A dirty, frowsy room, with furniture old and rickety, a ceiling blackened, and a faded carpet full of holes.
Its two occupants, dark, sallow-looking foreigners in shabby-genteel attire, sat conversing seriously in French, between frequent whiffs of caporal cigarettes of the most rank description.
Bateman’s Buildings, Soho—where, on the second floor of one of the houses, this apartment was situated—is a thoroughfare but little known, even to dwellers in the immediate vicinity. The wandering Londoner, whose peregrinations take him into the foreign quarter, might pass a dozen times between Frith and Greek Streets without discovering its existence. Indeed, his search will not be rewarded until he pauses halfway down Bateman Street and turns up a narrow and exceedingly uninviting passage between a marine-store dealer’s and the shop of a small vendor of vegetables and coals. He will then find himself at Bateman’s Buildings, a short, paved court, lined on each side by grimy, squalid-looking houses, the court itself forming the playground of a hundred or so spirited juveniles of the unwashed class.
It is altogether a very undesirable place of abode. The houses, in comparison with those of some neighbouring thoroughfares, certainly put forward a sorry pretence towards respectability; for a century ago some well-to-do people resided there; and the buildings, even in their present state of dilapidation and decay, have still a solid, substantial air about them. Now, however, they are let out in tenements, and the inhabitants are almost wholly foreigners.
Soho has always been the abode of the French immigrant. But Time, combined with a squabbling County Council, has affected even cosmopolitan London; and Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross Road have now opened up the more inaccessible haunts, rendering them more conventional, if less interesting. Notwithstanding this, it is still the French quarter. French laundresses abound in great variety, with cheap French cafés where one can obtain absinthe, groseille, or grenadine, and where Jacques Bonhomme can dine with potage and three plats for less than a shilling, while French bakers are a feature at every turn.
Within a small radius of Bateman’s Buildings several thousand strangers struggle for the bare necessaries of life—deluded Germans, Belgians, and Frenchmen, who thought the English Metropolis a second El Dorado, and have found it nothing beyond a focus for squalid poverty, hunger, and crime.
The two men who were seated together in this upper room were no exception. Although not immigrants in search of employment, yet they were disappointed that the business which brought them over had not resulted profitably, and, moreover, they were considerably dejected by reason of their funds being almost exhausted.
They sat opposite one another at the table, with an evil-smelling paraffin lamp between them.
The silence was broken by the elder man.
“You must admit, Pierre,” he exclaimed in French, contracting his dark bushy eyebrows slightly, “it is no use sitting down and giving vent to empty lamentations. We must act.”