My friend Ledantec and I were twenty-five and we had
come to London for the first time in our lives.
It was a Saturday evening in December, cold and foggy,
and I think that all that combined is more than enough
to explain why my friend Ledantec and I were most
abominably drunk, though, to tell the truth, we did
not feel any discomfort from it. On the contrary,
we were floating in an atmosphere of perfect bliss.
We did not speak, certainly, for we were incapable
of doing so, but then we had no inclination for conversation.
What would be the good of it? We could so easily
read all our thoughts in each others eyes! And
all our thoughts consisted in the sweet and unique
knowledge, that we were thinking about nothing whatever.
It was not, however, in order to arrive at that state
of delicious, intellectual nihility, thai we had gone
to mysterious Whitechapel. We had gone into the
first public-house we saw, with the firm intention
of studying manners and customs,—not to
mention morals,—there as spectators, artists
and philosophers, but in the second public-house we
entered, we ourselves became like the objects of our
investigations, that is to say, sponges soaked in
alcohol. Between one public-house and the other,
the outer air seemed to squeeze those sponges, which
then got just as dry as before, and thus we rolled
from public-house to public-house, until at last the
sponges could not hold any more.
Consequently, we had for some time bidden farewell
to our studies in morals, and now they were limited
to two impressions: zig-zags through the
darkness outside, and a gleam of light outside the
public-houses. As to the inhibition of brandies,
whiskies and gins, that was done mechanically, and
our stomachs scarcely noticed it.
But what strange beings we had elbowed with during
our long stoppages! What a number of faces to
be remembered, what clothes, what attitudes, what
talk and what rags!
At first we tried to note them exactly in our memory,
but there were so many of them, and our brain got
mixed so quickly, that at present we had no very clear
recollection of anything or anybody. Even objects
that were immediately before us appeared to us in
a vague, dusky phantasmagoria and got confounded with
precious objects in an inextricable manner. The
world became a sort of kaleidoscope to us, seen in
a dream through the penumbra of an aquarium.
Suddenly we were aroused from this state of somnolence,
awakened as if by a blow in the chest, and imperiously
forced to fix our attention on what we saw, for amidst
this whirl of strange sights, one stranger than all
attracted our eyes and seemed to say to us: “Look
at me.”
It was at the open door of a public-house. A
ray of light streamed into the street through the
half-open door, and that brutal ray fell right onto
the specter that had just risen up there, dumb and
motionless.
