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Then a flash in the heart, as if Hell's flame of shame and Heaven's lightning of righteous wrath lit it together. The pock-marked rascal is lying quiet on the ruddled bricks at the foot of the stairs. The woman's Voice curses until the corner is turned. A door slams. He is hatless and unwashed and dishevelled, standing in the Blackfriars Road.
With not a tree, of course, or a blade of grass between the paving-stones, the narrow lane was as hot as Tophet, and reeked with a genuine Scotch odor, being infested with unwashed children, and altogether in a state of chronic filth; although some women seemed to be hopelessly scrubbing the thresholds of their wretched dwellings.
A table, littered with unwashed dishes, stood in the middle of the floor, and one or two rude split-bottomed chairs completed the furniture. The little girls were frightened at the unusual silence about the place, as well as the dirt and disorder, but, being very tired, they sat down to rest. "Diddie," asked Dumps, after a little time, "ain't yer scared?"
He appears to be friendless and despised by everybody, and I have never seen him talk to any one. I rather pitied the poor fellow as I saw him go night after night, with his long unwashed face and hands, along the rampart of the wall from one gate to another. Apropos of this I once made a Corean very angry by remarking that "really the safety of the city could not be in dirtier hands."
What age is he? queried one hearer who, by the way, seen from the side, bore a distant resemblance to Henry Campbell, the townclerk, away from the carking cares of office, unwashed of course and in a seedy getup and a strong suspicion of nosepaint about the nasal appendage. Why, the sailor answered with a slow puzzled utterance, my son, Danny? He'd be about eighteen now, way I figure it.
After the dishes had been cleaned away, I waited until a propitious time when the room was temporarily ours alone, and told him what had happened. He became so excited that he lit a stogy without thinking. "Yeller-hided, unwashed, palm-readin' skunk," he said under his breath. "I'll shoot him full o' holes if he don't watch out talkin' that way to my wife!"
They were not written for carefully edited, thrice- proofread, leather-bound volumes, but ground out for the unwashed hand of a Waco printer's devil, done into hastily set type and jammed between badly set beer ads and patent medicine testimonials, on a thin, little job-press sheet that could be rolled up and stuck through a wedding ring.
And the same imbeciles, if not canailles, speak of a mob-rule over the President, etc. Some one ought to enlighten those French and English supercilious ignorami that something like a mob only prevails in such cities as New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore; and nine-tenths of such a mob are mostly yet unwashed, unrepublicanized Europeans.
The air was thick with their unwashed bodies all Mars smelled, since water was still too rare for frequent bathing and their cheap perfume, and clouded with cheap Marsweed cigarettes. Gordon swung where their eyes pointed, until he saw Fats Eller sidling through the groups, then let the knife slip into the palm of his hand as the crowd seemed to hold its breath.
The crowd consisted entirely of the lower classes, labourers and mechanics, and their wives and children dusty people, unwashed people, people of no account whatever, and yet they did not look a mob.
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