VI
Before taking lodgings in Sidney Street, Whitechapel, to study the haunts of Peter the Painter and his fellow “thugs,” I tried to get a room in the house in Grove Street to which the handsome young Russian had been carried when he was mortally wounded by the police.
With my companion Eddy, I knocked at the door of this dark little dwelling place, in a sinister street with a railed sidewalk, where foreign-looking men lounged about in doorways, and young drabs with painted faces started out at dusk for the lighted highways. Eddy and I believed ourselves to be disguised adequately for East End life. We had put on our oldest clothes and cloth caps, but we were both aware that our appearance in Grove Street aroused immediate suspicion. After three knocks, the door was opened on a chain, and a frowsy woman spoke to me in Yiddish. I answered in German, which she seemed to understand. Upon my asking for a room, she undid the chain and opened the door a little way, so that I could see the crooked wooden stairs up which the man’s body had been carried by two of those men who now lay burned to death in Sidney Street.
The woman asked us to wait, and then went down a stinking passage and spoke to a man, as I could hear by the voices. While we waited, shadows crept up out of the dark street about us, and I saw that we were surrounded by the foreign-looking men who had been lounging in the doorways. The woman came back with a tall, bearded man who spoke English.
“What do you want?”
“A room for the night.”
“What the hell for?” he asked. “Do you know there’s been a murder in this house?”