The Meaning of Night Read Online Free PDF

parapets
    high above the teeming city, turning streets and thoroughfares into evil-smelling streams
    of filth and liquid refuse. I found my old companion, Willoughby Le Grice, lounging, as I
    knew he would be at this hour, at the Ship and Turtle in Leadenhall-street. Le Grice and I
    had been chums since our schooldays, though we were as different as could be. Whether
    he had ever read a book through in his life, I beg to doubt; he did not care for books, or
    music, or paintings – as I most certainly did; as for more advanced pursuits, I believe he
    considered philosophy to be actively pernicious, whilst the mention of metaphysics made
    him quite mad. Le Grice was a sportsman to his size-twelve boots: taller even than I;
    thick tow-coloured hair above a four-square manly gaze, the neck and shoulders of a
    young bull, and a luxuriant arc of curled hair above his top lip that made him look a very
    Caractacus. A true Briton, and a good man to have by you in a dangerous corner, though
    an innocent for all that. A strange pair, we must have made; but I could have wanted for
    no better friend.

    We ate the grilled fowl (Indian style), for which the house was celebrated, washed
    down with gin-punch; then, ever biddable as he was on such occasions, Le Grice allowed
    me to take him across the river to the Victoria Theatre,? just in time for the nine o’clock
    performance.

    There is no better place than the Victoria to watch the lower orders of the city
    taking their pleasure; to me, it is a constantly fascinating sight, like lifting a stone and
    observing the insect life beneath. Le Grice is not so charmed as I; but he keeps his
    counsel and sits back in his seat, a cheroot clenched grimly between his teeth, whilst I
    lean forward eagerly. Below our box, the coarse deal benches are packed to overflowing:
    costers, navvies, lightermen, hackney-coach drivers, coal-heavers, and every sort of
    disreputable female. A ferocious, sweating, stinking herd. Only the louder shouts of the
    pigstrotter woman and the porter men who patrol the aisles and stairways rise above the
    tumult of whistles and yells. Then, at last, the curtain rises, the master of ceremonies
    finally subdues the mob, and the performance – sublime in its vulgarity – begins.

    Afterwards, out in the New Cut, the rain had begun to ease, leaving the streets
    awash with mud and debris brought down from roofs and gutters. Degraded humanity,
    with its attendant stench, was everywhere: congregating on corners, or squatting beneath
    dripping archways; sitting on doorsteps, hanging out of windows, or huddling in the
    mouths of alleyways. Faces, hideously painted by the satanic light of the lamps and flares
    and the glow of the baked-chestnut stoves that lit up the street stalls and public-houses,
    passed by us like a parade of the damned.

    Just after midnight we dropped into Quinn’s. I wished especially to go to Quinn’s.
    On the excuse of attempting to locate a lost pocket-book, I sought out the waiter who had
    served me the previous evening: it soon became perfectly clear that he had no
    recollection of me; and so I returned, with a lighter heart, to Le Grice and we set about
    the consumption of oysters and champagne with a will. But eating oysters, Le Grice
    declared, only made him hungrier. He required meat and strong liquor, which, at this time
    of night, only Evans’ could supply. And so, a little before midnight, we arrived in
    King-street, Covent Garden.

    The parallel lines of tables, laid out like a college hall, were still packed with
    boisterous supper-goers. The air was cloudy with the smoke of cigars (pipes being
    prohibited) and heavy with the aroma of grog and roasted meat. Adding to the convivial
    din of conversation and laughter, a group of singers on the stage was lustily delivering a
    six-part glee, their strong and splendid voices rising in a resonant crescendo above the
    incessant clatter of plates and the rattle of cutlery. All about us, the tables