V
By a young journalist, or an old one, there is always an adventure to be found in London, as in any great city of the world where the passions of men and women, the conflict of life, the heroism and crimes of human nature, its dreams, its madness, and its faith, are but thinly masked behind the commonplace aspect of modern streets, and beneath the drab cloak of dullness of modern civilization.
It was my hobby in those early Fleet Street days to explore the underworld of London and to get behind the scenes of its monstrous puppet show. I sought out the queer characters not yet “standardized” by the discipline of compulsory education or the conventions of middle-class manners.
I dived into the foreign quarters of London and found that most nations of Europe, and the races of the East, had their special sanctuaries in the great old city, in which they preserved their own speech and habits and faith.
In the Russian quarter I met victims of the tyranny of Czardom, who had escaped from Siberian prisons and still bore the marks of their chains and lashes; and the Russian Jews, too, who had come to England to save themselves from the pogroms of Riga and other cities. I found many of them working as tailors and seamstresses in back rooms of tenement houses, Whitechapel way, abominably overcrowded, but earning high wages. It was a revelation to me that they did most of the “black” work for great West End firms, so that Mayfair received its garments from the East End, with any diseases that might be carried with them from those fœtid little factories. Thousands of them were employed in cigarette factories, and spent their days filling little spills of paper with the yellow weed, incredibly fast. According to the tradition of not muzzling the ox that treads the corn, they were allowed to smoke as much as they liked, and both men and women smoked continually.
I made a study of German London, which, at that time, before something happened like an earthquake, had as many German clubs as any good-sized city of the Fatherland, and several German churches, workers’ unions, theatrical and musical societies.
In Soho I poked about French London, lunched at the Petit Riche or dined at the Gourmet, and between Wardour Street and Old Compton Street met the French girls who made artificial flowers for the ballets and pantomimes, silk tights for the fairies of the footlights, and embroidered shoes which twinkled on the boards.
Italy in London was one of my earliest discoveries as a young writer in search of the picturesque. It was but a ten minutes’ walk from my first office, and often in lunch time I used to saunter that way, stopping to listen to the English cheap-jacks in Leather Lane, on the other side of Holborn, and then plunging into a labyrinth of narrow lanes and courtyards entirely inhabited by Italians.
It was a little Naples, in its color, its smells, its dirt. Across the courtyards Italian women stretched their “washing”; and blue petticoats and scarlet bodices, and silk scarves for women’s hair gave vivid color to these London alleys. The women, as beautiful as Raphael’s Madonnas, sang at their washtubs, surrounded by swarms of bambini.
Here, under a baker’s shop kept by an Italian padrone, slept o’ nights the little organ grinders and hurdy-gurdy boys, who used to wander through the London suburbs and far into the countryside, to the delight of English nurseries from which coppers were flung down to these grubby, dark-eyed urchins with little shivering monkeys in their coat pockets or on their music boxes. They were the slaves of the padrone and had to bring him all their earnings and get beaten if they did not bring enough, before they slept in the cellars of this London slum, among the black beetles and the rats.
In one back yard lived a gray bear, belonging to two wanderers from the mountains of Savoy, and I used to hear the rattle of his chains before they led him out on his hind legs with a big pole between his paws.
Above a big yard crowded with piano organs sat, in a little room at the top of a high ladder, a fat old Italian who put the music on the streets. He sat before an open organ case with a roll of cartridge paper into which he stabbed little holes, which afterward made the notes played by a spiked cylinder when the organ grinder turned his handle. It was he who selected the tunes, thus conferring immortality on many poor devils of musicians who heard their melodies whistled by the errand boys to this music of the streets, and became famous thereby. But it was the fat old Italian at the top of the tall ladder who was the interpreter of their genius to the popular ear of the great public of the streets and slums. He put in the trills, and the “twiddley bits,” stabbing with his bradawl on the cartridge roll, as though inspired by the divine afflatus, while his hair, above a massive face and three chins, was all curls and corkscrews, as though crotchets, and quavers, semiquavers, and demi-semiquavers, arpeggios and chromatics were thrusting through his brain.
In other yards were men all white from head to heel, who made the plaster casts of Napoleon and Nelson, Queen Victoria and General Gordon, Venus and Mercury, and other favorite characters of history, sold by hawkers in Ludgate Hill and other haunts of high art at low prices. They also made the casts of classical figures for art schools and museums.
In the back yards, the basements and the slum kitchens was another profitable form of industry which was a monopoly of Italians in London in the pre-war days. That was the ice cream trundled through the streets with that alluring call to youth, “Hokey-pokey penny a lump!” From surroundings appallingly free from sanitary supervision came this nectar and ambrosia which the urchins of the London streets found an irresistible temptation.
