Escaped from the land of the Tsar—What they learn—Robbed at the frontier—How they reached London—The terrors of rejection—How some outcasts get on.
IT is six o'clock on Sunday evening. It has been a wild, wet, February day, but with the twilight the rain has ceased, and a mist has come up from the river, wrapping the East End in a cold grey gloom.
Outside the newspaper shops in Aldgate flaring placards announce the latest disaster to the Russian army at the seat of war, and the internal troubles with which the empire of the Tsar is faced.
Looking at the placards, the war seems far away. The unfamiliar—to our eyes and ears almost barbarous—names of the Manchurian towns and rivers suggest illimitable space between the East in which we find ourself and the Far East where a yellow and a white race are writing history with swords for pens and seas of blood for ink, and are punctuating the pages with shot and shell.
Yet only a stone's-throw from where we stand in High Street, Aldgate, we may study real flesh and blood pages torn from the story of the war between Russia and Japan.
Thousands of Londoners pass daily along the great East End highway, and have not the faintest shadow of suspicion that within a few yards of them are hundreds of soldiers—men who have fought in the present war—men who have been in Japanese hospitals—men who have fled to escape further service, who have endured the most terrible hardships, who have, some of them, seen their comrades shot down by their side—Russian soldiers killed by Russian soldiers.
If we turn off the main road and strike down Leman Street, we shall come to a large private house, on the door-plate of which the words "The Jews' Free Shelter" are inscribed.
A few strange-looking men in sea-stained coats and high boots are standing about on the pavement, silent and solemn, with a dull, anxious look in their eyes.
We recognize the Jewish Shelter, look at the little groups, say to ourselves, "More alien immigrants," and perhaps pass on.
But if we go round to the back of the house we find ourselves in a narrow street which ends in a dead wall. And in this street, standing four deep in a line that stretches right away to the wall itself, are hundreds of the soldiers of the Tsar. They are all Jews, they have all escaped from Russia at the risk of their lives. Most of them had only a few roubles in their pockets. But they have come from Russia—some even from Manchuria—and they are here to-night in the quiet, deserted London street waiting their turn to go before the committee which is sitting in the big room of the Shelter to hear their stories, and see what can be done to help them to make a new home thousands of miles away across the seas.
Two London policemen and an inspector are standing in the roadway. They are there to preserve order among these six or seven hundred Russian reservists. But their office is a sinecure. These hunted men, fresh from a land of tyranny, are silent, cowed, incapable of anything but the blindest obedience to the authority of the land to which they have fled seeking a City of Refuge.
There is no need for the policemen to speak to them. If they did, no one in the thickly packed mob of men would understand them. None of the refugees speak a word of English; Yiddish—the German-Jewish jargon—is their mother tongue; but most of them, having been in the army, speak a little Russian.
The inspector, finding that the crowd is spreading over into the roadway, makes a motion with his hand, and the men press closer together. They understand the gesture, and obey it as quickly as they would obey the upraised whip of the Cossack.
They have not yet learnt that in England no one in authority will knock them about or kick them. If they were so used they would not show any resentment. It is the way in which they have been habitually treated in Russia. Sometimes one of their own number, placed in temporary authority to assist the staff of the Shelter, clears a way for someone to pass by, thrusting his compatriots back with a little violence. He does not understand that there is anything unusual in this method of giving an order. When it is explained to him that in England we don't lay hands upon peaceable people in this way, he is astonished. What a wonderful country! The great people don't knock a poor Jew off the footpath! They speak to him civilly! It takes a newly arrived Russian Jew many days to understand that he is going to be treated like a human being, and that even the police will not kick him or hit him on the head if he is unfortunate enough to be in the way.
This Sunday evening there are more than six hundred refugees waiting to enter the doors of the Shelter and go before the committee. During the week over a thousand have arrived. They are mostly the reservists who have been called up and have fled to avoid further service. They have served once—many of them have only just finished their time and returned to their wives and families. They don't want to go to Manchuria. They are Jews; and the Jew serves the Tsar under grievous disabilities. He cannot rise in rank. If he is killed, no information is forwarded to his relatives. In Russia, a Jew is outside the pale of humanity.
Let us pass into the building. We have left a packed army of men standing dumb and motionless outside. Here in a kind of courtyard is another silent and motionless crowd. Two hundred men at least are crowded together, and not a sound comes from their lips. They look like statues of despair. Their one feeling is of relief that they are now inside the Shelter, and so their chance of getting before the committee to-night is better.
We pass from this courtyard to an inner room. It is packed. We have seen already nearly a thousand deserters from the Tsar's army. The Shelter cannot provide accommodation for a tenth of this vast army of fugitives. But every one will get a ticket that will give him food and a lodging. So much these unhappy immigrants know. What they do not know is whether they will be helped to America, to Canada, to the Argentine, to any of the lands where there are Jewish colonies, and where they will be able to toil and save, and in time send for the wives and children left behind in Russia to join them.
