; a
piano organ gargled its tune; a wagon-load of iron girders drew near in
a clanging tintamar of slow progress. Michael's brief pause was enough
to make such an impression of pandemoniac din as almost to drive out his
original conception of Kentish Town as a menacing and gruesom