_The children never know--A reprieve at the last moment--A chapter
from a life drama--When father comes home from prison--Living down a
notorious name_
|IN the whirl of the world's news, the hurricane of happenings, the rush
of events, the impression made upon the public mind by the dramas and
tragedies of everyday life is bound to be transient.
All England may be thrilled on Monday by a horror that causes the Press
to bristle with headlines, but after the Sunday papers have reproduced
the details--perhaps with portraits by way of illustration--the horror
loses its grip on the public imagination. A dozen new sensations have
come to the front and forced the old one into the background.
There is always a large section of the public that retains its interest
in a condemned murderer or murderess right up to the morning of
execution. In the years when exciting news was scarcer, "hanging
mornings" were quite national events. Special editions of the morning
papers came out at ten o'clock with a full account of the painful
proceedings, and the last dying speech and confession, if any, of the
condemned. The halfpenny evening papers were rushed out at the same
time, and the sale was huge. Not long since two halfpenny evening papers
quarrelled about their statistics of circulation, and one reproached the
other with quoting the figures of its "hanging editions" as those of its
everyday sale.
With the execution chapter the story of a murderer ends so far as the
general reader is concerned. The interest has been keenly maintained
through all the chapters that have gone before relating to the crime,
the arrest, the police-court proceedings, the trial, the verdict,
scenes in the condemned cell, and, perhaps, the efforts made to obtain
a reprieve have kept the story at a high level of interest. But with the
last scene of all the details cease to be lovingly dwelt upon in the
Press. The curtain falls with the disappearance of the central figure
into the pit below the scaffold. The drama is considered--from the point
of view of public interest--to be at an end.
Many sympathetic people, especially women, give a passing thought on the
day of doom to the innocent relatives of the men and women whose throat
the hands of Justice have clutched in the death grip; but the sun rises
on another mom, and the tragedy and all concerned in it are lost in the
mists of yesterday.
What becomes of the family of a murderer or murderess, of the women and
children, the husbands and wives, the brothers and sisters, who bear the
name that is branded with infamy for evermore?
Long before the fatal bolt has been withdrawn the children of criminals
of fair or good position have disappeared from their old surroundings.
They could not stay in their home or walk abroad in the neighbourhood
in which they are known. Imagine a group of little ones in the park
with their nurse, and a hundred eyes turned upon them pityingly as the
children of a man or a woman lying under sentence of death.
The situation, of course, is too terrible to be risked. So from the hour
that the tragedy of a great crime becomes public, the near relatives of
the criminal try in every way to avoid being identified with it. If
they can afford it, they seek a new home, and often arrange to live the
remainder of their lives under another name. It happens sometimes that
children grow up to manhood and womanhood ignorant of the fact that the
name they bear is an assumed one. The ghastly thing that made their own
a brand of shame beyond the bearing has mercifully been kept from them.
Even among the poor, when the shadow of the gallows has fallen across
the little home, there is an effort to escape from that shadow and all
that it means. It is not often that the children remain in the house of
tragedy or the street where all their little playmates know their story.
Yet it happens sometimes. Last Christmas morning, wandering in the East
End, I entered a house in a little side street packed with a people
speaking an alien tongue.
On the staircase a little boy of five and his baby sister of three were
playing. Some one had given them a penny box of toys, and they were
setting the things out on the stairs.
Not six months previously the body of a murdered woman lay on these
stairs. It was there that her husband killed her. The man was hanged.
The man was the father, the murdered woman was the mother of the
children whom I saw playing last Christmas day on the stairs that had
been stained with their mother's blood.
To a boarding-school in the north-west of London there came one day a
lady dressed in deep mourning. With evident hesitation she told the head
mistress that she wanted to place her two little girls at the school,
as she had been ordered to a Continental _Bad_ to undergo a course of
treatment.
"But before I send my little girls," said the lady, "I shall have
to reveal something to you which I must ask you to regard as in the
strictest confidence."
Then the unhappy lady, nervous and ill at ease, stammered out her story.
She was the widow of a man who had committed suicide at the very moment
he was about to be arrested for a murder which was one of the most
sensational cases of recent years.
The two children she wished to place at the boarding-school were this
man's daughters. The name she and her children bore was a false one.
Would the school-mistress, knowing the facts, take the children?
The lady felt it would not be right to send them without letting the
mistress know the truth.
The head mistress was greatly affected by the tears and the evident
distress of her visitor, and when she had satisfied herself on certain
points she took the little girls, who knew nothing of the tragedy, and
did her best to make them happy in their new surroundings.