All of them have paid the fare to London. Some of them have hidden about them the fare to America or Canada. But others are penniless. They have been robbed at the Russian frontier. They have had to part with every rouble to pass the officials. Sometimes they have given up everything to the sentries to save themselves from being shot down.
It is a peaceful Sunday evening in London, but here are all the horrors of war. And of all London's myriad people, only a few active sympathizers in the Jewish community know of this human tragedy working itself out in London's heart.
Let us leave these unhappy ones massed together in quiet street, in crowded yard, and in the packed room, and pass into another room in which the committee are now sitting, as they will sit on far into the night, examining every man in turn as to his trade, his means, and his prospect of earning a living if room is found for him in one of the ships which the sympathy and philanthropy of their co-religionists have secured for these poor wandering Jews.
Let us sit at one of the long deal tables at which members of the committee are cross-examining the applicants for guidance and assistance, receiving money, making out tickets, and dispatching the refugees to various parts of the world.
A squarely built man of about thirty, pale, haggard, and with a hunted look in his eyes, comes forward. He tells his story. He is a builder of wooden houses. He had served his time, and had been home but for a few weeks, when he was ordered to rejoin. He talked the matter over with some fellow-reservists. They made up their minds to escape. They sold their possessions, got together a little money from their friends, and started. There were six of them, and they got into a train. After travelling a long time they came to a station, at which the carriage was entered by soldiers, who dragged four of the company out. The men were charged with being deserters. Two of the company remained in the train; the man standing now at the table was one of them. But they knew their turn would come, so they scrambled out on the other side of the line and ran for their lives across the country.
A party of soldiers started in pursuit. The men reached a river and leapt in. The soldiers fired and killed one. The man at the table swam to the opposite bank and made good his escape. For many hours he went on and on in his wet clothes, shivering with cold, his limbs benumbed. He endured the most terrible privations; but at last he reached the frontier, got into Germany, and with the money concealed about him purchased a ticket to London.
He stands before us in London to-night, waiting to know where the committee can send him for the roubles which he still has left. He receives a ticket for a ship leaving for Canada, drops a knee in the Russian manner of salutation, and goes forth gleefully into the street to think out the future in the London lamplight.
The man who takes his place is a fine-looking young fellow. Where has he come from? When he is asked, he answers, "Mukden."
Everyone at the table looks up at that. Is it possible that a Russian deserter has made his way from Mukden to Whitechapel? Yes. Here are the facts vouched for, proved beyond dispute.
This man had been serving a year in the Mukden garrison. During a sortie he, with some hundreds of other Russian soldiers, was forced on to a frozen river. The ice gave way, and they all fell in, the Japs firing at them from the bank. An officer in the same regiment as the Jewish soldier was wounded in the head, and was sinking, when the Jew got hold of him and swam with him to the bank. The officer was taken to the hospital, and the Jewish soldier followed him there shortly afterwards, suffering from pneumonia.
The Jew got well, but the officer died after lingering some weeks. Before his death he got the Jew called to him, and said, "You've been good to me—here, take these three hundred roubles—all I have—and get out of this hell as soon as you."
The Jew managed to escape, got rid of his uniform, and made his way across Siberia, now tramping, now travelling by chance conveyances. He reached Moscow in ten weeks. Thence he came to the Shelter in Whitechapel.
Here is a well-set-up young fellow; he is six feet, a height not common among Russian Jews. He wants to go to America, where he has friends. This is the story he tells. Again it shows the Russian officer in a new light. I will call the man Marcovitch. Even in these pages it would not be wise to give his real name, for the agents of the Tsar have keen eyes and are everywhere.
He was orderly to the colonel of the regiment. When the regiment was about to leave on active service, the colonel thought that Marcovitch was too good to go out and get shot. He did not, however, like to tell him in so many words to desert, so this is what he did. The regiment was stationed on the German frontier, so the colonel told Marcovitch he wanted him to cross over into the nearest German town to make some purchases for him there. At the same time he gave him two sealed envelopes, which Marcovitch was not to open till he got into German territory. When he opened them he found that one contained instructions how to get to England, and the other rouble notes for £10. Marcovitch took the hint and the money, and arrived safely in Whitechapel.
These are exceptional cases. Most of the stories that are told are tales of misery and despair, of homes broken up, of wives and children left behind, of terrible journeys and hairbreadth escapes, of freedom purchased at a price almost as terrible as death itself.
Almost every man of the hundreds thronging the Shelter and its annexes to-night has served his time with the colours. Hardly any are recruits. Most of the men have left dear ones behind them—dear ones who are still ignorant of the fate that may have befallen the fugitive. And all of them are prepared to go anywhere—to the most distant parts of the earth—if only they can be free to work and make a new home for their kindred in some land of liberty.
All, before they are sent away, even though they have the money to pay their passage, will have to pass a medical examination. If they are suffering from certain forms of disease they will be refused on the other side. The victims of persecution in Russia and Roumania have ere this made the journey of thousands of miles to the New World only to be refused admittance, and to be sent back again across the sea. It is a terrible picture to dwell upon—a miserable fellow-creature, ill, weak, despairing, refused a foothold everywhere—a storm-tossed human waif, whose one crime is that he dared to cling to the faith of his fathers in the land of the Great White Tsar.
