The Orange-Yellow Diamond

MP3 Audio CD. The Orange-Yellow Diamond

CHAPTER ONE


THE PRETTY PAWNBROKER

On the southern edge of the populous parish of Paddington, in a
parallelogram bounded by Oxford and Cambridge Terrace on the south,
Praed Street on the north, and by Edgware Road on the east and Spring
Street on the west, lies an assemblage of mean streets, the drab
dulness of which forms a remarkable contrast to the pretentious
architectural grandeurs of Sussex Square and Lancaster Gate, close by.
In these streets the observant will always find all those evidences of
depressing semi-poverty which are more evident in London than in any
other English city. The houses look as if laughter was never heard
within them. Where the window blinds are not torn, they are dirty; the
folk who come out of the doors wear anxious and depressed faces. Such
shops as are there are mainly kept for the sale of food of poor
quality: the taverns at the corners are destitute of attraction or
pretension. Whoever wanders into these streets finds their sordid
shabbiness communicating itself: he escapes, cast down, wondering who
the folk are who live in those grey, lifeless cages; what they do, what
they think; how life strikes them. Even the very sparrows which fight
in the gutters for garbage are less lively than London sparrows usually
are; as for the children who sit about the doorsteps, they look as if
the grass, the trees, the flowers, and the sunlight of the adjacent
Kensington Gardens were as far away as the Desert of Gobi. Within this
slice of the town, indeed, life is lived, as it were, in a stagnant
backwash, which nothing and nobody can stir.