Coarse Jewish women with false hair shouted to one another. Girls with high cheek-bones, smeared with red and white, caught hold of his arm, whispering evil suggestions to him, and cursing him for a fool when he turned away. There was a lurid glow in the air.
He stopped outside a stationer's window, gazing idly at the specimens of invitation cards in the window.
"Mr. and Mrs. Levenstein
"Request the pleasure of your company
"At the occasion of their son's circumcision."
In the brilliant light he saw the gutters littered with decayed vegetables, bones, and rags. Two old women stood at a corner of the Commercial Road. He heard one of them say, "Yes, it was still-born, so she said; but I 'eard it squeak before Annie come out of the room." He passed on. A piano-organ, with a cage of bedraggled birds on the top, struck up, the handle being turned by a boy, while his father went among the crowd showing a smooth white stump where his hand should have been.
The door of the Free Library stood open. He went in. The room was crowded with men standing about reading the evening papers. He walked up and down through the rows of stands, as if looking for someone, after a while coming out again into the street. A sailor knocked against him, and swore at him for a "bleeding fool."
He was passing a pillar-box, when he remembered his letter to Scott, and he posted it, hearing the hollow echo of its fall with the sense of a curious subjective disturbance in the air around. He felt something was by him in the noisy street, something waiting by him for the end. He looked hastily over his shoulder, and then laughed grimly.
After a time, when he had been among the crowd for nearly two hours, some impulse seemed to draw him away, and he went back towards Houndsditch. Before turning down the long narrow street, he went into the "Three Nuns," the big hotel at the corner, and spent his last shilling in three glasses of brandy.
As he closed the door of his lodgings, the noise of the streets sank suddenly into a distant hum, through which he could distinguish the far-off tinklings of the barrel-organ, which had moved higher up the street. When he got to his room he busied himself in making it clean and tidy, clearing up the hearth, putting his clothes neatly away into his bag.