_Unrecorded crimes--The mystery of the grave--The fascination of
the unknown--The shady friends we make--The romance of the railway
carriage--Who and what is your neighbour?--How I find my way about_
|A MYSTERY is, in a popular sense, that which cannot be easily
explained; a circumstance that cannot be readily accounted for.
Something is, but how or why we cannot tell. The mysteries of modern
London are as the sands of the seashore. The mighty city itself is a
mystery. The lives of thousands of its inhabitants are mysteries. In the
glare and clamour of the noonday, as in the darkness and silence of the
night, the mysteries arise, sometimes to startle the world, sometimes
to attract so little attention that the story of them never reaches the
public ear.
There are mysteries blazoned forth with all the glamour that the
contents-bill and the headline can give them, and there are mysteries
that are jealously guarded by those high in authority, lest public
curiosity should seek to fathom them.
There are mysteries in splendid mansions and in squalid garrets which
contain all the elements of criminal romance, and yet pass with the
police and the press as matter-of-fact incidents of London's daily life.
The great river hides more mysteries than ever the Seine gave up to
the Paris Morgue, and many of them end with a little rest in a quiet
mortuary, a "found drowned" hand-bill posted for a day or two on a
police-station notice-board, an inquest, an open verdict, and a pauper's
funeral.
But among the victims have been men and women the story of whose doing
to death would have thrilled the masses and the classes alike; in some
instances would have revealed the presence in our midst of active agents
of the most desperate secret societies in the world.
There are no mysteries of modern London more terrible than its unrecorded
ones. There are disappearances that are never chronicled; murders that
are never discovered; victims of foul play who go certified to the grave
as having succumbed to "natural causes."
If it were realized that scores of people whose death has been
accomplished by the hand of the assassin are quietly buried in London
cemeteries every year without the slightest suspicion of wrong, the
public would be startled. But the fact remains. And its most convincing
illustration is that in almost every case where a poisoner has been
tried, the exhumation of former wives or relatives who have died in
circumstances which the latest revelation makes suspicious, has proved
that they were poisoned too.
Fire has its mysteries, which are rarely revealed. Arson is not entirely
practised for the sake of the insurance-money. It happens sometimes that
there is loss of life. A house has ere now been burnt to the ground to
conceal a crime or to secure a death. The murderer makes good his own
escape; the victim is found when at last the brave firemen are able to
search among the smoking ruins.
The story of "Enoch Arden" is told again and again in our public
journals, sometimes with all the pathetic romance that the Laureate
wove into his poem, sometimes with the sordid details of threats and
blackmail.
But all the husbands and the wives who part and go their separate
ways, forget each other and contract other alliances, do not make the
circumstances of their chance re-encountering public.
The tragedy has happened ere now in the stalls of a theatre, in a
crowded ball-room, in a fashionable restaurant. The supposed dead man
has looked carelessly across the room and seen a woman go-white as death
as her eyes met his. She has explained to the husband sitting by her
side that it was a sudden faintness, and from that hour has had a terror
in her heart that has spoilt her life.
There sits in the House of Lords to-day a statesman whose ancestor,
following his wife to the grave, met in the churchyard a stranger who
had also come to pay the last respect to a dead wife. A strange story
was told, and the two husbands stood side by side at the grave, both
mourning the same woman.
As it happened then, so it happened in recent years in a great London
cemetery. The death of a well-known man appeared in the papers, and
in the announcement was the place of interment and the hour of the
ceremony.
The widow laid her cross of lilies reverently on the coffin as it was
lowered, and turned weeping away; then through the crowd came a woman
closely veiled and when the coffin had been lowered dropped upon the lid
a little bunch of violets.
She had left her husband for fifteen years and made no sign, and he had
married again. But she read of his death in the country town where she
was living, and came to the cemetery.
No one in the crowd of mourners knew the truth, but the younger widow
learnt it afterwards in some mysterious way, and in her perplexity
let her husband's relatives know of her discovery. And because of the
lawsuit they brought with regard to the will the truth became known.
The mysteries of crime and of wrong-doing are common to all cities and
to all races. They are part and parcel of the history of civilization.
It is not my object in these pages to bring out the sensational features
of police romance. My desire is to act as a guide to those who would
look beneath the surface of life in the world's great capital, who would
wander about its highways and by-ways and see with me that which lies
hidden from the casual observer. If I can help my readers to see behind
the veil, to peer into the dark recesses, to study out-of-the-way
aspects of life as it is lived by thousands of their fellow-citizens,
I shall have accomplished a task which has for its object not the
gratifying of a morbid curiosity, but the better understanding of
things as they are in the great city which is at once the wonder and the
admiration of the world.
