Complete Works of Bram Stoker by Bram Stoker Read Free Book Online

dangerous places, very hard to hit from any distance away, but able to contain the best and biggest guns made in the world; the black iron-cased ports, in rows seemingly level with the water’s edge, looked like the iron doors of the vaults in a cemetery, a fact which, in the eyes of the onlookers, added not a little to the grim terror of their appearance. The wonder culminated at Tilbury, for here two immense forts defended the narrowest part of the river, and made the idea of any hostile force passing up it a complete impossibility.
    London was reached at last. Busy, bustling, rushing, hurrying London, compared with which all other cities seem as the castle of the sleeping princess in the fairy tale; and Jerry and his wife, on landing from the steamer, albeit they came from a city where Progress speaks with no puny voice and works with no lazy hand, felt bewildered.
    At the best of times and places a landing-stage is no flower garden, especially to the incomer; but the London landing-stages, with their great steam-cranes and palatial warehouses, and ships lying seven or eight deep out into the river, are wonders in themselves. It was only by patience, and care, and asking many questions that Jerry was able to bring his family into the wholly terrestrial world.
    Through much bustling, scrambling, and exertion, they found their way into the street where the theatre was situated, for as they knew nothing about the place Jerry thought it best to get as near to his work as he could. He had high resolves, and intended to work harder even in the new life than in the old.
    The neighbourhood was exceedingly poor, and an amount of misery and squalor prevailed which showed Katey in as many moments as the other had taken hours that all was not gold which glittered within the strip of silver sea which her sons call Britain’s bulwarks, but that the greatness, and wealth, and strength, have their counterfoils in crime, and poverty, and disease.
    More than an hour was spent in looking for lodgings, and Katey’s heart was sick and sore. There was some vital objection to every place. One was too dear, another was too dirty, a third was too small, and so on.
    All things have an end, even looking for lodgings, and towards nightfall they lighted on a place, which, although not exactly what they required, was still the nearest approach to it that they had yet come across. It was over a green-grocer’s shop, and promised to be fairly comfortable. Katey, somehow, felt that the mere show of green stuff gave it a little of the idea of home - just enough, she found out afterwards, to make her home sickness, which had worn somewhat away during the last day or two, come back again.
    However, she had no time for brooding over sorrows, real or sentimental. The children were dead tired and crying with sleep, and so when a fire was lit, and the basket of provisions opened, they were tucked into their bed and fell asleep in a moment.
    Whilst Katey was thus attending to her household duties, Jerry was exercising his professional skill in making the room comfortable, knocking up nails here and there, and generally improving the disposition of affairs. Both had finished about the same time, and then Katey made the tea, and the husband and wife sat down to chat, she sitting on his knee as all loving little wives love to sit.
    Jerry now felt face to face with the realities of his new life, and the prospect was not all cheering. He missed the comforts of home, and felt, in spite of his strong wilful self-belief which deadens a mind like his to many outward miseries, that he was but an atom in the midst of the world around him - a grain of sand in that great desert which men call London. Katey was more cheerful, for a wife carries with her husband and children her true home which rests as securely in her heart as a snail’s-house on his back. Katey slept that night, for she was tired out, but Jerry could not sleep.
    In the morning he was stirring by daylight,