Those who cannot hope to be received in America or Canada, or who are unfit to be sent to the Jewish colonies, are told so plainly, and at once. Every effort is made to get them out of London, and they are kindly treated.
But these Jewish immigrants are never utterly disheartened. Self-preservation is an instinct of the race.
I saw a man turned away regretfully by the committee one night. He had but a few shillings in his pocket. A week later I saw the same man with a basket in the Lane selling stockings at a shilling a pair. A fortnight later he had a little barrow with goods for sale on it. When I heard from him last, he had sent to Russia for his wife, and had opened a little shop in the Ghetto.
There are men in the city of London engaged in large businesses, and employing hundreds of Christian hands in manufactures not previously carried on in England, and these men came from Russia and Poland poor persecuted Jews, with but a few shillings in the world to call their own. If I were to make a list of the big Jewish manufacturers and tradesmen, and Jewish men of learning and of science, who came to this country poor alien immigrants, the revelation would be an astounding one.
But we must not stay now to look back or to look forward. The people to whose stories we are listening to-day have left the past behind them, and their future is an unknown quantity. The present is to them a problem which shuts out all other considerations.
Here is a refugee who fled from a city of massacre. He had been wounded in a riot at Ekaterinoslav. During the riot his brother disappeared, and it was supposed that he had been killed and quietly buried by the authorities.
When this man gives his name it is a peculiar one. A member of the committee remembers that some time previously a man with a similar name had come to the Shelter from Russia, and had been sent to America. The books are referred to, and a full description of the man is found.
It is the brother who was supposed to be dead. The poor applicant is overjoyed. He receives his ticket for America, and goes from the room almost hysterical with joy. He is going across the seas to find in the new land the brother whom he had mourned as dead.
A young woman comes before the committee with tears in her eyes. She has her ticket for the Argentine. What does she want?
She tells a pathetic little story. Five years ago her only sister left Russia and came to London. She sent her address to her relatives. The girl who is now before the committee has accompanied her husband, a reservist. When she left home she took her sister's last letter with the address on it and put it with her few belongings. She has lost the letter. She has been all day tramping about trying to find anyone who can tell her where her sister is living. To-morrow she will have to leave London for the Argentine. She may be quite close to her sister at this very moment—the sister she loves—but she must go away to-morrow, and in all human probability they will never meet again.
What can be done? Nothing. To find a certain woman in London, who left Russia five years ago, is beyond the power of the committee. They can only offer the weeping girl their sympathy.
Here is a boy of fourteen—a sturdy little fellow. He steps up boldly to the table. Where are his parents? He has none. His father and mother were killed in the massacre of Kischineff. He has obtained enough money of friends and sympathizers in Kischineff to make his way to England. He has come alone from Kischineff to London, and he asks the committee to help him. The boy's story is a pitiful one. The committee investigate his case, and it is decided to send the lonely little voyager to the Jewish Orphanage at Jerusalem.
The quiet of the Christian Sabbath night has settled on London as we make our way from the Jewish Shelter to the wide thoroughfare that leads to the deserted and silent streets of the City.
But outside the Shelter in that grey back street a serried mass of silent suffering still waits dumbly, patiently, for the dawn of a new life.
Far away in the Pales of Settlement women and children are wondering and weeping—wondering if the husband, the father, is alive or dead, if he has reached the City of Refuge or been captured as he fled—if he has died by the way, or been shot down by the soldiers of the Tsar.
They will hear in time. Letters and cards are on the way to them bearing the London post-mark and the unfamiliar stamp with the head of King Edward VII of England upon it.
The tragedy of the smiling face—Starving at their work—From manager to super—A fallen star—A terrible life drama—The brighter side of the profession.
Fortune has smiled upon the happy favourites of the footlights. Never was the glamour of the stage more powerful than it is to-day; never were young men and young women more eager to revel in the limelight and leave the dull duties of everyday life for the gay Bohemianism of the boards.
The world, that judges only by what it sees, looks upon the life of the fortunate few as typical of the theatrical life generally. Of the hidden mysteries of the player-folk's pilgrimage it knows nothing. It hears of the magnificent salaries of the stars, it sees the portraits of pretty actresses week after week in the illustrated papers, it is led to believe that every girl who joins the chorus of certain theatres has the chance of marrying a millionaire, and it understands that the members of touring companies go gaily about the world on a picnic arrangement and have all their expenses paid.
It is not upon the parade-ground that one learns what the life of a soldier means; it is upon the battlefield. We see our actors and our actresses and the merry entertainers of the variety halls and palaces on the parade-ground. Very few of us see them upon the battlefield, in the time of storm and stress, when the issue of the struggle is one of life and death.
The hidden mysteries of the stage it is not permitted to the outside world to penetrate.
Kings and queens in historical romance, princes and princesses in pantomime, duchesses in society comedy, of my working life in close communion with the warm-hearted children of Thespis, lift a corner of the veil, it will be but to show how much there is to admire in the men and women who, out of the rays of the limelight, often lead brave, self-sacrificing, and very human lives.
