A policeman was stationed near the entrance of the street. After they had passed him, Mr. Peabody ran back and said a word in his ear.
"I gave him your name," he said briefly, in answer to Raeburn's interrogative look, when he returned, "and told him what we were after. The street is not quite as bad as it was; and there are little oases of respectability in it you would never expect. But there is plenty of the worst thieving and brutality left in it still. Of course, now you see it at its dull moment. To-night the place will swarm with barrows and stalls, all the people will be in the street, and after dark it will be as near pandemonium as may be. I happen to know the School Board visitor of these parts; and a City Missionary, too, who is afraid of nothing."
And standing still a moment, pointing imperceptibly to right and left, he began in his shy, monotonous voice to run through the inhabitants of some of the houses and a few typical histories. This group was mainly peopled by women of the very lowest class and their "bullies"—that is to say, the men who aided them in plundering, sometimes in murdering, the stranger who fell into their claws; in that house a woman had been slowly done to death by her husband and his brutal brothers under every circumstance of tragic horror; in the next a case of flagrant and revolting cruelty to a pair of infant children had just been brought to light. In addition to its vice and its thievery, the wretched place was, of course, steeped in drink. There were gin-palaces at all the corners; the women drank, in proportion to their resources, as badly as the men, and the children were fed with the stuff in infancy, and began for themselves as early as they could beg or steal a copper of their own.
When the dismal catalogue was done, they moved on towards the further end of the street, and a house on the right hand side. Behind the veil of his official manner Aldous's shrinking sense took all it saw and heard as fresh food for a darkness and despondency of soul already great enough. But his companion—a young enthusiast, secretly very critical of "big-wigs"—was conscious only of the trained man of affairs, courteous, methodical, and well-informed, putting a series of preliminary questions with unusual point and rapidity.
Suddenly, under the influence of a common impression, both men stood still and looked about them. There was a stir in the street. Windows had been thrown open, and scores of heads were looking out. People emerged from all quarters, seemed to spring from the ground or drop from the skies, and in a few seconds, as it were, the street, so dead-alive before, was full of a running and shouting crowd.
"It's a fight!" said Peabody, as the crowd came up with them. "Listen!"
Shrieks—of the most ghastly and piercing note, rang through the air. The men and women who rushed past the two strangers—hustling them, yet too excited to notice them—were all making for a house some ten or twelve yards in front of them, to their left. Aldous had turned white.
"It is a woman!" he said, after an instant's listening, "and it sounds like murder. You go back for that policeman!"
And without another word he threw himself on the crowd, forcing his way through it by the help of arms and shoulders which, in years gone by, had done good service for the Trinity Eight. Drink-sodden men and screaming women gave way before him. He found himself at the door of the house, hammering upon it with two or three other men who were there before him. The noise from within was appalling—cries, groans, uproar—all the sounds of a deadly struggle proceeding apparently on the second floor of the house. Then came a heavy fall—then the sound of a voice, different in quality and accent from any that had gone before, crying piteously and as though in exhaustion—"Help!"
Almost at the same moment the door which Aldous and his companions were trying to force was burst open from within, and three men seemed to be shot out from the dark passage inside—two wrestling with the third, a wild beast in human shape, maddened apparently with drink, and splashed with blood.