Let it be noted that the glasses in question held no great quantity of the hot liquor. Indeed, they were what used to be called rummers; round, and of a bloated aspect, but of comparatively small capacity. Therefore, nothing injurious to the clearness of those old heads is to be inferred, when it is said that between the third and fourth filling, the talk drew away from central London and the lost, beloved Strand and began to go farther afield, into stranger, less-known territories. Perrott began it, by tracing a curious passage he had once made northward, dodging by the Globe and the Olympic theatres into the dark labyrinth of Clare Market, under arches and by alleys, till he came into Great Queen Street, near the Freemason’s Tavern and Inigo Jones’s red pilasters. Another took up the tale, and drifting into Holborn by Whetstone’s Park, and going astray a little to visit Kingsgate Street—“just like Phiz’s plate: mean, low, deplorable; but I wish they hadn’t pulled it down”—finally reached Theobald’s Road. There, they delayed a little, to consider curiously decorated leaden water-cisterns that were once to be seen in the areas of a few of the older houses, and also to speculate on the legend that an ancient galleried inn, now used as a warehouse, had survived till quite lately at the back of Tibbles Road—for so they called it. And thence, northward and eastward, up the Gray’s Inn Road, crossing the King’s Cross Road, and going up the hill.
“And here,” said Arnold, “we begin to touch on the conjectured. We have left the known world behind us.”
Indeed, it was he who now had the party in charge.
“Do you know,” said Perrott, “that sounds awful rot, but it’s true; at least so far as I am concerned. I don’t think I ever went beyond Holborn Town Hall, as it used to be-I mean walking. Of course, I’ve driven in a hansom to King’s Cross Railway Station, and I went once or twice to the Military Tournament, when it was at the Agricultural Hall, in Islington; but I don’t remember how I got there.”
Harliss said he had been brought up in North London, but much farther north—Stoke Newington way.
“I once knew a man,” said Perrott, “who knew all about Stoke Newington; at least he ought to have known about it. He was a Poe enthusiast, and he wanted to find out whether the school where Poe boarded when he was a little boy was still standing. He went again and again; and the odd thing is that, in spite of his interest in the matter, he didn’t seem to know whether the school was still there, or whether he had seen it. He spoke of certain survivals of the Stoke Newington that Poe indicates in a phrase or two in ‘William Wilson’: the dreamy village, the misty trees, the old rambling red-brick houses, standing in their gardens, with high walls all about them. But though he declared that he had gone so far as to interview the vicar, and could describe the old church with the dormer windows, he could never make up his mind whether he had seen Poe’s school.”
“I never heard of it when I lived there,” said Harliss. “But I came of business stock. We didn’t gossip much about authors. I have a vague sort of notion that I once heard somebody speak of Poe as a notorious drunkard—and that’s about all I ever heard of him till a good deal later.”
“It is queer, but it’s true,” Arnold broke in, “that there’s a general tendency to seize on the accidental, and ignore the essential. You may be vague enough about the treble works, the vast designs of the laboured rampart lines; but at least you knew that the Duke of Wellington had a very big nose. I remember it on the tins of knife polish.”
“But that fellow I was speaking of,” said Perrott, going back to his topic, “I couldn’t make him out. I put it to him; ‘Surely you know one way or the other: this old school is still standing—or was still standing—or not: you either saw it or you didn’t: there can’t be any doubt about the matter.’ But we couldn’t get to negative or positive. He confessed that it was strange; ‘But upon my word I don’t know. I went once, I think, about 95, and then, again, in 99—that was the time I called on the vicar; and I have never been since.’ He talked like a man who had gone into a mist, and could not speak with any certainty of the shapes he had seen in it.
“And that reminds me. Long after my talk with Hare—that was the man who was interested in Poe—a distant cousin of mine from the country came up to town to see about the affairs of an old aunt of his who had lived all her life somewhere Stoke Newington way, and had just died. He came in here one evening to look me up—we had not met for many years—and he was saying, truly enough, I am sure, how little the average Londoner knew of London, when you once took him off his beaten track. For example,’ he said to me, ‘have you ever been in Stoke Newington?’ I confessed that I hadn’t, that I had never had any reason to go there. ‘Exactly; and I don’t suppose you’ve ever even ............