Part 6

In the top-floor room of the anarchists’ house we observed a gas jet burning, and presently some of us noticed the white ash of burnt paper fluttering out of a chimney pot.

“They’re burning documents,” said one of my friends.

They were burning more than that. They were setting fire to the house, upstairs and downstairs. The window curtains were first to catch alight, then volumes of black smoke, through which little tongues of flame licked up, poured through the empty window frames. They must have used paraffin to help the progress of the fire, for the whole house was burning with amazing rapidity.

“Did you ever see such a game in London!” exclaimed the man next to me on the roof of the public house.

For a moment I thought I saw one of the murderers standing on the window sill. But it was a blackened curtain which suddenly blew outside the window frame and dangled on the sill.

A moment later I had one quick glimpse of a man’s arm with a pistol in his hand. He fired and there was a quick flash. At the same moment a volley of shots rang out from the Guardsmen opposite. It is certain that they killed the man who had shown himself, for afterward they found his body (or a bit of it) with a bullet through the skull. It was not long afterward that the roof fell in with an upward rush of flame and sparks. The inside of the house from top to bottom was a furnace.

The detectives, with revolvers ready, now advanced in Indian file. One of them ran forward and kicked at the front door. It fell in, and a sheet of flame leaped out.... No other shot was fired from within. Peter the Painter and his fellow bandits were charred cinders in the bonfire they had made.

So ended the “Battle of Sidney Street,” which created intense excitement and indignation throughout England, and threw a glare of publicity on to the secret haunts of the foreign anarchists in London.

I was one of those who directed the searchlight, for the very next day, with Eddy, my colleague, I took up residence at 62 Sidney Street, and explored the underworld of Whitechapel and the Anarchist clubs of the Russian and German Jews, who were the leading spirits of a philosophy which is now known as Bolshevism. And in that quest I had some strange adventures, and met some very queer folk.

VI

Before taking lodgings in Sidney Street, Whitechapel, to study the haunts of Peter the Painter and his fellow “thugs,” I tried to get a room in the house in Grove Street to which the handsome young Russian had been carried when he was mortally wounded by the police.

With my companion Eddy, I knocked at the door of this dark little dwelling place, in a sinister street with a railed sidewalk, where foreign-looking men lounged about in doorways, and young drabs with painted faces started out at dusk for the lighted highways. Eddy and I believed ourselves to be disguised adequately for East End life. We had put on our oldest clothes and cloth caps, but we were both aware that our appearance in Grove Street aroused immediate suspicion. After three knocks, the door was opened on a chain, and a frowsy woman spoke to me in Yiddish. I answered in German, which she seemed to understand. Upon my asking for a room, she undid the chain and opened the door a little way, so that I could see the crooked wooden stairs up which the man’s body had been carried by two of those men who now lay burned to death in Sidney Street.

The woman asked us to wait, and then went down a stinking passage and spoke to a man, as I could hear by the voices. While we waited, shadows crept up out of the dark street about us, and I saw that we were surrounded by the foreign-looking men who had been lounging in the doorways. The woman came back with a tall, bearded man who spoke English.

“What do you want?”

“A room for the night.”

“What the hell for?” he asked. “Do you know there’s been a murder in this house?”

“That makes no difference,” I said, casually. “It’s late and raining, and we want to sleep.”

“Not here. We don’t want no narks in this house. We’re honest people.”

“All right,” said Eddy. “We’ll go somewhere else.”

He was moving off, when the man took hold of his arm.

“Perhaps you won’t,” he snarled. “I may get into trouble about this, with the cops. You’ll stay here till I send a word round to the station.”

He gave a whistle, and the men lurking in the darkness about us pressed closer. They were young Jews of Russian type, anæmic and white-faced.

He shoved the man off, and pushed his way through the crowd. They jabbered in a foreign tongue, and followed a little way, but did not touch us.

“Let go of my arm, or I’ll hit you,” said Eddy.

The rain fell faster, and we were splashed with mud. With good warm houses in the West of London, it was ridiculous to be tramping about the East like this, homeless and cold. We knocked at many doors in other streets, and every answer we had was a rough refusal in Yiddish or German to take us in. Not even when we offered as much as a sovereign for a night’s shelter.

“These people don’t like the look of us,” said Eddy. “What’s the matter with our money?”

The truth was, I think, that the affair in Sidney Street had thoroughly scared the foreign element in the East End, and these people to whom we applied for rooms were on their guard at once against two strangers who might be police spies or criminals in search of a hiding place. They were not accepting trouble either way.

It was late at night when at last we persuaded an Israelite, and master tailor, to rent us a room in Sidney Street, next door to the house in which Peter the Painter and his friends had defied the armed police of London, and escaped capture by dying in the flames.

From that address Eddy and I wrote a series of articles describing our experiences in the East End, among anarchists, criminals, and costers. The anarchists were the most interesting, and we visited them in their night clubs.

