The Mysteries of Modern London

by George R. Sims

Here lay some time ago a man done to death—a foreigner shot in the streets of London. The man had been tracked by an assassin sent by a secret society from his native land. The society's agent came to London with orders to shoot the condemned man on sight.

Soon after the news of the crime got into the papers, two men of the victim's own nationality came to the mortuary to see if they could identify him.

One glance was sufficient. As they turned shuddering away, one muttered to the other, "This fate is for us, too; we shall be the next." A few days later those men met their doom, and came to lie side by side with the first victim.

The murderer being eventually discovered in the neighbourhood, and brought to bay, shot himself as he was on the point of being arrested. He was brought to this mortuary, too, and made up a gruesome quartette.

This tragedy of vengeance, as thrilling as any story that is told of the Italian Vendetta or the Russian Terrorism, happened in a quiet London suburb. These people lived in modest apartments, without a vestige of romance about them to suggest to the landlady, or the servant girl who waited on them, that they were men whose death-sentence had been pronounced by the committee of a secret society in Eastern Europe, and that one by one they were to fall to the pistol-shot of the man who had drawn the lot which made him their executioner. It reads like a page tom from a wildly sensational story. It happened in a popular London suburb, among the trams and 'buses, the crowded streets and the busy shops.

A portion of the truth was told in the court of the coroner, a good deal that lay behind the tragedy was imagined; but there were elements of mystery in this romance of the East, transplanted to the West, which yet remain to be solved.

Year in, year out, all days of the week, the mysteries of life and death come to this building of sad significance.

At the iron gate that shuts it off from the roadway the mortuary-keeper stood one summer evening. A young workman came along the street whistling. It was the young fellow's wont as he passed every evening on his way home to exchange greeting with the mortuary-keeper if he happened to be at the gate. His greeting was generally a grim joke: "All right, John," he used to say, "I'm not coming in just yet."

This summer evening as he passed he nodded and made his usual joke. "I'm not coming in just yet," he said, and went laughing on his way. He had not gone ten paces before he tottered and fell suddenly to the ground. Almost before the echo of his laughter at his own grim joke had died away, he was carried through the gates.

These are the mysteries of life and death that find their way to the House of Rest by the waterside. They are mysteries perhaps only in the sense that they are phases of the great human drama of which the busy world sees little. We pass our way without a thought of the strange happenings hidden from us by a few thin walls. Upon the mimic stage the fourth wall is always down. On the stage of life it stands and hides from all the working out of the great scheme of things. It is the fourth wall that makes many a mystery over which the world puzzles unexplainable.