A NIGHT IN WHITECHAPEL

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.