It was a careless word on the subject of this lack of sanitation in the ice-cream factories which nearly ended my career as a journalist before it was fairly begun. Requiring some additional photographs for the second instalment of some articles I was writing for a magazine—the first, almost, that I ever wrote—I went one Sunday morning to Italy in London with an amateur photographer. We went into one of the courtyards where I had made friends with some of the pretty washerwomen, but I was no sooner observed by a few of them than, as though by magic, the courtyard was filled with a considerable crowd of those whom the Americans call “Wops.”
They came up from the basements where they slept as many as forty in a cellar—organ grinders, ice-cream vendors, bear leaders, waiters. I was obviously the object of passionate dislike. They surrounded me with violent gestures and torrential speech, not one word of which did I understand. At first I was mildly curious to know what all this noise was about, but I saw that things were serious when several young men began to flash about their clasp-knives. Help came at a critical moment. Three London “Bobbies” appeared on the scene, as they generally do, in the nick of time.
“Now, what’s all this about?”
Seldom before had I heard such a friendly and comforting inquiry.
The crowd melted away. In the quietude that followed, one young waiter who remained explained to me that my published article on the Italian quarter had caused great offense, as my reference to the ice-cream factories had been taken as an insult. I had used the phrase “dirty places” and the Italian colony desired my death. They did not get it that Sunday morning. But I was sorry to have hurt their feelings, as I had an affectionate regard for those people.
I was abominably near a nasty accident, owing to a misplaced sense of humor, when the Mohammedans in London celebrated the Feast of Ramadan, as they do each year at the Holborn Restaurant. That is one of the most unlikely places in which to meet Romance. On all the other days of the year it is given over to public banquets of Odd Fellows and Good Fellows, Masons, and Rotarians, and the business man of London when he puts on a hard white shirt, and expands his manly bosom under the influence of comradeship, and the sense of holding an honorable place among his fellow men of the same social grade as himself. Yet, in the Holborn Restaurant there is the mystery and the romance of the East, an astonishing, and almost incredible, assembly of Oriental types, on that day of Mohammedan rejoicing.
The first time I went, there were several Indian princes in richly colored turbans and gold-embroidered coats, some Persians in white robes, Turks wearing the scarlet fez, a number of Arabs, some full-blooded African negroes, and a group of Indian students. White tablecloths, used as a rule by business men at their banquets, were spread on the floor, and these were used as kneeling mats by the Mohammedans, who bowed to the East with their foreheads touching the ground and joined in a chant, rising and falling in the Oriental scale, with strange wailings, as one among them read extracts from the Koran, and between whiles seemed to carry on a musical and melancholy conversation with the Faithful.
My trouble was that I wanted to laugh. There was nothing to laugh at, and much to admire in the intense faith of these Mohammedan worshipers, but there are times, probably due to nervousness, when some little demon tickles one into a desperate desire to relieve one’s emotion by mirth. It is what schoolgirls call “the giggles.” I caught the eye of an enormous negro, staring at me ferociously, and I failed to hide a fatuous smile. It was the queer nasal lamentations of those kneeling men, and this scene in the Holborn Restaurant, where I had dined the very night before with business men in boiled shirts, which stirred my sense of the ridiculous, against all my spirit of reverence and decency. I was alarmed at myself, and hurriedly left the room.
Outside the door I leaned against the wall and laughed with my handkerchief to my mouth, because of this Arabian Nights’ dream in the ridiculous commonplace of the Holborn Restaurant. As I did so, the tall negro who had been eying me appeared suddenly before me in the darkness of the passage. His eyes seemed to blaze with rage, and all the wrath of Islam was in him, and he crouched a little as though to make a spring at me. My misplaced sense of humor left me immediately! I was out of the Holborn Restaurant and on top of a ’bus bound for Oxford Circus, with astonishing rapidity.
It was not only among the foreigners of London that I found strange scenes and odd characters. The life of a journalist brings him into touch with the eccentricities of human nature, and trains him to keep his eyes open for rare birds, philosophers in back streets, odd volumes in the bookshelf.
It was by accident that I discovered a very queer fellow who revealed to me a romantic profession. I was calling on a Member of Parliament in the old Queen Anne house behind Westminster Abbey, when I saw a smart gig standing by the pavement, a well-dressed young man with a clean-shaven face, long nose, and green eyes, and, up against the wall, a sack. It was the sack which astonished me. Filled with some bulky-looking material, it was not like an ordinary sack, but was heaving in a most peculiar way. I ventured to address the young man with the gig.