We shall see life in many of its strangest phases, in its best and
sometimes, perhaps, in its worst. We shall take our journeys in search
of London's mysteries at all hours of the day, and sometimes in the dead
of night, when all good people are supposed to be in bed and asleep, but
when thousands are out earning an honest living, and hundreds are abroad
to earn a dishonest one.
"How do all these people get money?" is a question which comes naturally
to the lips as one gazes at a great crowd of human atoms jostling and
elbowing their way along the busy thoroughfares on a working day. And
that question puts in a sentence one of the greatest mysteries of modern
London.
Alike in the City and in the West there are for ever mixing with the
crowd men and women whose means of obtaining a livelihood are mysteries
to all but themselves. The tragedies and comedies of life cross each
other at every movement of the crowd. The melodrama passes side by
side with all that is ordinary and humdrum in the monotony of everyday
existence.
In the 'buses and the trams and the trains the silent passengers sit
side by side, and no man troubles about his neighbour. But the mysteries
of modem London are represented in the crowded vehicle and in the packed
compartment. The quiet-looking woman sitting opposite you in the omnibus
knows the secret that the police have been seeking to discover for
months. The man who politely raises his hat because he touches you as he
passes from his seat would, if the truth were known, be standing in the
dock of the Old Bailey to answer a capital charge.
The actors and actresses in London's wild romances and terrible
tragedies on shoulders with their fellows every day.
I had for months upon my study table the card of a man with the story
of whose crime a few months later all England rang. He came to me in the
ordinary way about a theatrical matter. He had written a pantomime--I
have the book of the words--and he was about to write a comic opera. I
chatted with him for a quarter of an hour, bade him good-bye, and forgot
all about him until he became the sensation of the day.
He murdered and robbed a fellow-traveller in a railway carriage, made
his escape, and was found hiding in a back street London lodging,
brought to justice, convicted and executed.
One of the most famous adventuresses of our day, a woman whose whole
life had been a romance of daring imposture, left her umbrella in my
hall-stand when she drove away in a hansom. She came to claim it a week
later. In the meantime she had committed a fraud which later on secured
her a long term of penal servitude. It never for a moment in these cases
crossed my mind that I was entertaining a man capable of a brutal murder
and a woman who was to rank among the celebrated female impostors of the
century. To few of us does it occur as we come and go in the course
of the day's work or pleasure that we are actually in touch with the
mysteries of wickedness and crime.
Going from the Old Bailey not long since, at the conclusion of a murder
trial, I got to Farringdon Street just as a train was starting, and
scrambled into a third-class carriage. It was nearly full, and I took
the last seat. Instantly I recognized two of my fellow-travellers. They
were an elderly woman and a young woman, both dressed in deep black.
No one took any notice of them. But what objects of interest they would
have been to the other passengers had the identity of one of them been
known!
She was the affianced wife of a young man who had that day been
condemned to death for the barbarous murder of the woman to whom he was
already married. The girl who was sitting with her mother in the crowded
compartment on the Metropolitan Railway had just parted with the man who
had murdered another woman to make her his wife, and had that day been
sent to the gallows.
I had heard this poor girl on the previous day tell in the crowded
court one of the strangest incidents of the tragedy. When all London was
ringing with the mystery of the murder, her affianced husband came
to tea with her people. The talk turned upon the startling crime, and
everybody present said they hoped the murderer would soon be discovered.
And all the time the murderer was sitting at the tea-table, the honoured
guest of that happy little family party!
It is because its mystery has fascinated me from the beginning, and
because the spell has never been weakened, that I have wandered London
in every direction night and day in a ceaseless endeavour to know it
in every phase and form. In these years of wandering, often far off the
beaten track, I have learnt much that is not common knowledge, and every
day I am learning more. If I were to say that London has laid its heart
bare to me it would be untrue, for that has happened to no man. Many of
its inner workings are mysteries even to those whose task in life it is
to solve them.
But I have penetrated far enough to be able to act as guide to those who
have no opportunity of making the journey by themselves, who, even if
they had, would make it with small profit to their knowledge of facts.
For the truth does not lie in the open road, and to take the narrow
winding way that leads to it, one must be armed with two things--the
word that will carry you past the vigilant sentinels and the knowledge
that will insure your safe return.
