_She waits in vain--Messengers from the First Cousin of the Moon--
Witches and wise women--The seventh child of a seventh child--
Secret societies of vengeance--Italy in London_
|THE strange, the weird, the romantic, may be found at every turn of the
great maze of mystery which is called London.
The homes of mystery and romance lie often at our very doors, unknown
and unexpected. We pass a scene that the novelist or the dramatist could
turn to thrilling account, and to us it suggests not even a passing
thought of wonder.
Here is a house in a fashionable road in that part of the north-west
which borders on Hampstead.
It is an ordinary villa residence. There are flowers in the windows,
and all the signs of well-to-do occupation. But in this ordinary-looking
villa there is a room at the back in which the light of day never
penetrates. The shutters are always closed, the door is always kept
locked. Only one person has that key, the lady to whom the house
belongs. She lives there with a brother and a sister, who came to make
their home with her in her hour of distress, and who do their best to
brighten a life that has known a great sorrow.
The lady came to the house a young married woman. It was the house that
she and her fiancé selected and furnished to be their home when they
returned from their honeymoon.
The young couple knew in it one happy month. Then the young husband went
out one day and never returned. From that hour no inkling of his fate
ever reached the unhappy bride, whose reason almost gave way under the
strain and stress of the long agony of suspense.
On the day that he went out from the home to which he was never to
return, the young husband was expected back at six o'clock in the
evening.
It was his birthday, and a little birthday dinner had been arranged, to
which a few intimate friends had been invited.
It was the young wife's first dinner-party, and she took great pride in
the arrangement of the room and the floral decorations of the table.
The table as it was laid out for that little dinner-party remains
to-day. The flowers are dead and withered, the table-linen is yellow
with age, the furniture is faded and decayed, and desolation has settled
on the scene. But the wife so suddenly and mysteriously widowed
refused from the first to allow a thing in the room to be touched. The
birthday-table is still laid for the husband, who will never come home
again.
Here in the south-west of London is a little old-fashioned shop in which
second-hand furniture and curios are sold.
There is nothing out of the common in the shop, yet it has its strange
romance. If you look over the doorway you will see a Chinese name. If
you enter the shop the young lady who comes forward, though she has
Oriental features, addresses you in ordinary English, with perhaps a
slightly Cockney twang.
The shop was founded by her father, a young Chinaman who suddenly
appeared in London. No one knew where he came from. He wore Chinese
dress and a pigtail, and started in business with a hired barrow, with
which he went round to houses in the neighbourhood, buying the odds and
ends that people wanted to get rid of.
Gradually he became less Chinese in appearance. The pigtail went, and
he took to European clothes. He seemed to have prospered, for he took a
little shop, and later on married an Englishwoman.
It was quite a humble little shop at first, but there passed in and out
of it occasionally Chinamen who were evidently grandees. They came in
elegant carriages, and, according to report, they were mandarins.
Once the carriage of the Chinese Ambassador stopped in the street, and
the representative of the Brother of the Sun and First Cousin of the
Moon passed into the shop and remained for a quarter of an hour in the
little back parlour closeted with the Chinaman who had come here from
nowhere, and had started business in England buying old bottles, old
iron, and old rags.
Every one in the street knew the Chinaman, and gradually many became his
tenants, for he bought a good deal of property round about. But no one
ever penetrated the mystery of his connection with the great mandarins
who from time to time visited him, and no one was ever able to form the
faintest idea why the Chinese Ambassador came to interview him in the
back parlour.
The Chinese name is over the door, the Chinaman's children are carrying
on the business at the present moment. They are in everything but
appearance English men and women. The Chinaman himself lies in a London
cemetery, where the broken stones are on his grave. But the mystery
of who he was, and what interest the high representatives of the great
Chinese Emperor had in him, remains unfathomed.
While we are in Chinese company let us cross London to the east and
enter the Chinese quarter, which is still round Lime-house Causeway,
although many of the lodging-house proprietors and opium-den keepers
have moved into High Street, Poplar.
Here is a little shop which looks innocent enough. The only suggestion
that it is an opium den is in the odd-looking little pipes exhibited for
sale in the window.