“What on earth’s the matter with that sack?”
He grinned, and said, “Want to know?”
Then, very cautiously, he opened the mouth of the sack, made a sharp nip with forefinger and thumb, and brought out a big-sized rat.
“There are four hundred in that bag,” he remarked proudly, “and all alive and kicking. One has to handle ’em carefully. They bite like blazes.”
“What are they for?” I asked. “What are you going to do with them?”
“Sell ’em to fancy gents who like a little sport with their dogs on Sunday, down Mitcham way. Care to have my card?”
He handed me a visiting card, and I read the inscription, which notified that my new acquaintance was
“Rat Catcher to the Lord Mayor and the City of London.”
I made an appointment with this dignitary, and found that he was the modern Pied Piper, who spent his nights in luring the rats of London from riverside warehouses, city restaurants, and other establishments along the bed of the Thames where they swarmed by the thousand.
“Great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats,
Brown rats, black rats, grey rats, tawny rats,
Grave old plodders, gay young friskers,
Fathers, mothers, uncles, cousins,
Cocking tails and pricking whiskers,
Families by tens and dozens....”
Every night when the city folk had left their chop-houses or their warehouses, this mysterious fellow with the greenish eyes went in quietly with four big wire cages, some netting, and a long willow wand. The nets, which had pouched pockets, he put up against the passages and doorways. Then, in the absolute darkness, he stood motionless for an hour. Presently there came a patter of tiny feet, a squeaking, a glint of ravenous little eyes. They were all round him, searching for the crumbs, ravenously. Suddenly he uttered a strange beastlike cry, in his throat, like yodeling, and whipped the floor with his long white wand. The rats were mesmerized, stupefied. They tried to make their way back to their holes, but fell into the poacher’s nets, dozens and scores, on a good hunting night. He emptied them into the cages, covered them with white cloths, stood motionless again, waited again, made a second bag. At dawn he departed with his sack well loaded, to sell to “fancy gents” at four-pence each, in the suburbs of London.
The foreign element in London was, on the whole, very law abiding. For centuries London had been the sanctuary of political refugees from many countries of persecution, and it was a tradition, and a good tradition, of England, that no questions should be asked as to the political faith of those who desired shelter from their own rulers. Even the revolutionaries of Europe, and the “intellectual” anarchists, had the good sense, for a long time, not to stir up trouble or attack the laws of the land in which they found such generous exile. This rule, however, was abruptly broken by a gang of foreign bandits who carried out a series of alarming robberies, and, when tracked down at last, shot a police inspector and wounded others.
One of their own men was mortally wounded in the affray and carried bleeding to a house in Grove Street, Whitechapel, one of the worst streets in London, where he died. He was a young Russian, as handsome as a Greek god, in the opinion of the surgeons of the London Hospital, with whom I happened to be lunching when one of the juniors rushed in with the news that the corpse had been secured, against all competitors, by the “London.”
It was the death of this Russian which gave the clue to the habits and whereabouts of the gang with whom he had been connected. Their women were caught, and “blew the gaff,” and it was discovered that the leader of the gang was another young Russian called Peter the Painter. Scores of Scotland Yard detectives set out on the trail, and another police inspector lost his life in the endeavor to arrest three of the bandits at a house in Sidney Street, Whitechapel, where they defied all attempts at capture by a ruthless use of automatic pistols. Siege was laid to the house by the police and detectives, armed with revolvers, and an astounding episode happened in the heart of London.
For some reason, which I have forgotten, I went very early that morning to the Chronicle office, and was greeted by the news editor with the statement that a hell of a battle was raging in Sidney Street. He advised me to go and look at it.
I took a taxi, and drove to the corner of that street, where I found a dense crowd observing the affair as far as they dared peer round the angle of the walls from adjoining streets. Heedless at the moment of danger, which seemed to me ridiculous, I stood boldly opposite Sidney Street and looked down its length of houses. Immediately in front of me four soldiers of one of the Guards’ regiments lay on their stomachs, protected from the dirt of the road by newspaper “sandwich” boards, firing their rifles at a house halfway down the street. Another young Guardsman, leaning against a wall, took random shots at intervals while he smoked a woodbine. As I stood near him, he winked and said, “What a game!”
It was something more than a game. Bullets were flicking off the wall like peas, plugging holes into the dirty yellow brick, and ricocheting fantastically. One of them took a neat chip out of a policeman’s helmet, and he said, “Well, I’ll be blowed!” and laughed in a foolish way. It was before the war, when we learned to know more about the meaning of bullets. Another struck a stick on which a journalistic friend of mine was leaning in an easy, graceful way. His support and his dignity suddenly departed from him.
