A year afterwards the clergyman did come—more wretched-looking, more woe-begone than ever.
When he applied for a bed, the deputy at once communicated the good news to him. "There's been somebody here asking for you," he said; "some solicitors. We were to communicate with them if we saw you again. They want you for——"
Before the deputy could finish the sentence the clergyman had fled.
The proprietor of the lodging-house, interested in the case, made several inquiries of the solicitors; but from that night the Rev. William Venn was never seen again.
There is a street in the East End which, owing to the character of its fourpenny lodging-houses, has become notorious. You may see standing at the doors of these houses men and women whose appearance, even in the broad daylight, would make a stranger doubtful as to the advisability of passing near them.
Night after night these houses are crowded with vagabonds, male and female, of the most dangerous type. In one of these, three murders took place in one year.
Nearly every woman who comes out of them has a black eye or some facial disfigurement due to male violence. The younger men have "ruffian" writ large upon their features, while the older men are of the ragged, weather-beaten tramp order.
To spend an evening in the common kitchens is to get an idea of humanity which revolts rather than saddens. Horrifying as the ordinary language of the company is, their callous viciousness and criminality are more horrifying still. There are men here who have taken human life—taken it brutally on dark nights in country lanes and by the waterside, sometimes to rob their victim, sometimes to get rid of a man or woman who knows too much or who wants too much.
Some of the men and women sitting together and indulging in drunken chaff or maudlin reminiscences are old acquaintances. They have met in more than one lodging-house in London, and have tramped together to fairs and race-meetings. And the mildest form of "ragging" among them is to remind each other of the robbery or the outrage, it may be the murder, with which the gossip of the doss-houses credits them.
The one offence which among these people is considered discreditable, and which makes them unfit for the society of their fellows, is to give information to the police, or to give evidence which assists the police in obtaining a conviction.