You may pass up and down the street all day and not see a soul enter
this shop. If you peer in you will see something in Chinese characters
over the door that leads to the inner portion of the premises. If you
were to enter you would be in the presence of a Joss and the strange
worship of the wooden image. Here in the heart of living London are the
mysteries of the East to be found--here you may see phases of life
as they might have been depicted in some side street of Pekin by Guy
Boothby.
To this house opium smokers with strange histories have come again and
again. It was here that an English opium smoker, who had been searched
for in vain by his friends for many months, was found at last, lost to
knowledge of himself, lost to everything except the mad craving for the
drug that had degraded him from a high estate to lie cheek by jowl with
the strange men of the East, who bring their mysteries with them for
awhile to the world's port, and then vanish to be seen no more.
The Londoner may think when he sees high up upon a tapering flagstaff
a red lamp glowing in the darkness of the night that it is intended, by
the small body of men and women who have imbibed the occultism of the
East, to light the wandering Mahatmas home.
Though the general knowledge of the rites of the Theosophists is vague,
there is no concealment about the temples of the worshippers. But there
are strange rites practised in the heart of busy London, and there is no
sign or token given of the meeting-place of those who indulge in them.
In a gloomy synagogue in a by-street of Alien Land the patriarchal Jew
may be seen writing out the sacred amulets and scrolls by the light of
a guttering candle--a picture for a Rembrandt; but no one but her dupes
sees the "witch" or the "wise woman," who still carries on her trade in
the twentieth century, making the charms and the love philtres that she
knows where to sell.
The West End palmists and fortune-tellers flourished for a time and
had their day, and went down before the arm of the law; but a far
more dangerous trade than theirs, which did but minister to a foolish,
fashionable craze, is still carried on daily and nightly in secret in
unsuspected places.
It is nine o'clock at night and the darkness has descended over London.
At the top of a street near Victoria Station, once inhabited by the
well-to-do, but now fallen into the seediness of floor-letting, a cab
stops and a lady closely veiled alights.
She makes her way to one of the houses, looking furtively behind her now
and then. She rings the bell and is admitted.
If we follow her we shall see her descend the stairs to the basement.
She is shown into a room dimly lighted and fantastically draped, and
filled with strange objects.
A dark, sallow-faced woman, clad in a curious Eastern robe, receives
her, and the door is closed and locked.
The woman passes for a seeress--a modern witch. She is consulted by
women of education, women who come to her to gaze into the crystal and
the ink pool, to peer into the future, and who--strange as it may
seem to common sense, level-headed people--implicitly believe in the
supernatural powers of the wily adventuress, the cunning woman who
trades upon their credulity.
We can understand the ignorant servant-girl who pays the half-crown she
can ill spare for some wretched hag in a garret to read the cards for
her and tell her her future; but there is nothing more amazing in
the mysteries of London than the hold which the clairvoyante and the
"divineress"--generally, according to themselves, "the seventh child of
a seventh child"--still have upon the minds of women of education and
position.
There is hardly one of the clairvoyantes who practised in the West until
the law stepped in who is not still carrying on the business, though in
a more secret and a less profitable manner.
Here is a house that the agents would call "a desirable villa
residence." It stands in a long garden at the corner of one of the leafy
roads of St. John's Wood.
Within its walls meets a little band of men and women who go through
strange ceremonies and perform strange rites, and almost worship
as their leader a woman who calls herself a prophetess, and who has
persuaded her ignorant dupes that she is directly appointed to save them
from death. The semblance of death they will know, but their souls will
pass into other bodies, and in a reincarnated state they will continue
to live upon the earth in greater happiness and greater health and
strength and well-being than they ever knew before.
The policeman on duly passes the house at night and flashes his lantern
on the door, but he has no idea of the strange orgies of exaltation
which take place behind the closed shutters of that charming villa
residence.
There are "offerings" to the prophetess, the giving up of jewellery and
"adornments" for the good of the cause, and so it may be that one
day the Old Bailey will see "a prophetess" in the dock again, and the
spectators will look with astonishment at the men and women who enter
the witness-box to tell a story that will startle the newspaper reader
and make the humdrum world open its eyes and say, "Can such things be in
these days of enlightenment?"
In a road running off the outer circle of Regent's Park there is another
house of mystery. It is walled in in front, and there is a door in the
wall which is always kept locked.
If you ring the bell a man-servant will open the little trap in the door
and look at you keenly.