“That’s funny!” he said, seriously, as he saw his stick neatly cut in half at his feet.
A cinematograph operator, standing well inside Sidney Street, was winding his handle vigorously, quite oblivious of the whiz of bullets which were being fired at a slanting angle from the house, which seemed to be the target of the prostrate Guardsmen.
A large police inspector, of high authority, shouted a command to his men.
“What’s all that nonsense? Clear the people back! Clear ’em right back! We don’t want a lot of silly corpses lying round.”
A cordon of police pushed back the dense crowd, treading on the toes of those who would not move fast enough.
I found myself in a group of journalists.
“Get back there!” shouted the police.
But we were determined to see the drama out. It was more sensational than any “movie” show. Immediately opposite was a tall gin palace—“The Rising Sun.” Some strategist said, “That’s the place for us!” We raced across before the police could outflank us.
A Jew publican stood in the doorway, sullenly.
“Whatcher want?” he asked.
“Your roof,” said one of the journalists.
“A quid each, and worth it,” said the Jew.
At that time, before the era of paper money, some of us carried golden sovereigns in our pockets, one to a “quid.” Most of the others did, but, as usual, I had not more than eighteenpence. A friend lent me the necessary coin, which the Jew slipped into his pocket as he let me pass. Twenty of us, at least, gained access to the roof of “The Rising Sun.”
It was a good vantage point, or O.P., as we should have called it later in history. It looked right across to the house in Sidney Street in which Peter the Painter and his friends were defending themselves to the death—a tall, thin house of three stories, with dirty window blinds. In the house immediately opposite were some more Guardsmen, with pillows and mattresses stuffed into the windows in the nature of sandbags as used in trench warfare. We could not see the soldiers, but we could see the effect of their intermittent fire, which had smashed every pane of glass and kept chipping off bits of brick in the anarchists’ abode.
The street had been cleared of all onlookers, but a group of detectives slunk along the walls on the anarchists’ side of the street at such an angle that they were safe from the slanting fire of the enemy. They had to keep very close to the wall, because Peter and his pals were dead shots and maintained something like a barrage fire with their automatics. Any detective or policeman who showed himself would have been sniped in a second, and these men were out to kill.
The thing became a bore as I watched it for an hour or more, during which time Mr. Winston Churchill, who was then Home Secretary, came to take command of active operations, thereby causing an immense amount of ridicule in next day’s papers. With a bowler hat pushed firmly down on his bulging brow, and one hand in his breast pocket, like Napoleon on the field of battle, he peered round the corner of the street, and afterward, as we learned, ordered up some field guns to blow the house to bits.
That never happened, for a reason which we on “The Rising Sun” were quick to see.
In the top-floor room of the anarchists’ house we observed a gas jet burning, and presently some of us noticed the white ash of burnt paper fluttering out of a chimney pot.
“They’re burning documents,” said one of my friends.
They were burning more than that. They were setting fire to the house, upstairs and downstairs. The window curtains were first to catch alight, then volumes of black smoke, through which little tongues of flame licked up, poured through the empty window frames. They must have used paraffin to help the progress of the fire, for the whole house was burning with amazing rapidity.
“Did you ever see such a game in London!” exclaimed the man next to me on the roof of the public house.
For a moment I thought I saw one of the murderers standing on the window sill. But it was a blackened curtain which suddenly blew outside the window frame and dangled on the sill.
A moment later I had one quick glimpse of a man’s arm with a pistol in his hand. He fired and there was a quick flash. At the same moment a volley of shots rang out from the Guardsmen opposite. It is certain that they killed the man who had shown himself, for afterward they found his body (or a bit of it) with a bullet through the skull. It was not long afterward that the roof fell in with an upward rush of flame and sparks. The inside of the house from top to bottom was a furnace.
The detectives, with revolvers ready, now advanced in Indian file. One of them ran forward and kicked at the front door. It fell in, and a sheet of flame leaped out.... No other shot was fired from within. Peter the Painter and his fellow bandits were charred cinders in the bonfire they had made.
So ended the “Battle of Sidney Street,” which created intense excitement and indignation throughout England, and threw a glare of publicity on to the secret haunts of the foreign anarchists in London.
I was one of those who directed the searchlight, for the very next day, with Eddy, my colleague, I took up residence at 62 Sidney Street, and explored the underworld of Whitechapel and the Anarchist clubs of the Russian and German Jews, who were the leading spirits of a philosophy which is now known as Bolshevism. And in that quest I had some strange adventures, and met some very queer folk.