t, and
made himself one with the shadows that crowded one another round the walls.
He did not leave by the hall door; but of a sudden the room was untenanted.

VII

THE FANTASTICS

Downstream from The Pool, a little way below Shadwell, an uncouth row of
dilapidated dwellings in those days stood--or, better, squatted, like a
mute company of draggletail crones--atop a river-wall whose ancient blocks,
all ropy with the slime of centuries, peered dimly out through groups of
crazy spiles at the restless pageant of Thames-life.

Viewed by day, say from the deck of a river steamer, the spectacle they
offered was, according to bias of mood and disposition, unlovely and drear
or colourful and romantic: Whistler might have etched these houses, Dickens
have staged therein a lowly tragedy, Thomas Burke have made of one a frame
for some vignette unforgettable of Limehouse life.

Builded of stone or brick or both as to their landward faces, without
exception they presented to the river false backs of wooden framework which
overhung the water. Ordinarily, their windows were tight-shut, the panes
opaque with accumulated grime--many were broken and boarded. Their look was
dismal, their squalor desperate.

Below, by day, heavy wherries swung moored to the ooze-clad spiles or, when
the tide was out, sprawled upon stinking mud-flats with a gesture of
pathetic helplessness peculiar to stranded watercraft. Seldom was one
observed in use: to all seeming they existed for purposes of atmosphere
alone.

More seldom still did any dwelling betray evidence of inhabitation beyond
faint wisps of smoke, like ghosts of famine, drifting from the chimneypots,
or--perhaps--some unabashed exhibit of red flannel hung out to dry with
wrist or ankle-bands nipped between a window-sash and sill.

By night, however, a stir of furtive life was to be surmised from cryptic
lights that flared and faded behind the crusted window-glass or fell
through opened floor-traps to the thick black element that swirled about
the spiles, and from guarded calls as well, inarticulate cries of hate and
love and pain, rumours of close and crude carousal.

And ever and again the belated riverfarer would encounter one of the
wherries, its long oars swung by brawny arms and backs, stealing secretly
across the inky waters on some errand no less dark.

On land the buildings lined a cobbled street, from dawn to dark a
thoroughfare for thundering lorries and, twice daily,