Let us sit for a while in the waiting-room of a well-known London agent, and listen to the boys and girls who come there day after day in the hope of getting an engagement.
There are no anxious faces. The young actor does not wear his heart upon his sleeve. The young actress does not let her professional sisters see that she is breaking down under the strain of hope deferred.
The conversation is light, almost frivolous. It is a merry world for everybody in theatre land, and even when four o'clock comes, and the hope of the day is over, the boys and girls will go chattering out into the street and bid each other a smiling good-day.
But there is a change in many of the faces when the Strand is left behind. There are tears in the eyes of the girl who was smiling so brightly a few minutes ago. The man who stepped with such a jaunty air along Garrick Street drops his chin, and his face grows stem.
There are people at home—a mother and a sister, perhaps—dependent upon the actress, and she has been out of an engagement for a couple of months. But the girl must keep up appearances. She must be neatly dressed and look happy. To acknowledge defeat, to dress poorly, would "let her down" and injure her prospects.
The young actor may be married. He has a wife and child at home. The summer has gone—how he got through it he hardly knows himself. Now the autumn has come, and he is still out of an engagement. If he could sing, he would do what many another young actor does. He would join a troupe of pierrots—of seaside minstrels. He would sing on the beach, in the streets, anywhere, to keep the wolf from the door. But he is only an earnest and capable young actor, and he can't get an engagement.
These unlucky ones are young, and hope will buoy them up for a time. They will weather the storm, and presently they will be rehearsing, and the stress will be lighter.
But even when the engagement is secured and the rehearsals begin, there is a terrible time to get through.
Many pieces are rehearsed for six or seven weeks, and during that time there may be no salary. However distant from the theatre the actor and actress live, they may have to walk—'buses cost money.
I have known an actor and his wife, who were compelled to ride because the distance was too great to walk, go for days with only two pennyworth of food each in order to pay the train fare. But they were both capable and conscientious artists, and had always had excellent notices. A series of short runs had exhausted their resources. This is what had happened to them in one year. An engagement and a month's rehearsal. The play ran a fortnight. They were out for three weeks. An engagement and six weeks' rehearsal. The play ran a month, then they were two months out. Then an engagement in the provinces. The tour, owing to bad business, terminated earlier than was expected. Then out at Whitsuntide and out all the summer. At the end of August came an engagement to open at the end of September, and a month's rehearsal before a farthing of salary was touched.
But if you meet these unfortunate Thespians they will be bright and cheery, and never let you see a sign of the care that is gnawing at their heart-strings.
Years ago I met a brother dramatist on the morning that the news reached England of the suicide under terrible circumstances of an actor whose name was well known in the West for many years. I said that I feared things had been going badly with the poor fellow for some time. Then my friend told me of a pathetic incident.
A year previously the actor came to lunch with him one Sunday by invitation. A joint of roast beef was the principal item, and the guest excused himself for having a second helping. He had had a long walk, and it had given him an appetite.
The host turned his head a little to look out of the window at something that was passing. But there was a mirror that reflected the guest. In the mirror the host saw the poor fellow slip a slice of beef from his plate into the folds of a handkerchief he had in his hand. He was taking the meat home to his wife.
In the days of their vogue the couple had drawn a joint salary of £50 a week. But something happened. Their vogue passed, and for three years they did nothing, sinking gradually into something akin to absolute want, but hiding it from all the world.
"Fifty pounds a week, and come to that!" the prudent may exclaim. But there are plenty of expenses to eat up salaries at the best of times, and the thrift must be great that can enable comparatively young professionals to stand the strain of no income for three years.
If these are the vicissitudes of an actor's life while youth and strength are assets, it is not difficult to imagine how terrible must be the struggle for existence when age comes to those who have been unable to provide for it.
It is then that the problem faces most workers, but there is not in ordinary callings the sharp contrast that exists among the unfortunate of the theatre world.
To have money, friends, fame, and public favour at one period of your life, and then to know poverty, loneliness, neglect—that is the experience that adds bitterness to the cup of sorrow many an old favourite has to drain to the dregs before the merciful curtain falls.
It happened to me once, behind the scenes, to find lying on the mimic battlefield of a Drury Lane drama three corpses, and each of the "supers" who impersonated a soldier, with nothing to say and nothing to do but fall down at a given cue, had been a popular actor, and the lessee and manager of a London theatre. On the stage of the great national theatre I saw in a pantomime procession of Shakespearean characters King Lear represented by an actor who had once played the part on those very boards as the bright particular star of the evening.
The theatrical profession is the most generous in the world. When it hears of a sad case, the more fortunate comrades of one who has fallen by the way come to the rescue. A private subscription is made; a benefit is organized; the sympathy shown is whole-hearted, generous, and practical. But it often happens that the tragedy is only discovered by accident. The wounded comrade has hidden himself away and suffered in silence, too proud to let his pitiable condition be known.
In my wanderings along the shores on which our social wreckage is cast, I come frequently upon men and women who have strutted their hour upon the stage—men and women who had at one time fortune at their feet in the entertainment world, and have come to the workhouse or the common lodging-house.