If you watch the young ladies of Miss ----------'s well-known
boarding-school in the big garden attached to the house, you will see
two pretty, fair-haired girls playing gaily with their companions, and
you will hear their childish laughter ring out again and again.
The pretty little fair-haired girls are the daughters of the murderer
who committed suicide to avoid arrest.
On the bright autumn day that their mother was sentenced to death,
three children dressed in deep mourning sat in the sunshine with their
governess. They knew that their papa was dead, and that was why they
were in black. They were told that their mamma was very, very ill--too
ill for her children to be with her--and that she "might die." But the
little ones had not the slightest idea that the mother who "might die"
was accused of having killed their father. When the verdict had been
given, and the sentence pronounced, the children were taken away by
a relative and brought up under another name. The law did not in this
instance "take its course." At the last moment there was a reprieve, and
the death sentence was commuted to one of penal servitude for life.
A curious circumstance has stamped the day of that reprieve on my
memory.
On the morning that the Home Secretary's decision was announced I was at
Madame Tussaud's Exhibition. The effigy of the condemned woman had, in
deference to public opinion, which was divided, been put in a separate
room, instead of in the Chamber of Horrors--the usual department for
condemned criminals.
On the day of the reprieve a number of people were standing in front of
the figure, which was naturally a special attraction. "Ah!" said a man
standing near me, "they'll have to take her out of this place altogether
some day."
Fifteen years later this woman was released on license, or, as those who
cling to old forms of expression say, "ticket-of-leave." That very day
her effigy was removed from the premises, and it no longer forms part of
the exhibition.
This convict came out into the world. The fact was duly recorded in the
Press with considerable emotional comment, and the old dispute as to her
guilt or innocence was temporarily revived.
But to how many people did the most dramatic feature of the tragedy
present itself? Few of those who re-discussed the celebrated case in all
its points remembered that the children of the "murderess" had lived
their lives and grown up in ignorance of their mother's fate.
When the unhappy woman was free once more, did she seek her children and
reveal herself, or did she mercifully leave their lives unshadowed by
the knowledge that the celebrated convict about whose release all the
world was talking was their mother?
That is a matter with which the public has no concern, and one into
which the Press has very rightly made no attempt to pry. But if the
truth were not revealed, if the unhappy mother denied herself the
supreme reward of the long years of patient endurance in the silent
world, it may have happened that the young people one day as they walked
abroad saw a lady looking at them with strange, pathetic intentness, and
passed on their way little dreaming that the sad-looking lady was their
mother, who had been condemned to death as a murderess long years ago,
and had yet lived to see her children grown-up and happy.
No dramatist has given us a situation more intensely human and pathetic
than that.
Without the sensational surroundings, strange meetings and reunions are
constantly taking place in this great soul-absorbing London of ours.
It is a feature of the human drama that is most completely ignored, one
that is rarely dwelt upon even by the writers who probe deep down into
the mysteries of life in the great City. But the fathers and mothers
come home from the prisons and the convict gaols to those who love them.
In the class where no effort is made to conceal the nature of the family
misfortune from kinsfolk or neighbours, the absence of the wife and
mother is often sympathetically alluded to, and there is joy in the
household--a criminal household, possibly--when mother, having paid
the penalty of acquiring property without payment, comes back to get
father's tea ready and put the children to bed.
Mr. Holmes, the veteran police-court missionary, made the other day what
was described as the "startling" statement that he had found some most
lovable characters among the wickedest people.
But the confession did not startle those who are in constant touch with
the criminal and the vicious.
Society visits the sins of the fathers upon the children, but in
the slums and alleys where the criminals congregate the child left
temporarily motherless by the action of the law is "everybody's baby."
The poor woman, whose position with regard to children is very much like
that of the old lady who resided in a shoe, will take in the child of
the woman sent to prison and house it with her own brood, tend it, and
feed it.
The home-coming of father, who has done a "length" or a "stretch," is
sometimes quite a local event. I went into a little Hoxton house the
other day and found great preparations in progress. The eldest girl
was scrubbing the floor, the younger children were helping to tidy up.
Mother had been out marketing, and on the fire was a saucepan giving
forth a savoury smell. The little family seemed so excitedly happy that
I ventured to ask the cause of the jubilant bustling.
"Father's coming out of prison to-day," said a little girl, smiling
sweetly.
I did not like to ask to be permitted to stay and witness the
home-coming of the gentleman, who had frequently returned to the bosom
of his family under similar circumstances, but I knew exactly what would
happen. The little domestic reunion would be delightful, and all
would go well till evening. Then the welcome would be of a more public
character, and the hero of the occasion would have considerably
more drink offered him than was wise after a long period of enforced
abstinence.
