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.