To the people with whom they associate they are unknown. When they have their day out from the workhouse, when they come ragged and wretched from the lodging-house, and pass the hours as best they can, they attract no attention.
A woman in weather-stained clothes, with a battered hat on her unkempt hair, with the skirts of her dress caked with the mud of the streets, does not appeal to the curiosity of the well-to-do people who pass her by. They do not imagine that there is any mystery about this woman, still young, still good-looking, who has sunk so low. They let her go by, and if they think about her at all, it is as a tramp—a homeless vagabond who sleeps in the parks or on the Embankment.
But if they had known when she had passed them who this woman was, everyone would have turned to look after her. For her portrait was for years in the illustrated papers, the dramatic critics wrote of her enthusiastically, and the leading managers competed for her services.
She was found one evening in the park, ill, dazed, apparently dying. She had crawled under a hedge to sleep, and there she had attracted the attention of some tramps who were "camping" near at hand. One of them went and found a policeman, and the poor woman was carried to the workhouse infirmary. There, by certain old letters found upon her, her identity was revealed, and presently it became known to the profession that one whom they had all regarded with affection and esteem was homeless, penniless, starving.
The response to an appeal was generous; everything that sympathy and help and skilful treatment could do was done; but the once famous actress only recovered a little of her strength to pass away soon afterwards in an asylum.
The life dramas in which the dwellers in limelight-land play a part are often stranger, more romantic, more pathetic, than any written play in which they simulate the human emotions for the entertainment of the public.
The causes of catastrophe are many, and are often obscure. There came to me a year or two ago two sisters. They were young actresses, and wanted parts in a forthcoming play with which I wat associated. They stayed for a few minutes after I had told them that all the parts were filled; they patted my little dog, and asked to see a little white cat of which I had occasionally written in the "Referee."
They bade me a smiling good-bye, and went out, apparently in the best of spirits. A few days afterwards they were found lying dead side by side in their lodgings. They had agreed to die together, and had taken poison. Young and beautiful, with the world all before them, they had broken down almost at the outset of their career under the strain of professional disappointment.
In the days of my youth I knew intimately a famous manager in the entertainment world. He was originally a waiter in a well-known restaurant, but he had ability and pluck, and he became in time the proprietor of a famous variety palace, and some equally famous pleasure gardens. He was also a caterer and contractor on a large scale.
In the days of his prosperity he drove a six-hundred-guinea pair of horses in his phaeton, and the brougham in which he was whirled about in the evening was as well known to the public as that in which Adah Isaacs Menken drove nightly to Astley's when she was drawing all London over Westminster Bridge to see her in "Mazeppa."
Many years afterwards, when the brilliant star of the variety firmament had disappeared, and no one knew what had become of him, I was on a penny steamer on the Thames. A poor old fellow with a greasy cap on his head was waiting about and taking orders for any refreshments the passengers might require. He passed me once and looked at me earnestly. Presently he brought a bottle of beer to two men sitting by me, and then I recognized him. The man, whose name had been one to conjure with in connection with variety enterprise, was the steward of a penny steamer on the Thames.
But when we look behind the scenes of theatrical life it is not always the note of tragedy that greets us. There is a fairer and a sunnier side.
Ten years ago a young girl determined to be an actress—had made her way to London—the city of her dreams. It had been a rough journey. In the provinces she had joined a small opera company. When there was any money taken the manager obligingly gave some of it on account of salaries to the artists. When times were bad they had to go without. So it came that the finding of lodgings was a terrible task. When you have no money—and you can't take your luggage into apartments, for fear it should be kept for the rent—very few doors are open to you. In one country town the little girl, failing to get a room, went and sat in a shed in a field and cried herself to sleep there. She woke up at one in the morning with a thunder and lightning storm raging. She ran out into the roadway, and a kind policeman took her to his wife, who gave her a bed for the night.
One day, the company being near London, she left it, and, having a few shillings in her pocket, took a train which landed her at Liverpool Street. She found lodgings in the Whitechapel Road, and thought that London was a very busy place, but she didn't think the people dressed very grandly.
In the Whitechapel Reading Room she read the "Era," and saw an advertisement for chorus ladies at Earl's Court. She walked from Whitechapel to Earl's Court, and failed to see the manager. Then she walked back again, and, passing Hyde Park, went into it, and, tired and hungry and broken-hearted, sat down on a seat.
It was the fashionable hour of the afternoon, and the Park was crowded with carriages and elegantly dressed people. The young actress, with nothing in her pocket, and terror of the future in her heart, sat and watched the wealth and luxury of London for a little while. In the bitterness of her despair she almost hated the people for being so prosperous and so happy. She burst into tears, and, unable to look any longer at a scene which only emphasized her own misery, she rose and walked, weary and footsore, back to the Whitechapel Road.
That was ten years ago. To-day it is again the fashionable hour, and the Park is crowded. In an elegant victoria sits a charming young lady, daintily dressed, smiling and happy. Every now and then she smiles and bows, and returns the salutation of someone who knows her.
