_The inquest and the garden party--A policeman sits behind the
screen--The portrait of a prosperous impostor--From his wife's death-bed
to the House--The judge and his pet dog--Tea and cakes while they wait
for the sentence_
|UNDER the trees in the garden the tables are spread for a pastoral
fête. Smiling waitresses are handing ices and claret cup and
strawberries and cream to daintily-gowned ladies who are sitting in the
shade and chatting gaily with their admiring cavaliers. I come out from
a little building in the grounds and gaze at the fair and festive scene.
As I see the pretty frocks and pretty faces, and listen to the rippling
laughter, I cannot help being struck by the vivid contrast between the
tragedy I have that moment left and the comedy I have come upon.
These grounds are the grounds of a famous hospital, and the company
are gathered together under the trees after listening to speeches
and witnessing the presentation of prizes in the great hall of the
institution.
I come through the little door of the out-building to step right into
the joy of life, and the door as it closes behind has shut away a
tragedy. Behind it lies a dead man upon whom the verdict of a coroner's
jury has been pronounced.
I am not easily upset, and I have looked in my professional wanderings
upon many gruesome sights, but my nerves have been sorely tried during
the five minutes I have been inside that little out-building of a great
hospital.
There were only two men inside it when I entered, and one of them was
dead. The living man was the inquest porter, and he was spending the
blazing summer afternoon in giving back to the dead one the shape and
impress of humanity.
It was a sight to make the unaccustomed spectator shudder, and I only
lingered long enough to hear the story of the tragedy. Then I passed out
again into the sunshine and found myself at a garden party. I looked at
the charming scene and the smiling faces of the fair guests; I listened
to the rippling laughter and the musical clink of the ice in the cooling
wine cups, and I could not help thinking of the strangeness of the
contrast. Only a few inches of space and a wooden door separated the
garden party from the dead-house.
Not one fair visitor in that gay crowd had the faintest idea of what was
happening within a few yards of where she sat in the sunshine under the
trees eating strawberries and cream.
As I passed the group a young lady whom I knew came towards me. "What a
delightful place this is!" she said. "Really, I never thought a hospital
was so charming."
"Charming" seemed a strange word to apply to a hospital. But in our
great palaces of pain to-day the eye is constantly cheered, and in the
note of colour and comfort the casual visitor forgets the anguish that
lies hidden beneath the gay coverlets and behind the pretty curtains.
Here is a hospital ward that an artist might delight in. The colour
scheme is soothing to the eye. Along the ward are little tables on which
stand bowls and vases of daintily arranged flowers. In the centre of the
ward is a square of carpet of a soft artistic green. A young lady with a
basket of roses is passing from bed to bed. She places one of her sweet
flowers in the hand of every sufferer.
Outside the sun is shining and the birds are singing. The scene is
delightful, and the visitor forgets the pain of the patients in the
charm of the environment.
But at the far end of the room there is a screen. Behind that screen is
a bed on which lies a man white and motionless, with his throat swathed
in surgical bandages.
Beside the bed, hidden also by the screen, sits a policeman.
The visitor sees the flowers and the pretty coverlets and curtains, the
polished floors, and the soft green art carpet. But he does not see the
horror behind the screen; he does not suspect it, for he is not allowed
to go near enough to know that the screen conceals anything at all.
The man behind the screen was brought to the hospital with a gaping
wound in his throat. He had inflicted it himself, after stabbing the
wife who lay by his side. The woman may die. She is in another part of
the hospital. When the man is well enough he will be taken to prison. If
the woman dies the charge against him will be murder. Night and day in
that charmingly arranged, flower-decorated ward, the officer of justice
sits guarding, not a patient, but a prisoner.
In the next bed lies a young man who is rapidly approaching
convalescence. His happy wife bends over him with tender love in her
eyes. The sunshine of returning life and the shadow of a dreadful death
are separated only by a few inches of polished floor and a little table
on which stands a bowl of roses.
The world once rang with the story of the Tichborne Claimant. The
romance of that colossal imposture will be told again and again for many
a long year to come.
In the days when he was still "Sir Roger" to the great public, I met the
Claimant and conversed with him. Long after the huge edifice of fraud
had crumbled to the dust I made the acquaintance of some members of the
Orton family, and from them received certain photographs, which I added
to my souvenirs of famous cases.
After he had served his sentence the Claimant made a confession,
which he sent to a weekly newspaper. Later on he tried to withdraw the
confession, but it was substantially true, and its publication destroyed
the last vestige of faith which some few people still had in him.
After this "Sir Roger" gradually dropped out of public knowledge. He
lived quietly and meanly in furnished rooms in a street in Marylebone.
In these rooms he died. He was taken to the Marylebone mortuary, and
there one sunny morning I went to see him in his coffin.
