_Flotsam and Jetsam--The midnight coffee-stall--A sense of "life going
on"--A long row of three-storey houses--Sleeping on a staircase--The
burglar's business hours_
|FROM the moment that Big Ben booms the hour of midnight over the great
City the sounds of its ceaseless life begin to diminish in volume.
Silence comes to her never, but over vast spaces between the midnight
and the dawn there reign a peace and a quietude unfamiliar to the ears
of day.
But even in the shadows and silent places lurk the mysteries of
humanity. The lords of life and death look down upon a drama that is
played. The sentinel stars keep watch over a battlefield strewn with the
victims of the human conflict.
The palatial hostelries of wealth that glow with lights far into the
night are divided but by a few yards from the silent river, on which
gleam here and there the dull red lamps of black barges and vessels
moored at the wharves or anchored in the stream.
But between the gilded guest-houses of the wealthy and the river
freighted with the world's wealth there lie scattered heaps of human
wreckage.
Walk along the Embankment in the dead of night, and you will see the
outcasts lying huddled together in corners of the stonework, sometimes
reaching in lines of misery almost to the last step by the water's edge.
Every seat is occupied by homeless men and women, tramps and
tatterdemalions of both sexes, who are camping out because they have not
the money for a bed, and prefer the canopy of heaven to the ceiling of
the refuge or the casual ward.
Every now and then a policeman passes, creeping along in silent shoes
that give no warning of his approach, and as he flashes his lantern on
the faces of the sleepers you can see that they are young and old and
middle-aged men and women who have gone under, and men and women who
were born under and never tried to rise.
There is no mystery about the bulk of them, but now and again amid
the herd of hapless ones you will find traces of refinement and
intelligence; the look of despair may be in the sunken eyes raised to
yours from a row of brutal and sinister faces.
From one of these dormitories of the desolate a woman rose wearily one
night as the dawn was breaking, and, climbing the parapet, dropped into
the river.
She was rescued and charged with attempting to commit suicide. The
magistrate, struck by the refinement of the poor creature's voice and
manner, asked the police-court missionary to see her.
To the missionary the homeless, penniless woman who had staggered in
the dawn from a seat on the Embankment to end her misery in the merciful
river confided her story. He took her to his own home and sought her
friends. They had not seen her for years, and were ignorant of her fate.
Her story was as old as the first love tragedy--a woman's faith and a
man's treachery, and then the shame that hides itself away from all who
knew and cared.
The outcast of the Embankment who leapt to a suicide's grave has taken
her old place in her father's home, and the past is forgotten. That home
is across the Atlantic. Not long ago her people came to London, and she
came with them, travelling with all the comfort and luxury of wealth.
From the window of her room in one of the great hotels she may have
looked out in the hush of the starlit night at the crouching outcasts of
whom she once was one.
Through the long night, in deserted streets and squares, the human
shadows pass, some creeping furtively as if ashamed, others fierce and
reckless prowlers of the darkness, waiting for prey.
Along the main thoroughfares of London, from the West to the East, from
the North to the South, there is never the intense loneliness of the
streets that lie off the track. There the late Londoner and early
Londoner divide the night between them, and as the late brougham or cab
bears the tired pleasure-seeker home to rest, the carts and the wagons
begin to wend their way to the markets and the docks and the great
railway stations.
Here and there along the line of route there are belated groups of men
gathered at the night coffee-stalls. The last reveller has hardly slunk
sleepily home before the early workers begin to make their way into the
streets.
But at the dead of night in many a big thoroughfare, crowded and busy in
the daytime, there is a sense of loneliness and mystery.
It is past two o'clock in the morning, and a young woman, who has
perhaps returned from her late work at the West, stops for a moment
outside a popular theatre in a main street in the East End of London.
There is no one on the broad pavement but herself. A little way off
across the road is a coffee-stall. It is deserted, and the keeper is
dozing in his box.
Two young men come lounging up the street. One of them knows the girl
and greets her by name, and in a friendly way invites her to have a cup
of coffee.
The two men and the girl linger for a few moments at the stall, and the
girl says good night and goes towards her home. The young men pass along
the street and disappear. No one sees them again until six o'clock in
the morning, when a boy and a man notice them coming out of a closed
shop.
In the dead of night these two young men disappeared. No one met them,
no one saw them. When the time came to trace their movements, only the
girl who stood outside the theatre at two o'clock, and a young man
who passed them a little earlier, could be found to give Justice the
information she sought. For Justice laid her hand upon the men and
charged them with being concerned in a crime for which they eventually
paid the penalty on the gallows.