This happy young lady in the victoria is the little actress who sat in the Park and cried because she had not even the money for a 'bus to take her back to the Whitechapel lodging from which she had set out in the morning to walk to Earl's Court.
Twelve years ago a girl of eighteen, thin, white-faced, and none too warmly clad for the bitter winter day, came back wearily to her home. Her father, an actor, had been dead six months. When his affairs were settled, it was found that there was nothing for his wife and daughter. What little he had left was not sufficient to pay his creditors. So the widow made a struggle to keep a home for herself and child. Two rooms were furnished, and the girl looked about for work on the stage. She got a small engagement, then her mother fell ill, and the situation became serious. Then she was out of work again, and the rent had been unpaid for six weeks. The landlord would give only a few days' further grace, and then——
The girl went to her mother's room and fell on a chair by the sick woman's bed. "Nothing yet, mother—nothing yet," she wailed. "What will become of us?"
To-day! A stately house in the fairest English county. It stands in magnificent grounds. If you peer through the gates of the park that lies around it you will see the fine old mansion grandly grey against a background of noble trees.
Presently the park gates open and a carriage comes through them. There are a few villagers in the roadway, and as the carriage passes the women curtsey and the men raise their hats.
The young lady in the carriage is the Lady Bountiful of the place. All the tenants love her, and have loved her from the day she left the stage to come as the new mistress of the Hall to live among them. The middle-aged lady sitting by her side is her mother. They are driving to the station to meet the Lady Bountiful's husband. He has been in London to take part in a debate in the House of Lords.
When last we saw the Lady Bountiful and her companion they were in two furnished rooms, and the girl, terrified at the thought of being homeless, was weeping by her mother's bedside, and wailing, "What will become of us?"
The discovery of the box—And what it contained—The mystery of the coat-cellar—A dreary quarter—A house with a past—Another trunk mystery.
THERE are streets and squares and terraces in London which have been renamed in order that they may no longer be associated in the public mind with the dark deeds of which they have been the scene.
Sometimes, where the renaming has been a difficult one, the houses have been renumbered. But many remain as they were, and Londoners pass them daily and hourly, little dreaming of the drama that once made them notorious.
Let us this bright spring morning take a trip round London and look at some of the houses which a few years ago were the scenes of tragedy and mystery.
We are in a quiet square of well-built, neatly-painted residences. There is an air of comfort and well-to-do-ness about them which bespeaks the "genteel" neighbourhood. The windows are gracefully curtained, the knockers and bells are highly polished, the steps are scrupulously clean. The window-boxes are filled with flowers.
Look well at the house with the turquoise-blue window-boxes. A canary is hanging in the dining-room and singing merrily in the morning sunshine. As we watch, the door opens and a nursemaid comes carefully down the steps with a baby in a perambulator. Two prettily-dressed little girls follow. At the open doorway a young mother stands and watches her little ones as they start hill of childish merriment for their morning walk.
It is a pretty scene, and we know that the four walls of the house frame a picture of happy English home-life. But some years ago there lay in the room in which the canary is singing a corded box. At the front door stood a van on which this box was about to be loaded.
There is another little square five minutes' walk away. On the balcony of one of the houses at the far end a charming girl in a pink blouse is standing. She is leaning over the balcony and talking to some girl friends who have come out of a neighbouring house.
Presently a peal of girlish laughter rings out on the soft May air, and the girls wave their hands to each other in token of adieu.
The pretty girl in the pink blouse goes back again into the room, and as we move away there comes through the open window an air from the latest Gaiety success.
Both these houses belonged at one time to an elderly clergyman. One was empty—the one in which the Gaiety music is being played—and a workman was employed in doing it up that it might be re-let.
The old clergyman went out one morning to see how the repairs were going on, and that was the last that was seen of him for some time.
His elderly housekeeper at his residence in the other square expected him back to dinner. But instead of her master the workman came. That was the last that was seen of the old housekeeper for some time.
A few days later a van stood at the door. The caretaker, a workman, explained that he had been left in charge and had to send a box away. The vanman picked up the box to carry it out, and found his hand stained with blood.
He uttered a cry of alarm and exclaimed, "What does this mean?" Then the workman ran out of the house and the van-man ran after him. The fugitive, who had hurriedly swallowed a dose of laudanum, was arrested by a policeman. Other constables proceeded to the house and opened the box.
In it was the body of the housekeeper. She had been strangled with a rope, which was still round her neck. The rope had been drawn so tightly that it had forced blood from the victim's mouth. The murderer had not calculated on this, and owed the detection of his crime to the circumstance.
Search was made at the house in the other square, and the body of the clergyman was found buried in the drain.
That is the story of two houses in quiet Chelsea squares. In the one we have just seen a charming girl chatting with her friends, and we have heard her playing the piano merrily.
The happy young mother who stands at the door of the other house has no knowledge of the tragedy that once darkened her dwelling-place. In the room where the murder was committed her children romp and play.
