I have spent more than one night in the kitchen of a padrone. I have been into most of the houses from floor to basement, even into the underground cellars, where at night-time they dance the Tarantella, and I have found the inhabitants of Little Italy a hard-working and civil lot of men and women, very much more prosperous, and with a far higher standard of comfort, than we gather from sensational newspaper articles about ice-cream vendors and organ-grinders. But there are two classes of inhabitants, the North Italians and the South Italians, and there is as much difference between them in temperament as there is between a Scotchman and an Irishman.
The Piedmontese, who are in Little Italy in large numbers, are mostly paviors and labourers, and they repudiate the acts of violence for which the district has, or had, a bad name.
If you speak in a lodging-house where the clients are Piedmontese about the stabbings and shootings, they will say, "Oh yes, the Neapolitans, perhaps—but not us."
But both North and South know the Mafia, and would hesitate to speak the truth about any of its members if the truth were likely to do the said members harm. If you were to ask in Little Italy to-morrow about the Mafia, they would even deny that its agents were to be found there at all.
But they are there, and on more than one occasion they have made their presence felt in the most approved manner of the vendetta as it finds expression in Italian opera.
In every quarter of London, in the most matter-of-fact environment, the romance of reality is to be found—a romance as thrilling as anything the sensational novelist could invent and give to the world with a certainty that his invention would be looked upon as wildly improbable.
Nothing that is imagined and invented is so astounding as that which really is, and the most astounding thing is that the existence of the reality is unsuspected by the people who live constantly in close proximity to it.
Over much that is strange and terrible in modern Babylon the veil is wisely drawn by those who write for the great public. In Paris there is less discretion, and the sores of the city are laid bare for the idle and the curious to stare at them.
If a writer knowing London wrote with the lack of reticence which distinguishes the Parisian who knows Paris, the result would be one beside which all the "startling revelations" that are imagined and dressed up by fictionists disguised as journalists would pale into insignificance.