The scream of the dying woman was carried indistinctly to the ears of the sleeping inmates simply because the air was too heavy with vile tobacco and whiskey, stale beer fumes, and the exhalations of festering garbage heaps to transmit anything in other than a confused and indistinct manner.
Nevertheless there was something so extraordinarily frightful in the shriek that it did succeed in reaching the ears of nearly every habitue of the place, who, shrieking in their turn aroused the others, and one by one frowzeled heads and wrinkled faces issued from broken windows and rapidly, with shuffling footsteps, men and women crawled from innumerable dark passages and darker doorways, and with suspicious glances at each other, sneaked in and out through the slime and rubbish, in a half curious, half frightened search for a glimpse of that horrible tragedy.
I say sneaked about, and I use the word advisedly as the lawyers say, inasmuch as these degraded members of the human family,—these de-humanized fag ends of the genius Homo, did not walk, run, or perform any other specified motion in their perambulations.
On the contrary, they hugged the walls and the gutters; they were distrustful of the laws of gravitation and equilibrium, preferring to lean more or less heavily on walls and other supports, with bodies bent and faces averted, while the rapidity with which they appeared and disappeared was best appreciated by the Police who were supposed to guard this particular section of Whitechapel, but who religiously confined their guardianship to the outer walls, while the denizens of the multitudinous alleys or passages were free to perpetrate their murders, ply their nefarious trades and revel and rot in the stench of their own degradations.
One by one these creatures crawled from their hiding places.
Men were seen clutching the rags of their scanty clothing while their bleared eyes scanned every inch of the broken pavements.
Women, with odd garments thrown carelessly about their shoulders, joined in the search, and for a brief time no word was spoken.
Finally an old creature, dirtier if possible than the rest, bent in form, and with one long brown fang extending down over her shrunken chin, hobbled from a gloomy doorway and in a strident, nasal tone gave her opinion to these searchers of iniquity.
"Hit's Queen Liz thet's done fer, HI knowed 'er yell; You'll find 'er somewheres down by the Chinaman's shanty. HI spects 'e's knifed 'er."
"Good enough for 'er, the stuck hup 'uzzy," exclaimed one of the wretched beings that followed closely at the woman's heels.