The Fiend in Human Read Online Free PDF Page A

attention of the constabulary – would not have required the name Chokee Bill to effect, had the victims been shopkeepers, and not whores …
    Whitty peers through the curtains at the passing parade of expensive fabric, the magenta satins, the bottle-green velvets. By unfocusing somewhat and thereby altering his field of vision, he can discern the thin shapes of sneak thieves, beggars and sweepers, darting out of the crannies between buildings, scuttling sideways like crabs then retreating into the shadows.
    He observes a girl no older than six, in rags, crying in distress over what appears to have been a beating, a performance which she enacts on a daily basis. As always, he marks with heartfelt admiration her portrayal of hopeless despair, the theatrical sweep with which she gesticulates, clasping her little hands together and pressing them to her breast.

    A magenta dress with its side-whiskered escort swishes by the child without pause. Lacking the Fiend in Human Form to disconcert them, they have no reason to notice.

2
    Fleet Street, west of Ludgate
    The cabman tosses Whitty’s coin into the air and catches it with an impudent wink, then, sensing the possibility of a fare in the middle distance, whips his foaming wreck of a horse and tools off, leaving the correspondent warily scanning the streetscape off Chancery Lane for suspicious parties, while identifying the beggars and performers who occupy customary tracts under the arches and porticoes, as though by inheritance.
    A solemn, sharp-featured young prostitute watches traffic from a second-floor window while tearing a newspaper into strips for curling-papers; behind her a young man yawns and buttons his shirt. On the walkway beneath her a Hindoo, in a voluminous turban, orange caftan, worsted stockings and hobnailed boots, sings a foreign ditty while beating a tom-tom with stoic monotony.
    At the corner beside the tobacconist’s, an Italian organ-grinder, hirsute and sunburnt, churns out airs from I masnadieri, ‘The Old Hundredth’ and ‘Postman’s Knock’, cycled throughout the day like the chimes of a clock. Nearby, a coarse-featured woman, in a Scotch cap adorned by a thatch of rusty black feathers, dances the highland fling, while her partner, a shabby operator with one eye, produces a shrill howl from a set of etiolated bagpipes.
    Each of these parties is familiar to the correspondent, having from time to time served as paid eyes and ears supplying fragments of information, to be connected like scattered dots into a coherent picture, from hearsay to rumour to fact.
    Other spaces and terraces along Fleet Street are occupied, as always, by costermongers.
    The Irish fruit-seller with his cart, for which the loan (at two hundred per cent interest) has been nearly paid. On the street, such a thing approaches the acquisition of a building. Next to him the clothes-man, tall and skeletal beside racks of men’s and ladies’ apparel, freshly stolen from the clothes-lines of the better districts.
    In less-favoured locations stand less-favoured retailers, all wearing the same quiet expression of melancholy struggle – slowly starving to death, keeping out of the workhouse one more week in the last gasp of
their independence. Their cries, none the less, are a confederacy of hearty optimism.
    Paaaaper! Any of the morning paaaapers!
    Strange news from Sussex!
    Fine pictures, show stunning!
    Will you buy!
    What d’you lack?
    The choice is yours!
    As though to provide a visual counterpart to the vocal din, the walls around these melodious hawkers are themselves a clutter of messages:
    Malt whisky from John Howse!
    Can you help me out?
    Rose Swingle is a drunken cunt!
    Suspended above the heads of the prospective buyers and sellers rushing in all directions are the signs of shops, scarcely nine feet above the ground, large enough to nearly touch one another in the middle of the street, each sign proclaiming a rare and precious commodity or service. Beneath one’s