The inspector announced that he proposed to take his companion first of all to a street behind Drury Lane, of which many of the houses were already marked for demolition—­a “black street,” bearing a peculiarly vile reputation in the neighbourhood.  It contained on the whole the worst of the small workshops which he desired to bring to Raeburn’s notice, besides a variety of other horrors, social and sanitary.

After ten minutes’ walking they turned into the street.  With its condemned houses, many of them shored up and windowless, its narrow roadway strewn with costers’ refuse—­it was largely inhabited by costers frequenting Covent Garden Market—­its filthy gutters and broken pavements, it touched, indeed, a depth of sinister squalor beyond most of its fellows.  The air was heavy with odours which, in this July heat, seemed to bear with them the inmost essences of things sickening and decaying; and the children, squatting or playing amid the garbage of the street, were further than most of their kind from any tolerable human type.

A policeman was stationed near the entrance of the street.  After they had passed him, Mr. Peabody ran back and said a word in his ear.

“I gave him your name,” he said briefly, in answer to Raeburn’s interrogative look, when he returned, “and told him what we were after.  The street is not quite as bad as it was; and there are little oases of respectability in it you would never expect.  But there is plenty of the worst thieving and brutality left in it still.  Of course, now you see it at its dull moment.  To-night the place will swarm with barrows and stalls, all the people will be in the street, and after dark it will be as near pandemonium as may be.  I happen to know the School Board visitor of these parts; and a City Missionary, too, who is afraid of nothing.”

And standing still a moment, pointing imperceptibly to right and left, he began in his shy, monotonous voice to run through the inhabitants of some of the houses and a few typical histories.  This group was mainly peopled by women of the very lowest class and their “bullies”—­that is to say, the men who aided them in plundering, sometimes in murdering, the stranger who fell into their claws; in that house a woman had been slowly done to death by her husband and his brutal brothers under every circumstance of tragic horror; in the next a case of flagrant and revolting cruelty to a pair of infant children had just been brought to light.  In addition to its vice and its thievery, the wretched place was, of course, steeped in drink.  There were gin-palaces at all the corners; the women drank, in proportion to their resources, as badly as the men, and the children were fed with the stuff in infancy, and began for themselves as early as they could beg or steal a copper of their own.

When the dismal catalogue was done, they moved on towards the further end of the street, and a house on the right hand side.  Behind the veil of his official manner Aldous’s shrinking sense took all it saw and heard as fresh food for a darkness and despondency of soul already great enough.  But his companion—­a young enthusiast, secretly very critical of “big-wigs”—­was conscious only of the trained man of affairs, courteous, methodical, and well-informed, putting a series of preliminary questions with unusual point and rapidity.