Here is one of the most aristocratic thoroughfares in London. From the windows of the beautiful houses you can look upon the green glories of Hyde Park and watch the gay scenes of the Ladies' Mile.
Some of the houses are huge mansions, others are bijou residences. The house to which I would direct your attention once came into the latter category, but it has been rebuilt and enlarged, and the old premises have been absorbed in the new. The house was taken for the season some years ago by a young professional lady and her mother. The young lady paid a visit to some friends from Saturday to Monday. On Monday afternoon she returned, and, knocking, was unable to gain admittance. She had taken her maid with her. Her mother had been left for the Sunday with one servant only in the house—the cook, a foreigner.
When eventually admission was obtained, the young lady, in a state of alarm, searched the house for her mother. She found her lying dead in one of the lower rooms. She had been strangled and dragged with a rope round her neck into the pantry. Money and jewels had been taken, and the foreign cook had disappeared.
The murderess was arrested some time afterwards in Paris, was brought to London, tried, found guilty, condemned, and respited.
As we stand and gaze at the house which bears the old number to-day, we see no sign of its tragic history. There is nothing to suggest that one woman who lived in it was murdered and another tried for her life. At the door an electric brougham stands waiting. An elegantly-dressed young lady comes out and enters it. A footman follows her carrying a dainty lap-dog. The little creature is adorned with a light blue bow. The footman places it in the brougham beside its young mistress.
The dainty lap-dog and the elegant young lady are among the occupants of the premises on which not many years ago a woman lay strangled, and from which a murderess fled.
A house in a big square of boarding-houses and hotels. A house now let out for offices and business purposes, but with a portion of it inhabited, and servants on the premises. Scores of people pass it daily and see nothing in it to arrest their attention. The servants and employées of the house go about undisturbed by any thought of the tragedy once enacted within its walls. One of the servants goes every day to the coal-cellar and fills the scuttles from the black mass that lies around.
But in that coal-cellar there lay concealed for months the body of an old lady who suddenly disappeared, who one day wrote to her friends, and from that day forth was never seen again until she was found a strangled corpse with coals and rubbish piled upon her in the corner of the cellar. There were arrests for that murder, but no one was found guilty of it. The crime still remains one of the mysteries of London.
Many years before she came to her end I knew the victim personally. For some months I saw her almost daily. I ceased to visit the health resort where she was one of the best-known habituées, and in time forgot her.
I remembered her again only when her murder revealed the fact that she had been living a lonely lodging-house life for years in London, and had disappeared; to be found in circumstances which added one more mystery of crime to the capital's crowded record.
Not long ago I found myself late at night in a dark, ill-lighted street in the south-east of London. I had been through an area of narrow byways and alleys that has long been the despair of the authorities, an area that to walk through at night requires a certain amount of confidence in one's powers of self-protection. Shadowy figures crept here and there in the darkness, and now and then in the distance were the sounds of conflict.
It was impossible to recognize the features of anyone who passed me. The ramshackle houses that lined the muddy lanes—one cannot call these unpaved byways streets—had in them only a glimmer of light, and many of them were without even that.
These long, narrow lanes of slum dwellings meandered in and out and crossed each other till they became a maze. When in the pitch darkness I found myself faced with a dead wall through which a narrow opening had been cut, and discovered that it was the entrance to another maze of alleys, I turned back and groped my way to the distant lights of a street in which I should at least be able to see what sort of people were round about me.
The street, when I reached it, was gloomy enough, but there were one or two little shops in it. One was a fried-fish shop, which threw a certain amount of light upon the muddy roadway; the other was the shop of a general dealer.
The shop stood at the corner of the lane up which I came, and in the lane was a side entrance, a black wooden door which led to the yard at the back of the house.
Through this door not very long ago a man passed bearing two sacks. Those sacks he put upon a van which he had hired, and drove away with them. He drove to an empty house in the suburbs which he had taken, and that night he dug a deep hole in the garden, put the sacks into it, and covered them up. They contained the bodies of a man, a woman, and a child.
It was close on midnight when I turned the corner, but the shop was still open. There were no customers in it, but through the open door I could see into the back parlour. An old man sat there alone, smoking his pipe and looking into the dying embers of the fire.
The shop had changed hands twice since the murder. Country folks had taken it, ignorant of its history, had found out the terrible tragedy that had been enacted on the premises, and had left again.
I wondered as I looked at the old man if he knew the story of his home.
I have in my possession the letters the murderer wrote from the condemned cell to the mother of his child. They are well written, and convey a suggestion of refined feeling, which is remarkable when one remembers the brutal crime the man committed for a paltry profit. After the murder he remained alone in the house with his victims the long night through, and as soon as he had succeeded in removing the remains he set about to plan another crime of a similar character.
He intended to murder a man whom he had lured to his house, then go to the shop where the intended victim's wife was alone, murder her, and take possession of the business in exactly the same way that he had taken possession of the little shop of his first victim.
Whenever I look late at night into that shop window I am fascinated, for the whole scene reacts itself, and in fancy I see the man—whom I saw tried and condemned—sitting in the little parlour and planning the removal in the morning of the "sacks" through that little black door in the side street.