A gravel path bordered by flowers and trees leads to the hostel of the
dead. After I had seen the Claimant, the adventurous life ended at last,
the lying lips closed for ever in the eternal silence, I came back along
that flower-bordered pathway and out into the busy thoroughfare.
My way home lay through a long street of private houses. Passing one of
the houses, I looked up at the windows of the drawing-room floor, and
the thought of the dead man I had left came vividly back to me. For in
these rooms there lived for many years a gentleman whose name was on
every one's lips in the days of the great Tichborne trial. He believed
in the Claimant implicitly. He found large sums of money for "Sir Roger"
during the years that the case remained undecided.
Long after the butcher of Wapping had gone to reduce his weight on a
convict regime, his friend and supporter took this house. He lived there
and died there, and up to the day of his death, quaint and eccentric
in many things, he still believed that Arthur Orton was Sir Roger
Tichborne, Bart., of the B.K.
There were many mementoes of the old Tichborne days in the possession of
his former supporter. When he died he left them to his housekeeper. His
housekeeper kept the house on, and let a portion of it in apartment. I
knew, for I had seen them, that the Tichborne relics were still in the
drawing-room. One of them was a portrait of the Claimant, taken in the
days of his prosperity, when the Tichborne Bonds had been put on the
market and money was pouring in. I could not resist the temptation of
calling and telling the lady of the house of the Claimant's death,
and asking to see the portraits and the relics. There they stood as I
remembered them in the old days. The portrait of "Sir Roger" was on the
old-fashioned chiffonier, standing between two little vases of flowers.
I looked at the smiling face of the prosperous impostor in his heyday a
few minutes after I had seen Arthur Orton lying in the parish mortuary.
*****
A nurse from one of the big nursing institutions has been sent for
hurriedly to a woman who is lying dangerously ill in cheap apartments in
Pimlico.
Nurses are accustomed to contrasts. One week they may be tending a
patient in a magnificent mansion, the next they may be in charge of a
case where the surroundings are of the humblest description.
The nurse whose adventure I am about to tell did not particularly
like the look of the house to which she had been summoned. Her quick,
professional eye read the character of the inmates before she had passed
through the hall into the room occupied by her patient.
The patient, a woman of about five-and-thirty, was what is technically
known as "a drink case." The doctor who had been in attendance and
telephoned to the institution was in the room waiting for the nurse.
"She is very bad," he said, "and I don't think there is much hope. I
have ascertained who she is, and I have communicated with her husband.
He may come this afternoon or this evening."
At eight o'clock in the evening a gentleman called and asked to see Mrs.
----------. He saw the nurse and told her the doctor had informed him
that Mrs. ---------- was ill. He asked to see her alone.
The visitor, a man of about fifty, remained alone with the sick woman
for a few minutes. Then he came out and spoke to the nurse.
"She is very bad," he said. "Does the doctor give any hope?"
The nurse shook her head. "Very little," she replied.
Two days afterwards the blinds were down in the Pimlico lodging-house.
The patient was dead.
The morning after the visitor had called, the nurse read the daily
paper, and, because a certain fact which had come to her knowledge had
aroused her curiosity, she turned to the Parliamentary Report.
A well-known and distinguished member of Parliament had made a speech
the previous evening which had attracted general attention, and which
was reproduced in full, as it was on a burning question of the day.
The politician had gone from the bed of the dying woman in the Pimlico
lodging-house to the House of Commons to make the speech of the evening.
The woman whom he had called to see he had not spoken to for many years.
But she was his wife. The dying woman had revealed her identity to the
doctor, and had implored him to let her husband know of her whereabouts
and to beg him to come and see her.
*****
In his Memoirs Lord Brampton, known to an earlier generation as Sir
Henry Hawkins, quotes a little article written about his famous dog
Jack, and says he wishes he knew who the author was.
I have not written to Lord Brampton telling him that the words he quotes
are mine. If I refer to them here, it is because the great judge's pet
was always associated in my mind with a vivid contrast.
Many years ago I was in a provincial town where a man was being tried
for murder. I went to the court and heard the trial, and was present
when the prisoner was sentenced to death. I saw the judge upon the Bench
with the black cap upon his head, and I heard him pronounce the awful
words of doom.
Early the next morning I went for a walk to a rural suburb of the town.
Crossing a meadow I came upon a gentleman who was also taking a country
stroll. In the middle of the meadow he was playing with his dog. He had
a piece of stick in his hand, and the dog was jumping up and barking,
and eagerly demanding in canine language that the stick should be
thrown.
The smiling gentleman romping with his dog in the morning sunshine was
the stem judge who had the previous evening sentenced a man to death.
