Читать книгу Carnival - Compton Mackenzie - Страница 6

"Hundreds," corroborated her friend.

"Every night," added Ruby, "sometimes two."

"I've been afraid to sleep alone. You can hear the paper boys calling of 'em out."

True enough, that very night, Jenny, lying awake, heard down the street cries gradually coming nearer in colloquial announcement of sudden death, in hoarse revelations of blood and disaster.

"Could I be murdered?" she asked next day.

"Of course you could," was Ruby's cheerful reply. "Especially if you isn't a good girl."

Jenny went over in her mind the drama of Punch and Judy. Murder meant being knocked on the head with a stick and thrown out of the window.

That night again the cries went surging up and down the street. Details of mutilation floated in through the foggy air till the flickering night-light showed peeping hangmen in every dim corner. Jenny covered herself with the blankets and pressed hot, sleepless eyelids close to her eyes, hoping to distract herself from the contemplation of horror by the gay wheels of dazzling colors which such an action always produces. The wheels appeared, but presently turned to the similitude of blood-red spots. She opened her eyes again. The room seemed monstrously large. Edie was beside her. She shook her sleeping sister.

"Wake up; oh, Edie, do wake up!"

"Whatever is it, you great nuisance?"

In the far distance, "Another Horrible Murder in Whitechapel," answered Edie's question, and Jenny began to scream.