Chapter 30

Chapter 13

A SOLO AND A DUETT

The wind was blowing so hard when the visitor came out at the
shop-door into the darkness and dirt of Limehouse Hole, that it
almost blew him in again. Doors were slamming violently, lamps
were flickering or blown out, signs were rocking in their frames,
the water of the kennels, wind-dispersed, flew about in drops like
rain. Indifferent to the weather, and even preferring it to better
weather for its clearance of the streets, the man looked about him
with a scrutinizing glance. 'Thus much I know,' he murmured. 'I
have never been here since that night, and never was here before
that night, but thus much I recognize. I wonder which way did we
take when we came out of that shop. We turned to the right as I
have turned, but I can recall no more. Did we go by this alley?
Or down that little lane?'

He tried both, but both confused him equally, and he came
straying back to the same spot. 'I remember there were poles
pushed out of upper windows on which clothes were drying, and I
remember a low public-house, and the sound flowing down a
narrow passage belonging to it of the scraping of a fiddle and the
shuffling of feet. But here are all these things in the lane, and here
are all these things in the alley. And I have nothing else in my
mind but a wall, a dark doorway, a flight of stairs, and a room.'

He tried a new direction, but made nothing of it; walls, dark
doorways, flights of stairs and rooms, were too abundant. And,
like most people so puzzled, he again and again described a circle,
and found himself at the point from which he had begun. 'This is
like what I have read in narratives of escape from prison,' said he,
'where the little track of the fugitives in the night always seems to
take the shape of the great round world, on which they wander; as
if it were a secret law.'

Here he ceased to be the oakum-headed, oakum-whiskered man
on whom Miss Pleasant Riderhood had looked, and, allowing for
his being still wrapped in a nautical overcoat, became as like that
same lost wanted Mr Julius Handford, as never man was like
another in this world. In the breast of the coat he stowed the
bristling hair and whisker, in a moment, as the favouring wind
went with him down a solitary place that it had swept clear of
passengers. Yet in that same moment he was the Secretary also,
Mr Boffin's Secretary. For John Rokesmith, too, was as like that
same lost wanted Mr Julius Handford as never man was like
another in this world.

'I have no clue to the scene of my death,' said he. 'Not that it
matters now. But having risked discovery by venturing here at all,
I should have been glad to track some part of the way.' With
which singular words he