I recognized the dog before I recognized his master, because I had
met Jack at Worcester Assizes, and had seen him held on a lead by his
master, solemnly escorted by the javelin men, who met the Judge at
Worcester Station to accompany him to his lodgings.
I can imagine no greater contrast than that between the solemn
procession illustrating the majesty of the law and the antics in which
Jack indulged as he followed the javelin men. The contrast is hardly
a London one, but it is permissible to mention it here, as Jack, the
famous judge's dog, was a great London celebrity as well as a provincial
one.
*****
A fashionable London church is filled with flowers and palms. The pews
are crowded with pretty women and handsome men. Outside the church there
is an eager, expectant crowd that is with difficulty kept back from the
red carpet under the awning.
The bridesmaids have arrived and are waiting in the porch. Presently a
carriage drives up, and there is a buzz of admiration as the beautiful
and aristocratic bride alights, and, leaning on the arm of her father,
enters the church.
There is a bishop at the altar, and he is "assisted" by a distant
relative of the bridegroom. The service is fully choral, and the lady
journalists are taking notes of the dresses for tomorrow's newspapers.
As the bridal party comes out of the church there is a little accident.
A man falls in a fit in the crowd, and the policeman, turning to help
him, the people surge up, and the bridal procession is interrupted. In
the confusion some of the flowers in the bride's bouquet become detached
and fall to the ground. A workman with a sad, careworn face bends down
and picks them up. He will take them home when his work is over. The
flowers of the bride's bouquet will lie on the breast of the dead girl
who has given him a year of happy wedded life, and now lies dead in the
desolate little home.
The fair young bride of the West will know nothing of the dead wife in
the East. But the flowers that were bought for the bridal of the one
will lie in the coffin of the other.
******
Of all the dramatic contrasts of our modern London life few are so
striking as those which are conventional at a trial for murder at the
Old Bailey.
In the shadow of death on the last day of the trial sits the prisoner,
while a large portion of the spectators take the proceedings as an
interesting and sometimes thrilling form of entertainment.
There are rooms set apart in the Old Bailey for the necessary
refreshment of officials connected with the court, and in one of these,
while the jury are deliberating on their verdict, and the prisoner is
waiting in the cells below in feverish agony, lady visitors take tea and
cakes, and male visitors have coffee and cigarettes.
In the corridors of the court there are little groups chatting together,
and the talk is not always of the trial.
On the emotional man surveying the scene and listening to the light
conversation, sometimes to the jokes, this feature of a murder trial
makes a vivid impression. He looks around him at the light-hearted
groups and thinks of the dumb despair of the man or woman who waits,
white-faced and terror-stricken, in a cell below the dock.
And when with the solemn words of the death sentence ringing in his ears
he passes out of the court into the street, and the newsboys rush by him
shouting "All the winners," the contrast is complete.
* ****
One evening, in a quiet side street in the south of London, there
floated through an open window the sound of a banjo. Near the window sat
a man. He was amusing himself with the banjo, and presently he played a
cake-walk tune. The children in the street heard the music and began to
dance to it, and the man played on.
An hour or two later he gave himself up at the police-station. He had
murdered his little girl "to save her from her mother," he stated at his
trial. The child was lying dead in the room while he played the banjo
and the merry children danced the cake-walk in the roadway below.
*****
Not long ago, on a bitter winter day, I passed along the Euston Road.
Outside the soup kitchen stood a shivering crowd of penniless men and
women.
Up the street in front of me went a tall, military-looking man walking
with a beautifully dressed woman.
Opposite the soup kitchen the pair stopped for a moment and looked at
the pitiful spectacle. Suddenly the woman gave a little cry of distress.
"Oh! come along," she exclaimed--"Jack's there."
They passed rapidly along, and I stayed and watched the poor wretches
shivering in the blizzard, and waiting for the food that charity had
made possible for them.
Presently I saw the military man come back. He crossed the road, and,
going up to a man of about forty--refined-looking even in his rags--he
slipped a sovereign into his hand and then walked rapidly away.
The well-dressed man was an officer in the Army. He was engaged to the
lady with whom he was walking. The ragged outcast waiting at the soup
kitchen was the lady's husband, from whom she had been divorced some
years previously.
She was an actress well known in musical comedy. Some little time ago
she left the stage, and her marriage with Captain ---------- was
announced. When I saw the announcement I remembered the soup kitchen in
the Euston Road and the ragged outcast to whom his wife sent a sovereign
by the man she was about to marry.
The contrasts of life in the great city meet us at every turn. Those
that are sharply defined--the wealth and the poverty, the happiness and
the misery--we look upon and understand; but the greatest contrasts of
all are those which fail to appeal to us because we cannot see beneath
the surface of things as they are.