“Then here's your hat,” returns his new friend, quite as intimate with it as if he had made it; “and if you're ready, I am.”
They leave Mr. Tulkinghorn, without a ruffle on the surface of his imfathomable depths, drinking his old wine, and go down into the streets.
“You don't happen to know a very good sort of person of the name of Gridley, do you?” says Bucket, in friendly converse as they descend the stairs.
“No,” says Mr. Snagsby, considering, “I don't know anybody of that name. Why?”
“Nothing particular,” says Bucket; “only, having allowed his temper to get a little the better of him, and having been threatening some respectable people, he is keeping out of the way of a warrant I have got against him—which it's a pity that a man of sense should do.”
As they walk along, Mr. Snagsby observes, as a novelty, that, however quick their pace may be, his companion still seems in some undefinable manner to lurk and lounge; also, that whenever he is going to turn to the right or left, he pretends to have a fixed purpose in his mind of going straight ahead, and wheels off, sharply, at the very last moment. Now and then, when they pass a police constable on his beat, Mr. Snagsby notices that both the constable and his guide fall into a deep abstraction as they come towards each other, and appear entirely to overlook each other, and to gaze into space. In a few instances, Mr. Bucket, coming behind some under-sized young man with a shining hat on, and his sleek hair twisted into one flat curl on each side of his head, almost without glancing at him touches him with his stick; upon which the young man, looking round, instantly evaporates. For the most part Mr. Bucket notices things in general, with a face as unchanging as the great mourning ring on his little finger, or the brooch, composed of not much diamond and a good deal of setting, which he wears in his shirt.
When they come at last to Tom-all-Alone 's, Mr. Bucket stops for a moment at the corner, and takes a lighted bull's-eye from the constable on duty there, who then accompanies him with his own particular bull's-eye at his waist. Between his two conductors, Mr. Snagsby passes along the middle of a villanous street, undrained, unventilated, deep in black mud and corrupt water—though the roads are dry elsewhere—and reeking with such smells and sights that he, who has lived in London all his life, can scarce believe his senses. Branching from this street and its heaps of ruins, are other streets and courts so infamous that Mr. Snagsby sickens in body and mind, and feels as if he were going, every moment deeper down, into the infernal gulf.
“Draw off a bit here, Mr. Snagsby,” says Bucket, as a kind of shabby palanquin is borne towards them, surrounded by a noisy crowd. “Here's the fever coming up the street!”
As the unseen wretch goes by, the crowd, leaving that object of attraction, hovers round the three visitors, like a dream of horrible faces, and fades away up alleys and into ruins, and behind walls; and with occasional cries and shrill whistles of warning, thenceforth flits about them until they leave the place.
“Are those the fever-houses, Darby?” Mr. Bucket coolly asks, as he turns his bull's-eye on a line of stinking ruins.
Darby replies that “all them are,” and further that in all, for months