It is in the dead of night, when London sleeps, that crime stalks abroad
warily and plies its trade. The policeman passes on his beat, but the
darkness hides the figures that creep along the streets or crouch
behind high walls, and, defying bolts and bars, enter the houses of the
rich--uninvited guests.
Having secured any valuables they can lay their hands on, they steal
away stealthily to their lairs, and buy a paper the next day to read
about the daring burglary which has been discovered by the early
maidservant as she goes yawning down the stairs to light the kitchen
fire.
The darkness of the night is the burglar's hour, for then he knows that
the better parts of residential London are silent as the grave. And yet
in the deadest hour of night a mighty crowd can be gathered as if by
magic in a few minutes.
There is a red glow in the sky, the cry of "Fire!" rings out, and the
engine rattles past with the thrilling shouts of the men, and instantly
sleeping London wakes and pours a half-dressed crowd of men and women
into the streets. A city of the dead becomes a city of wild, turbulent
life in an instant.
There is no mystery of the City greater than that sudden gathering of
vast crowds in the dead of night to see someone else's house on fire. In
some areas the news spreads from street to street, even at such an hour,
so rapidly that a huge mob is crowding every approach to the burning
building before any of the fire-engines have been able to reach the
scene.
In the neighbourhood of the great stations where the mail trains arrive
between three and four o'clock in the morning, there is a sense of "life
going on" that attracts a certain kind of loafer--a nondescript lounger
totally different from the back-against-the-wall specimen of the
daytime.
If some of those people who are attracted to centres of movement during
the small hours could be tracked to their homes, we should be astonished
to find that a good many of them are in respectable circumstances. They
are generally men living alone, either bachelors or widowers, and some
of them are professional men and the victims of insomnia.
There are men who get up constantly in the middle of the night and
go out "to get rid of their thoughts," as one of the victims of this
peculiar form of distraction once told me. These men haunt the streets
in the dead of night; but they do not choose the lonely places, they
want to see their fellow-men who are still awake and about, and the
railway station with its bustle in the middle of the night has a
peculiar attraction for them.
They wait about on the platform, most of them, as if they were going
to meet friends; they watch the cabs away until the last luggage-laden
four-wheeler has crawled out of the station, and then when the lights
are turned down they go slowly out into the street again to make their
own way home.
There is one phase of London at the dead of night which is remarkable,
but it is not advisable to investigate it if you are alone. To see it
you must spend an hour or two in "the streets with the open doors,"
and these streets are not to be recommended to the stranger between the
hours of I and 4 a.m.
Picture to yourself a long row of three-storey houses, grimy,
monotonous, dilapidated. There is not one house that has not broken
window-panes, either stuffed with rag or pasted across with newspaper.
The stucco has peeled away in many places. Where it is left it is black
with grime.
To each of these houses there is a front door. But it has no knocker,
and by the side of it are no bells. Passed through the hole in the door,
intended originally for a key, there is a short piece of cord or string.
The string is there that the inmates may, if so minded, open or pull the
door to after them.
These doors are never bolted or locked. If they were the tenants would
be seriously inconvenienced, because they come in at all hours of the
night, and pass up the broken, dilapidated stairways to their rooms.
If you waited at the end of the street through the small hours you would
occasionally see rough-looking men come slouching along on their way
home. When one of these men reaches the door of his residence he either
pushes it open with his hand or his shoulder, or, if he is not in an
amiable mood, he probably kicks it open.
Anyone may pull the doors open in such a street and enter, and the
consequence is that occasionally a tenant has to pick his way up the
stairs over the reclining forms of travellers who have taken up their
quarters for the night without any preliminary negotiations with
the landlord. These people are of the same class as those who make a
dormitory of the Embankment, the seats on the bridges and in the public
thoroughfares and Trafalgar Square, and in the mews and stable-yards,
and under railway arches.
In fine weather they may sleep in the streets, in bad weather they make
themselves comfortable on the stairways of low-class tenant "blocks" and
the houses with "the doors that are always open." They used to be called
"'Appy Dossers"--a term the late Lord Salisbury with a smile asked me to
explain when I used it in giving evidence before the Royal Commission on
the Housing of the Working Classes.
Sometimes these people have a room for a week or two, then they put in
a week at the 'appy dosser business. That is why the tenants step over
them with a certain amount of consideration. They themselves, though
they have a room in the house this week for which they are paying rent,
may be glad next week to sleep on the stairs for nothing.
At the Old Bailey, when the Strattons were tried for the Mask murder,
one of the women was asked where she slept when they were turned out of
their lodgings. "On a staircase," was the reply.
But there is a certain etiquette even among the 'appy dossers. It is not
considered good manners to settle down for the night on somebody else's
staircase until after one o'clock, and the usual hour for rising is
between five and six.