We went, I remember, to a Russian hotel in Whitechapel, where the chief anarchist club in London had established its headquarters through fear of a police raid at its old address. Certainly they took no precautions to ensure secrecy, for even outside the hotel, down a side street, Eddy and I could hear the stentorian voice of one of their orators, and see the shadows of his audience on the window blinds. We went into the hotel and found the stairs leading to the club room densely packed by young men and women, for the most part respectably, and even smartly, dressed, of obviously foreign race--Russian, German, and Jewish.

Eddy and I wormed our way upstairs by slow degrees, sufficiently close to hear the long, excited speech that was being made in German. Here and there at least I heard snatches of it, and such phrases as “the tyranny of the police,” “the fear of the _bourgeoisie_,” “the dictatorship of the people,” “the liberty of speech,” and “the rights of labor to absolute self-government.” Such phrases as these were loudly applauded whenever the speaker paused.

“Who is speaking?” I asked of a good-looking young fellow sitting on the stairs.

He answered sullenly:

“Rocca. What’s that to you?”

Presently there was a whispering about us. Sullen faces under bowler hats held close consultation. Then there was a movement on the stairs, jamming Eddy and myself against the banisters.

“What do you want here?” asked one of the young men, aggressively. “If you’re police narks, we’ll turn you out!”

“Yes, or do you in!” said another.

“We don’t want any bleeding spies here,” said a woman.

Other expressions of hostility were uttered, and there was an ugly look on the faces of these foreign youths.

I thought it best to tell them frankly that I was merely a newspaper reporter on _The Daily Chronicle_, finding a little descriptive material. I should be interested to hear the speech upstairs, if they had no objection.

This candor disarmed them, or most of them, though a few raised the cry of “Turn them out!”

But an elderly man who seemed to have some authority raised his hand, and took me under his protection.

“That’s all right. We’ve nothing to hide. If _The Daily Chronicle_ wants our views, it can have them. Better come and see Mrs. Rocca.”

The crowd made way for us on the stairs and my companion and I were led to a narrow landing outside the room, where the orator still bellowed in German to a packed audience, and then into a little slip of a room which I found to be an ordinary bathroom.

On the edge of the bath sat a well-dressed, rather good-looking and pleasant-eyed lady, to whom I was introduced, and who was introduced to me as Mrs. Rocca. She was the wife of the orator in the next room, and, like himself, German.

She spoke English perfectly, and in the presence of half a dozen men who crowded in to listen, we had an argument lasting at least an hour, on the subject of anarchy. She began by disclaiming, for the anarchists in London, all knowledge of and responsibility for the affair of Peter the Painter and his associates. They were merely common thieves. But it was laughable, she thought, what a panic fear had been caused in middle-class London by the killing of a policeman or two. It filled columns of the newspapers, with enormous headlines. It seemed to startle them as something too horrible and monstrous for imagination. Why all that agitation over the deaths of two guardians of property, when there was no agitation at all, no public outcry, no fierce clamor for vengeance, because every night men and women of the toiling classes were being killed by the inhuman conditions of their lives, in foul slums, in overcrowded bedrooms, in poisonous trades, in sweated industries, as the helpless slaves of that capitalistic system which protected itself by armies of police. The English people were the world’s worst hypocrites. They hid a putrid mass of suffering, corruption, and disease, caused by modern industrialism, and pretended that it did not exist.

“What is your philosophy?” I asked. “How do you propose to remedy our present state?”

“I am an intellectual Nihilist,” said the lady very calmly. “I believe in the ultimate abolition of all law, all government, all police, and in a free society with perfect liberty to the individual, educated in self-discipline, love for others, and moral purpose.”

I need not here repeat her arguments, nor their fantastic disregard of human nature and the stark realities of life. She was well read, and quoted all manner of writers from Plato to Bernard Shaw, and I marveled that such a woman should be living in the squalor of Whitechapel as a preacher of the destructive gospel. We had a vehement argument, in which Eddy joined, and though we waxed hot, and disagreed with each other on all issues, we maintained the courtesies of debate, in which, beyond any mock modesty, I was hopelessly out-argued by this brilliant, extraordinary, and dangerous woman.

It was from acquaintances made in that club that we were led into other byways of Whitechapel and heard strange and terrible tales of Russian revolutionaries, who showed me the sores of fetters and chains about their wrists and legs, and swore eternal hatred of the Russian Czardom, which crushed the souls of men and women and tortured their bodies. They were, doubtless, true tales, and it was with the remembrance of those horrors that the Russian Revolution was made, in all its cruelty and terror, until the autocracy of the Czars was replaced by the tyranny of Lenin and the Soviet State, when the dream of Russian liberty was killed, for a generation at least, in the ruin and famine and pestilence of the people.

Eddy and I dined in the kosher restaurants of the East End, went to the Jewish theater, and explored the haunts of the Russian and Oriental Jews of London.

