A year later I received a letter from her husband. “I have been to the house,” he wrote, “and the present occupants are leaving almost immediately. There have been three deaths there during their tenancy, and they complain of exactly the same disturbances that alarmed us. I have lent them the blue stone.”
CHAPTER VIII
HAUNTINGS IN THE EAST END
Having come to the conclusion that it was quite impossible to earn a living in America, I returned to England as a steerage passenger on the German liner “Elbe.”
It was the last homeward journey she was destined to go, for she was run into on her next outward voyage by the “Crathie,” several hundred miles off the East Coast of England, and sunk with an appalling loss of life. The weather being particularly rough, we were about nine days at sea; and the fact that our quarters were extremely close, consisting of little more than a square foot to each person, coupled with food that I could not eat, made me sincerely thankful when the time came to go ashore. Apart from these details I had nothing to complain of in the way I was treated, for the crew—though barely concealing their hearty contempt for all but the first-class passengers—were to me civil enough. At the same time the experience—an experience I had not bargained for—was one I certainly do not desire to go through again.
I shall never forget how glad I was to find myself once more in an English restaurant, sitting down to a good, square English meal. I spent two nights in Southampton, travelling thence to London.
On arriving at Waterloo, I found myself almost as embarrassed as I had been in New York, for my knowledge of London was extremely limited. I had only been there—excepting when I was up for my Sandhurst Exam.—for an odd day occasionally, and then I had always stayed at a private hotel in Cambridge Street, Hyde Park. Now, however, my funds being no longer equal to the West End, I was forced to look elsewhere for a lodging. After a wearisome search, I at last found a room in Tennyson Street, S.E. That room will take a lot of forgetting. It was very small, very dark, and very beetly. I could hear whole armies of blackbeetles parading the floor and scaling the walls. Occasionally, one dropped with a thud seemingly close to me, and I sprang out of bed in terror, lest it had landed on the counterpane. I honestly believe I am as much afraid of cockroaches as I am of ghosts.
I only stayed in that house three days, and then moved into the attic of a coffee tavern in York Road. That was midway in the ‘nineties, and York Road then was very different from what it is now. In the day-time it was full of frowsily dressed men and women and the fœtid steam from the cheaper kinds of restaurants.
I well remember one shop that boasted of hot rabbit dinners for fourpence; and big pork pies, that had a peculiar fascination for blue-bottles, were sold there, all the year round, for threepence. I often wondered how many people those pies killed, and how any man could be such a villain as to sell them.