Here the home-coming is shorn of its pathos, for it takes place among a
class who are openly at war with Society. The criminal's welcome to his
home is that of a released prisoner of war--one who fell into the hands
of the enemy and is now set free.
The painful home-coming is that of the amateur criminal--the man
or woman who has taken a fatal step and endured the _shame_ of
imprisonment. Then the return of the father or the son to the home to
which he has been a stranger so long is often a poignant little domestic
drama. I have seen a decent man come out of prison--a man who was
innocent, and whom I knew to be innocent--and even in his case the first
meeting with friends and acquaintances was a painful trial.
In the respectable family the joy of a relative's return is damped by
the knowledge that the prison taint clings, that nothing ever wholly
removes it. The man from gaol--the woman from gaol--may be loyally
determined never again to deviate by a hair's-breadth from the straight
path, but the world does not take the future into consideration when it
reckons up the moral worth of a man or woman. The previous conviction
is not mentioned in a Court of Justice till the accused has been found
guilty. In the world the previous conviction stands against a man
throughout his life, though he may never sin again.
That is the burthen that the discharged prisoner of the better class
brings with him into the home where his dear ones are waiting to welcome
him. He has come back with his shame upon him, and in the shadow of that
shame those who bear his name will have to live.
It is to escape the shame that a new name, a new environment, sometimes
a new sky, is sought. Far away from the land of their birth there are
to-day hundreds of families expatriated by the sin of one member of
it. In the Continental cities there are to be met with Englishmen and
Englishwomen with whose doings at one time all England rang. They have
come abroad, sometimes to hide themselves, but frequently that their
children may be educated in Continental schools where the name they bear
will carry no scandal with it to the ears of their classmates.
Hidden away under assumed names there are tragedies which at one time
have been the talk of the town. The stage affords greater facilities
for a sudden change of identity than any other profession, and for that
reason many young men and women who have a desire to be known by a new
name do their best to get on to it as a means of livelihood.
In commercial life, before a young man or a young woman can secure
an appointment of any kind a reference must be given, and the giving
necessitates the revelation of the real name, and probably the family
story the applicant is most anxious to conceal.
But for the chorus of a musical comedy, for a small part in a play on
tour, the applicant can give any name he or she may choose. There are
no such things as references. All that the manager wants is appearance,
voice, and the possession of a certain amount of ability.
There happened once in the rehearsals of a drama of mine an incident far
more dramatic than any I had put in the piece itself.
One of the scenes was laid in Millbank, in those days a gaol for female
convicts. Anxious to have the details correct, I invited a friend of
mine who had held a high official position in the gaol to come to the
dress rehearsal. He sat by me in the stalls. When the curtain rose on
the prison scene a number of female convicts were standing on the stage
in charge of a warderess.
My friend eyed them critically to see that the dress was worn correctly
and the cap put on properly. At one of the convicts he gazed intently.
When he had passed the scene as correct in detail he turned to me and
said--
"I couldn't help staring at that young lady--the fourth in the row. She
is the living image of a woman who was in my charge ten years ago--Mrs.
----------; you remember the case?"
I did remember it. Mrs. ---------- was a lady for whom there
was considerable sympathy. Maddened by her husband's neglect and
ill-treatment, she shot him with a revolver one night after a fierce
quarrel. The wound was nearly fatal, and the unfortunate woman was
awarded a term of penal servitude. "I never saw such an extraordinary
resemblance to Mrs. ---------- in her convict dress," said the official;
"but, of course, it is a coincidence. Mrs. ---------- was old enough to
be this young lady's mother."
After the act was over I went behind the scenes to make a few
alterations, and I told the young actress "convict" that the gentleman
in front was a prison official, and I added jokingly, "He says you are
the living image of Mrs. ----------, who was at Millbank for the
attempted murder of her husband."
I expected the young lady to laugh, but, to my astonishment, the colour
faded from her face and she became visibly distressed.
"What a dreadful idea!" she gasped. "It frightens me--I--I wish you
hadn't told me."
She walked quickly away, and I thought no more of the incident. Long
afterwards I learnt the truth.
The young actress who had attracted the attention of the prison official
_was_ the daughter of Mrs. ----------. Under another name she had gone
upon the stage. It was a strange coincidence that the daughter of a
female convict should be called upon to represent a female convict in
Millbank before an official who had been at Millbank when her mother was
there.