In the dead of night strange burthens are borne across the sleeping
city. It is in the early morning that the night watchman, quitting his
post in some great works or storeyard, generally makes the gruesome
discovery which is to fill the Press for many days with the "mystery"
that all classes of readers delight in.
Skulking through the silent, deserted streets go men at war with
society, men living by crime, who under the cover of darkness ply their
perilous trade, ready armed to kill if need be, either the sleeping
householder or the guardian of the night who interrupts them at their
villainous work.
Sometimes they have accomplished their task and are returning to their
homes with the spoil upon them, but so cunningly concealed that they
can pass the policeman strolling on his lonely beat without exciting his
suspicion.
For these men--the professional burglars who follow crime as a
craft--plan and plot beforehand with the strategical skill of a general
arranging an attack upon the enemy. After they have studied the "crib"
they intend to "crack," and ascertained the habits of its inmates, they
frequently walk the route they intend to follow once or twice beforehand
in the night, noting everything by the way.
If you study the details of famous burglaries that have been brought
home to their authors, you will find that the men concerned have made
elaborate calculations, not only of the means of access, but of the
position of the moon--the "Oliver" of the highwayman of the days of
the romance of the road. "Shall we do it to-night?" is frequently the
question asked when the accomplices meet to confer. They know what they
mean to do, and the discussion is only as to whether the conditions are
favourable. And one of the conditions to be considered is whether the
dead of night is likely to be dark or bright.
Most of these men are known to the police, and many of them are
"under observation." Millsom and Fowler were being watched by special
instructions from Scotland Yard all through January and right up to
the time they committed the burglary and murder at Muswell Hill. The
burglars knew this so well that after the crime they hid in Highgate
Wood until between five and six in the morning, and then started to walk
home, thinking, in the words of Millsom's confession, "that at that time
the police would be fairly scarce."
Then they walked from Muswell Hill through Kilburn to North Kensington,
with the proceeds of the crime upon them.
Fowler's clothes were covered with blood-stains. To hide them he wore
Millsom's brown overcoat. Though they were watched and wanted men,
they walked through London reeking from their crime without attracting
attention, because they had timed their return for the quietest part of
the night.
The early hours from two to four are the burglar's hours for business;
the hour for the walk home is later, that criminals returning from work
may be mistaken for honest men going to it.
But there is romance in the dead of night, and the mystery of the
world's work as well as of dark deeds.
London, the mighty city, slumbers not nor sleeps. In the darkest hours
of the night the work is going forward for the needs of the great city,
that will presently wake to another day of life.
The side streets leading to the great markets are blocked with a great
traffic of laden vans. The news of the world is being prepared in great
printing offices for the million eyes as yet closed in sleep. Through
the quiet wards of the great hospitals the sisters of suffering move
gently from bed to bed, tending the maimed and sick.
The refreshment houses of the night-workers are open, and between four
and five o'clock many of them are packed with breakfasting guests. Down
by the dock gates a great crowd of men has gathered long before the grey
dawn throws their anxious and often careworn faces into relief. These
men have waited, many of them, through the dead of night to be nearest
to the great gates when they open, and the foremen come to choose the
hands that are needed for the unloading of the ships.
And there among the crowd waiting, some of them in the last despair for
a day's work, you may find many a mystery. All the men who wait in dumb
patience through the long hours for the dock gates to open are not of
the labouring class. The wreckage drifts to the dock gates for a job,
because it is the great market for unskilled labour.
I have seen in the crowd army men, 'varsity men, City men, actors,
stockbrokers, and once a clergyman. To the dock gates there came a year
or two back, day after day, a baronet. He was ill-clad, hungry, and
broken-hearted. He got a job at last, only to be sent away before he had
done a couple of hours' work, because he was too weak for the task he
had undertaken in his last desperate strait.
But as the dead of night yields to the dawn, there are brighter scenes
to look upon than the listless, anxious-eyed crowd at the dock gates and
the wharves of the great river of wealth.
Soon after four, in many a little side street, the professional caller
goes his round to rouse the sleepers who must be early astir, and by
five there is a plentiful sprinkling of healthy-looking, clean-faced,
stalwart men tramping along steadily, pipe in mouth and cloth-wrapped
dinner in hand, wending their way to the labour of the day.
The trains have begun to discharge their human freight. Over the bridges
pours a steady stream of humanity, the steam whistles sound shrilly on
the morning air, the warning bells of the factories clang noisily. The
rest of the night is over, the work of the day has begun, the evil-doer
has slunk away into the darkness, and the honest breadwinners go
cheerfully to their work, looking the whole world in the face.