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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.