I have said so much that the reader who wishes to accompany me in these
journeys in search of the mysterious side of London life may know over
what ground we shall have to travel But I should like to say one word
more. We shall not need police escort or protection. My obligation to
the police is great for many kindly services rendered, and I have the
sincerest admiration for the patience and the energy with which they
guard the capital's wealth and the lives of its citizens, but I have
never asked for their assistance in my journeyings into dark places. The
police are known, and in their presence the tongue of the local
gossip is tied, and the intentions of the person accompanying them are
suspected.
Wherever I have gone it has always been alone or with someone whom the
inhabitants of the area--whether honest or criminal, toilers or idlers,
decent folk or outcasts--have always regarded with a friendly eye.
Often a journey has been made alone. It has been made by day and by
night, and though there have been times when I have been glad to see the
beaten track and the lights and the traffic again, I have never received
either insult or injury. And I have Been in spots that are officially
recognized as the most dangerous in London.
I do not make this statement in any boastful spirit, for there is no
credit due to me for escaping the dangers of the dark alley and the
underground cellar, the peril of the secret haunt of the foreign
desperadoes, the attack of the prowling hooligan, and the wrath of the
criminal surprised in the active practice of his profession.
I have gone with a passport which has enabled me to secure, if not
the absolute confidence of the victims of my curiosity, at least their
abstention from active resistance to my intrusion.
But the mysteries of London do not confine themselves to any one quarter
or to any one class. They are to be found in the broad terraces of
the West as often as in the narrow alleys of the East. In the criminal
courts it is not always the prisoner in the dock who has the ghastliest
skeleton in his cupboard. When the police van passes the aristocratic
equipage with the coronetted panels, the elegantly dressed occupant of
the latter may have the haunting terror of to-morrow in her heart, while
the outcast on her road to Holloway is by comparison free from care.
There are mysteries in the lordly mansions of the West that make wealth
a mockery and rank a disaster. The jealous guarding of the family secret
is a task that embitters the lives of brave men and fair women who bear
the name that discovery would stain and besmirch.
In London, because it is the capital of the world, are the mysteries
of many lands. London is a city of refuge for the outcasts of the
Continent. It is an international Alsatia, where the laws from which
the alien inhabitants have fled cease to run. There are quiet cafés and
restaurants and clubs hidden away in back streets in which men and women
meet and eat, drink, dance, and play cards according to their mood, and
plot between whiles the deeds that will be ranked with the master crimes
of the age. In the dingy lodging-houses of the side streets of Soho
the French murderer and murderess may be leading quiet and simple lives
while the Parisian police are searching for them through the length and
breadth of France. In the Italian quarter that lies off the Gerkenwell
Road the agents of the Mafia frequent the little wine-shops and are in
constant communication with the heads of the dreaded society in Italy.
Here the vendetta that in this country we associate with Italian
melodrama and opera is brought to its tragic fulfilment. The stolid
London policeman assists at another "stabbing affray" in Little Italy,
and is informed that it arose out of a quarrel in a public-house.
But behind that quarrel and the stab or the pistol-shot lies a
death-sentence passed months ago in Naples or in Milan, and presently
the emissary of vengeance, having accomplished his task, is smuggled
out of the country by trusty and tried accomplices, who pay their rent
punctually to a London landlord, and draw cheques which are honoured by
their London banker.
There are romances of the "Mysterious East," strange and weird, working
themselves out behind closed doors and curtained windows in the by-ways
of Limehouse and Millwall. There, amid Hindu and Mohammedan rites, deeds
are done whose story would read like a page from "The Arabian Nights."
There are gloomy dens near the river in which solemn Chinamen, with
impassive frees, are engaged in a business which would seem incredible
to the Englishman if he read it in a volume that described the mysteries
of Pekin.
There are dealers in spells and charms and philtres, and all the
stock-in-trade of the witches, the magicians and the sorcerers, carrying
on in the centre of London's rush and roar a prosperous trade, not only
with the poor and ignorant, but with the rich and cultured. And among
all the mysteries of London, few have a deeper or more tragic meaning
than those in which the occult and the supernatural play a part.
Not all these mysteries lend themselves to the earnest student who
seeks only the truth, who wants to see for himself and to tell a plain
unvarnished tale. But many do, and it is these that I shall endeavour
to lay before the reader, without sensationalism, without exaggeration,
telling a simple story of things as they are.
Facts are more wonderful than fiction, the truth is stranger than
any written tale could ever hope to be. I do not propose to dwell on
horrors, or to tell again the story of startling crimes. London, the
modern Babylon, the Mother of Mysteries, lies before us. It is from
her own lips that we will hear the story of much that is strange and
mysterious in her life.