You are not likely to be admitted unless you have satisfied the janitor
that your visit is expected, and that your presence will be welcome to
the master of the house.
The master of the house is a foreigner. The name in which he dwells in
the house is not his own. He is one of the most trusted agents of the
great Revolutionary Party, and his guests are "comrades" who come with
messages from the capitals of Europe.
More than one plot which has startled the world has been arranged in
that ordinary, unromantic-looking house, and its walls have from time to
time sheltered men whose whereabouts certain European Governments were
exceedingly anxious to discover.
The Mafia! We read of this terrible Italian secret society and its
murderous doings in the land of the stiletto, and we accept the printed
stories with a vague suspicion that they belong to modern Italian opera
rather than real life.
But the emissaries of the Mafia--the Society of Vengeance--are tracking
down their prey in the dull, drab streets of our own prosaic city.
If you pass along the Clerkenwell Road you will come to a side street
that dips down into a hollow, and this hollow, though open to the view
of all who pass along the bustling London thoroughfare, is perhaps the
most un-English spot in the whole of England.
As you pass the top of Eyre Street Hill--that is the opening which leads
to the district we call Little Italy--you will see two policemen in
uniform standing together. You will see two policemen always there
after nightfall, and when there is trouble they go down into the hollow
together.
For the natives of Little Italy are given to sudden outbursts of anger,
and then the knife flashes and the pistol shot rings out on the air.
Occasionally, when the quarrel is an ordinary one, which has arisen over
a sweetheart, or perhaps over the wine bottles in the kitchen of the
padrone, the English police may make a capture.
But when the knife or the pistol is used to carry out the sentence
of the Mafia, the agent of that dreaded society who has executed
the "order" with which he was entrusted by the chiefs in Naples, or,
perhaps, in Palermo, finds it no difficult matter to lie concealed from
the most active search the English officers of justice may make.
The ordinary assassin may be denounced and given up by neighbours who
were witnesses of the outrage, but the man of the Mafia is not likely
to be betrayed by an Italian who wants to continue in the peaceable
enjoyment of his life.
It sounds very like a sensational novelette, but it is plain fact. The
Mafia agents who stab or shoot in Little Italy are shielded by those who
fear to offend the society, and an early opportunity is taken of getting
them secretly out of the country. Their mission accomplished, they go
back to Italy.
I have spent more than one night in the kitchen of a padrone. I have
been into most of the houses from floor to basement, even into the
underground cellars, where at night-time they dance the Tarantella, and
I have found the inhabitants of Little Italy a hard-working and civil
lot of men and women, very much more prosperous, and with a far higher
standard of comfort, than we gather from sensational newspaper articles
about ice-cream vendors and organ-grinders. But there are two classes of
inhabitants, the North Italians and the South Italians, and there is
as much difference between them in temperament as there is between a
Scotchman and an Irishman.
The Piedmontese, who are in Little Italy in large numbers, are mostly
paviors and labourers, and they repudiate the acts of violence for which
the district has, or had, a bad name.
If you speak in a lodging-house where the clients are Piedmontese about
the stabbings and shootings, they will say, "Oh yes, the Neapolitans,
perhaps--but not us."
But both North and South know the Mafia, and would hesitate to speak the
truth about any of its members if the truth were likely to do the said
members harm. If you were to ask in Little Italy to-morrow about the
Mafia, they would even deny that its agents were to be found there at
all.
But they _are_ there, and on more than one occasion they have made their
presence felt in the most approved manner of the vendetta as it finds
expression in Italian opera.
In every quarter of London, in the most matter-of-fact environment, the
romance of reality is to be found--a romance as thrilling as anything
the sensational novelist could invent and give to the world with a
certainty that his invention would be looked upon as wildly improbable.
Nothing that is imagined and invented is so astounding as that which
really is, and the most astounding thing is that the existence of
the reality is unsuspected by the people who live constantly in close
proximity to it.
Over much that is strange and terrible in modern Babylon the veil is
wisely drawn by those who write for the great public. In Paris there is
less discretion, and the sores of the city are laid bare for the idle
and the curious to stare at them.
If a writer knowing London wrote with the lack of reticence which
distinguishes the Parisian who knows Paris, the result would be one
beside which all the "startling revelations" that are imagined and
dressed up by fictionists disguised as journalists would pale into
insignificance.