It was
situated in a back street. Like trails of ooze, when the tide, neither
ebb nor flow, is leaving and making for some estuary, trails of
human beings were moving to and from it. The faces of these shuffling
"shadows" wore a look as though masked with some hard but threadbare
stuff-the look of those whom Life has squeezed into a last resort.
Within the porches lay a stagnant marsh of suppliants, through whose
centre trickled to and fro that stream of ooze. An old policeman, too,
like some grey lighthouse, marked the entrance to the port of refuge.
Close to that lighthouse the old butler edged his way. The love of
regularity, and of an established order of affairs, born in him and
fostered by a life passed in the service of the "Honorable Bateson" and
the other gentry, made him cling instinctively to the only person in
this crowd whom he could tell for certain to be on the side of law
and order. Something in his oblong face and lank, scanty hair parted
precisely in the middle, something in that high collar supporting his
lean gills, not subservient exactly, but as it were suggesting that he
was in league against all this low-class of fellow, made the policeman
say to him:
"What's your business, daddy?"
"Oh!" the old butler answered. "This poor woman. I'm a witness to her
battery.
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