Eeldrop and Appleplex

I

Eeldrop and Appleplex rented two small rooms in a disreputable part of
town. Here they sometimes came at nightfall, here they sometimes
slept, and after they had slept, they cooked oatmeal and departed in
the morning for destinations unknown to each other. They sometimes
slept, more often they talked, or looked out of the window.

They had chosen the rooms and the neighborhood with great care. There
are evil neighborhoods of noise and evil neighborhoods of silence, and
Eeldrop and Appleplex preferred the latter, as being the more evil. It
was a shady street, its windows were heavily curtained; and over it
hung the cloud of a respectability which has something to conceal. Yet
it had the advantage of more riotous neighborhoods near by, and Eeldrop
and Appleplex commanded from their windows the entrance of a police
station across the way. This alone possessed an irresistible appeal in
their eyes. From time to time the silence of the street was broken;
whenever a malefactor was apprehended, a wave of excitement curled into
the street and broke upon the doors of the police station. Then the
inhabitants of the street would linger in dressing-gowns, upon their
doorsteps: then alien visitors would linger in the street, in caps;
long after the centre of misery had been engulphed in his cell. Then
Eeldrop and Appleplex would break off their discourse, and rush out to
mingle with the mob. Each pursued his own line of enquiry. Appleplex,
who had the gift of an extraordinary address with the lower classes of
both sexes, questioned the onlookers, and usually extracted full and
inconsistent histories: Eeldrop preserved a more passive demeanor,
listened to the conversation of the people among themselves, registered
in his mind their oaths, their redundance of phrase, their various
manners of spitting, and the cries of the victim from the hall of
justice within. When the crowd dispersed, Eeldrop and Appleplex
returned to their rooms: Appleplex entered the results of his
inquiries into large notebooks, filed according to the nature of the
case, from A (adultery) to Y (yeggmen). Eeldrop smoked reflectively.
It may be added that Eeldrop was a sceptic, with a taste for mysticism,
and Appleplex a materialist with a leaning toward scepticism; that
Eeldrop was learned in theology, and that Appleplex studied the
physical and biological sciences.

There was a common motive which led Eeldrop and Appleplex thus to
separate themselves from time to time, from the fields of their daily
employments and their ordinarily social activities. Both were
endeavoring to escape not the commonplace, respectable or even the
domestic, but the too well pigeonholed, too taken-for-granted, too
highly systematized areas, and,--in the