Angel Pavement [antikvár]

She came gliding along London's broadest street,1* and then halted, swaying gently. She was a steamship of somé 3,500 tons, flying the flag of one of the new Baltic states.* The Tower Bridge* cleared itself of midgets and toy vehicles and raised its two arms, and then she passed underneath, accompanied by cheerfully impudent tugs, and after somé manoeuvring and hooting and shouting, finally came to rest alongside Hay's Wharf. The fine autumn afternoon was losing its bright gold and turning into smoke and distant fading flame, so that it seemed for a moment as if all London bridges were burning down. Then the flare of the day died out, leaving behind a quiet light, untroubled as yet by the dusk. On the wharf, men in caps* lent a hand with ropes and a gangway, contrived to spit ironically, as if they knew what all this fuss was worth, and then retired to group themselves in the background, like a shabby and faintly derisive chorus; and men in bowler hats* arrived from nowhere, carrying dispatch cases, notebooks, bundles of papers, to exchange mysterious jokes with the ship's officers above; and two men in blue helmets,* large and solid men, took their stand in the very middle of the scene and appeared to teli the ship, with a glancé or two, that she could stay where she was for the time being because nothing against her was known so far to the police. The ship, for her part, began to think about discharging her mixed cargo. This cargo was so mixed that it included the man who now emerged from the saloon, came yawning on to the deck,