CHAPTER II

A FRIEND IN REQUEST

It was the hour of the unyoking of men.  In the highways and byways of Clerkenwell there was a thronging of released toilers, of young and old, of male and female.  Forth they streamed from factories and workrooms, anxious to make the most of the few hours during which they might live for themselves.  Great numbers were still bent over their labour, and would be for hours to come, but the majority had leave to wend stablewards.  Along the main thoroughfares the wheel-track was clangorous; every omnibus that clattered by was heavily laden with passengers; tarpaulins gleamed over the knees of those who sat outside.  This way and that the lights were blurred into a misty radiance; overhead was mere blackness, whence descended the lashing rain.  There was a ceaseless scattering of mud; there were blocks in the traffic, attended with rough jest or angry curse; there was jostling on the crowded pavement.  Public-houses began to brighten up, to bestir themselves for the evening’s business.  Streets that had been hives of activity since early morning were being abandoned to silence and darkness and the sweeping wind.

At noon to-day there was sunlight on the Surrey hills; the fields and lanes were fragrant with the first breath of spring, and from the shelter of budding copses many a primrose looked tremblingly up to the vision of blue sky.  But of these things Clerkenwell takes no count; here it had been a day like any other, consisting of so many hours, each representing a fraction of the weekly wage.  Go where you may in Clerkenwell, on every hand are multiform evidences of toil, intolerable as a nightmare.  It is not as in those parts of London where the main thoroughfares consist of shops and warehouses and workrooms, whilst the streets that are hidden away on either hand are devoted in the main to dwellings Here every alley is thronged with small industries; all but every door and window exhibits the advertisement of a craft that is carried on within.  Here you may see how men have multiplied toil for toil’s sake, have wrought to devise work superfluous, have worn their lives away in imagining new forms of weariness.  The energy, the ingenuity daily put forth in these grimy burrows task the brain’s power of wondering.  But that those who sit here through the livelong day, through every season, through all the years of the life that is granted them, who strain their eyesight, who overtax their muscles, who nurse disease in their frames, who put resolutely from them the thought of what existence might be—­that these do it all without prospect or hope of reward save the permission to eat and sleep and bring into the world other creatures to strive with them for bread, surely that thought is yet more marvellous.