Even the outward and visible signs of these had been wonderful. Setting
out from one or other of the score of garrets and cheap lodgings we had
in our time inhabited, we had wandered together, day after day, night
after night, far down East, where, as we had threaded our way among the
barrels of soused herrings and the stalls and barrows of unleavened
bread, he had taught me scraps of Hebrew and Polish and Yiddish; up into
the bright West, where he could never walk a quarter of a mile without
meeting one of his extraordinary acquaintances--furred music-hall
managers, hawkers of bootlaces, commercial magnates of his own Faith,
touts, crossing-sweepers, painted women; into Soho, where he had names
for the very horses on the cab-ranks and the dogs who slumbered under the
counters of the sellers of French literature; out to the naphtha-lights
and cries of the Saturday night street markets of Islington and the North
End Road; into City churches on wintry afternoons, into the studios of
famous artists full of handsomely dressed women, into the studios of
artists not famous, at the ends of dark and break-neck corridors; to tea
at the suburban homes of barmaids and chorus girls, to dinner in the
stables of a cavalry-barracks, to supper in cabmen's shelters. He was
possessed in some mysterious way of the passwords to doors in hoardings
behind which excavations were in progress; he knew by name the butchers
of the Deptford yards, the men in the blood-caked clothes, so inured to
blood that they may not with safety to their lives swear at one another;
he took me into an opium-cellar within a stone's-throw of Oxford Street,
and into a roof-chamber to call upon certain friends of his ... well,
they _said_ they were fire extinguishers, so I'd better not say they
were bombs. Up, down; here, there; good report, but more frequently
evil ... we had known this side of our London as well as two men may. And
our other adventures and peregrinations, not of the body, but of the
spirit ... but these must be spoken of in their proper place.
I had arranged with Maschka that Schofield should bring me the whole of
the work Andriaovsky had left behind him; and he arrived late one
afternoon in a fourwheeler, with four great packages done up in brown
paper. I found him to be a big, shaggy-browed, red-haired, raw-boned
Lancashire man of five-and-thirty, given to confidential demonstrations
at the length of a button-shank, quite unconscious of the gulf between
his words and his right to employ them, and bent on asserting an equality
that I did not dispute by a rather aggressive use of my surname.
Andriaovsky had appointed him his executor, and he had ever the air of
suspecting that the appointment was going to be challenged.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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