A small, semi-detached house in a dull, deserted side street of Kentish Town. In the front a little grass plot; in the windows a few pots of ferns. A curtain is drawn aside and a young woman looks up at the sky. She is wondering, probably, if the weather is going to clear up and be fine for her afternoon walk. Two little boys come along and seat themselves on the doorstep. One has a mouth-organ and plays "At the Old Bull and Bush," while his small companion listens critically.
A sleek black cat creeps through the railings, settles down on the little grass plot, and begins to perform an elaborate toilet.
If I were to say that there is nothing in the scene to suggest tragedy, it would not be true. There is, at least, something in the neighbourhood, something in the street, something in the house that suggest mystery. And we are looking upon the scene of a tragedy which was a mystery for a time.
In a room in this house a young woman murdered one afternoon a young mother and her child. Down the steps on which the two boys are seated with the mouth organ the murderess, a few hours later, wheeled a perambulator covered over with a cloth. Beneath the cloth lay the bodies of her victims. The perambulator broke down with the weight near some rough ground on which building operations were in progress. The woman left the bodies—one at the back of a new building, the other some distance away. She wheeled the broken perambulator as far as Hamilton Terrace and went back to the little house and slept there.
All London rang next day with the discovery of the murdered woman; the body of the baby was not found till later on. The body of the woman lay at the mortuary for identification. Two young women came to see it. One, the sister of the victim, recognized it; the woman who accompanied her said that she was mistaken. A police official was present, and something in the second woman's conduct aroused his suspicions.
He ascertained her address, and sent police officers to it to search the house. The condition of one room left no doubt that it had been the scene of a terrible tragedy.
The woman was convicted and hanged. Whatever the motive of the murder was, it did not transpire at the trial. Many people believed it to be an act of insanity, with jealousy as the root of it.
On the night of the crime the husband of the murdered woman called at the house to see the murderess. He had no idea then that a tragedy had happened. He found that the woman was out, and he tore off the top of a "Pall Mall Gazette" he had with him, wrote on it a message in lead pencil, and left it on the kitchen table. "Sorry you are out," was part of the message. It was not until days afterwards that he learnt the woman had gone out that evening instead of waiting in to see him as she had promised that she would do.
All the details of the ghastly tragedy come back to me as I look to-day at the melancholy little house. If the boys with the mouth-organ knew the story of the perambulator that jolted down the steps upon which they sit, they would probably shift their ground and take their al fresco concert to a place of less gruesome associations.
Here is a house in a street off Tottenham Court Road. It is one of the stately-looking old houses that tell of a day when people of wealth and position lived around Fitzroy Square. These houses are now occupied as offices and warehouses, or let out in unfurnished floors.
In the front window of one of these houses hangs a card—"Apartments to Let." The vacant rooms are on the diningroom floor. Those two rooms were to let a year or two ago. One day the card was taken out of the window. A German lady had secured the apartments. She arrived about ten o'clock in the morning with her boxes and belongings on a van.
The vanmen unloaded the goods carefully and carried them in. They had great difficulty with one large trunk, and had to get assistance before they could put it into the back room. The heavy trunk plays a leading part in many of London's deepest mysteries.
A tall, slim, gentlemanly man, as soon as the box had disappeared into the house, strolled across the road, entered by the open door, and raised his hat to the German lady.
Madam bowed. The tall, slim gentleman was an old acquaintance. Madam had been useful to him on many occasions, supplying information which enabled him to discover the authors or authoresses of a good many robberies of a certain class. Madam was on the best terms with the police. "So you have moved from ———— Street?" said the detective.
"Yes, this morning."
"I've just come from ———— Street. What's been the matter in your place? One of the walls is smeared with blood."
"Really?" said Madam. "It must have been there a long time. Some furniture must have hidden it. I never noticed it."
"I see. Well, you are going to stay here for some time, I suppose?"
"Oh, yes, I hope so."
"Then why is that large trunk of yours addressed to 'The Station Master, Berlin—To be called for'?"
"I am sending some things there that I don't want."
"Oh! You might let me see what they are."
The detective went outside, gave an order to the vanmen, a knife was produced, the cords of the huge trunk were cut, and the lock forced. The lid sprang up, and the body of a man weighing eighteen stone was discovered inside. His skull had been split open with a hatchet.
The evidence brought forward at the trial saved Madam's neck by inducing the jury to make their verdict manslaughter. The sentence deprived the police of Madam's valuable information for twelve years.
We have looked up at the house in which Madam's secret was discovered; let us look at the house in which the crime was committed.
It is only a little distance away. Here is the street It has rather a Continental appearance. The names over the doors are mostly foreign. There is the house. Madam's room was on the first floor.
The first floor is to let. Plenty of people have occupied it since Madam gave it up. Some of them have slept night after night in the very room in which a man of eighteen stone was done to death, packed up in a trunk, and addressed to the station master at Berlin. Very few of the occupants, I fancy, have had any knowledge of the story of that room.
The tragedies pass and are forgotten. The houses of tragedy remain and are let to new tenants.