The Hole in the Wall E-Book

Arthur Morrison

• Herausgeber: Arthur Morrison
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Arthur George Morrison (1 November 1863 – 4 December 1945) was an English writer and journalist known for his realistic novels and stories about working-class life in London's East End, and for his detective stories, featuring the detective Martin Hewitt. He also collected Japanese art and published several works on the subject. He left a large collection of paintings and other works of art to the British Museum after his death in 1945. Morrison's best known work of fiction is his novel A Child of the Jago (1896) (Font: Wikipedia)

Leseprobe

The Hole in the Wall

Arthur Morrison

Table of Contents

Stephen’s Tale

In Blue Gate

Stephen’s Tale

Stephen’s Tale

In the Highway

Stephen’s Tale

Stephen’s Tale

Stephen’s Tale

Stephen’s Tale

Stephen’s Tale

Stephen’s Tale

In the Club-Room

Stephen’s Tale

Stephen’s Tale

Stephen’s Tale

Stephen’s Tale

In Blue Gate

On the Cop

On the Cop

Stephen’s Tale

In the Bar-Parlour

On the Cop

On the Cop

On the Cop

Stephen’s Tale

Stephen’s Tale

In the Bar-Parlour

Stephen’s Tale

Stephen’s Tale

Stephen’s Tale

Chapter 1

Stephen’s Tale

My grandfather was a publican — and a sinner, as you will see. His public-house was the Hole in the Wall, on the river’s edge at Wapping; and his sins — all of them that I know of — are recorded in these pages. He was a widower of some small substance, and the Hole in the Wall was not the sum of his resources, for he owned a little wharf on the river Lea. I called him Grandfather Nat, not to distinguish him among a multitude of grandfathers — for indeed I never knew another of my own — but because of affectionate habit; a habit perhaps born of the fact that Nathaniel Kemp was also my father’s name. My own is Stephen.

To remember Grandfather Nat is to bethink me of pear-drops. It is possible that that particular sort of sweetstuff is now obsolete, and I cannot remember how many years have passed since last I smelt it; for the pear-drop was a thing that could be smelt farther than seen, and oftener; so that its smell — a rather fulsome, vulgar smell I now believe — is almost as distinct to my imagination while I write as it was to my nose thirty years ago. For pear-drops were an unfailing part of the large bagful of sticky old-fashioned lollipops that my grandfather brought on his visits, stuffed into his overcoat pocket, and hard to get out without a burst and a spill. His custom was invariable, so that I think I must have come to regard the sweets as some natural production of his coat pocket; insomuch that at my mother’s funeral my muddled brain scarce realised the full desolation of the circumstances till I discovered that, for the first time in my experience, my grandfather’s pocket was void of pear-drops. But with this new bereavement the world seemed empty indeed, and I cried afresh.

Associated in my memory with my grandfather’s bag of sweets, almost more than with himself, was the gap in the right hand where the middle finger had been; for it was commonly the maimed hand that hauled out the paper bag, and the gap was plain and singular against the white paper. He had lost the finger at sea, they told me; and as my notion of losing a thing was derived from my Noah’s ark, or dropping a marble through a grating, I was long puzzled to guess how anything like that could have happened to a finger. Withal the circumstance fascinated me, and added vastly to the importance and the wonder of my grandfather in my childish eyes.