In our wanderings we discovered the most Oriental place this side of Constantinople. It was Hessell Street Market, in a deep sunken road, reached by flights of steep steps through blocks of buildings in the Commercial Road, and quite unknown to most Londoners. On each side of the sunken street were wooden booths which looked as though they had been there since the time of Queen Elizabeth, and at night, when we went, they were lit, luridly, by naptha flares. In these booths sat, cross-legged, old bearded men with hooked noses, who looked as though they were contemporaries of Moses and the Prophets. They were selling cheap Oriental rugs, colored cottons and silks, sham jewelery, rabbit skins, kosher meat, skinny fowls, and embroidered slippers. The crowd marketing in this place, chaffering, quarreling, picking over the wares, with the noise of a Turkish bazaar, were mostly of Oriental types. Some of the men wore fur caps, or astrakhan caps, like the Persians who cross the Galata bridge at Constantinople. Others wore fur coats reaching to their heels, and top hats of ancient architecture. It was the market of the London Ghetto, and thronged with flashy young Jews and Jewesses, starved-looking men of Slav aspect, and shifty-eyed boys who were professional pickpockets and sold the harvest of their day’s toil to the old villains in the booths.

It was a young thief who acted as our guide to some of these places, and he performed a delicate operation in the way of housebreaking for our benefit. We were eager to get a photograph of Peter the Painter, and he told us that he knew of the only one in existence. It belonged to a “young lady” who had been Peter’s friend, and naturally wished to keep secret her association with this bandit. It stood on her bedroom mantelpiece, and if we would give him half an hour, he would “pinch” it for us. But he would have to replace it after we had made use of it. At the end of an hour he returned with the photograph of a good-looking young Russian, and told us that it had been an “easy job.” This photograph was reproduced as the only authentic portrait of Peter the Painter, but I have grave doubts about it.

With this lad, who was an intelligent fellow and vowed that henceforth he was going to lead an honest life, as burglary was a mug’s game, he went into the cellars below a certain restaurant which were used as a library of anarchist literature. Doubtless there was more high explosive here, in the way of destructive philosophy, than one might find in Woolwich Arsenal, but we did not examine those dangerous little pamphlets and books which preached the gospel of revolution. At that time, before the advent of Bolshevism in the history of the world, that propaganda seemed to have no bearing upon the ordinary facts of life, and did not interest us. It was at a later period that the international anarchist in London translated his textbooks and touted them outside the gates of English factories, and slipped them into the hands of unemployed men.

In those pre-war days, the foreign revolutionaries in London kept themselves aloof from English life and, as I have said, generally avoided unpleasant contact with the English law. Living in the foulest lodgings--I sicken still at the memory of the stench we encountered in some of their tenement houses--many of these young tailors, cigarette makers, and factory hands dressed themselves up in the evening and came down West with their girl friends to the music halls and night clubs in the neighborhood of Piccadilly, leaving the older folk to their squalor and the children to the playground of the streets and courts. Now and again they stabbed each other, or cut each other’s throats, but, as a rule, such incidents were hushed up by their neighbors, and the London police were not invited to inquire into affrays between these aliens.... The war made a great clearance of these foreigners, and many of their old haunts have disappeared.

By the merest chance I saw the disappearance of one of the oldest and most historic haunts of London lawbreakers. It was the abandonment of the Old Bailey, before its grim and ancient structure was pulled down to make way for the new and imposing building where Justice again pursues its relentless way with those who fall into its grip. Ever since Roman days there has been a prison on the site of the Old Bailey, and for hundreds of years men and women have languished there in dark cells, rattled their chains behind its bars, rotted with jail fever, and died on the gallows tree within its walls. The dark cruelties of English justice which, in the old days, was merciless with all who broke its penal laws, however young and innocent till then, belong to forgotten history, for the most part, but as time is counted in history, it is not long since the judges of the Old Bailey condemned young girls to death for stealing a few ribbons or handkerchiefs, and my own grandfather saw their executions, in batches.

But on the last day of the Old Bailey, when the police were withdrawn from its courtroom and corridors, before its furniture and fittings were to be put up for public auction, the crowd I met there did not remember those old ruthless days. They were the criminals of a later generation who had been put in the cells as “drunks and disorderlies,” as pickpockets and “petty larcenies,” brought up for judgment with the knowledge that short sentences would be inflicted on them.

It was one of the most remarkable crowds I have ever seen. Some queer sentiment had brought all these crooks and jailbirds to see the last of their old “home.” Frowzy women and “flash” girls, old scamps of the casual ward and doss house, habitual drunkards, and young thieves, sporting touts and burglars of the Bill Sikes brand, had gathered together, as though by special invitation, to the “private view.” Laughing, excited, full of loquacious reminiscences, they wandered through the charge room and the cells where they had been “lagged,” pointed out the cell from which Jack Sheppard had escaped, and other cells once inhabited by famous murderers and criminals, and surged into the great court where they had stood in the dock facing the scarlet-robed judge and all the majesty of law. They stood in the dock again, lots of them, jeering, with bursts of hoarse laughter at the merry jest.

They crowded up to the judge’s throne. One young coster, with a gift of mimicry, put on a judicial manner, wagged his head solemnly, and sentenced his pals to death. Shrieks of laughter greeted his pantomime. An old ruffian with a legal-looking face, sodden with drink, played the part of prosecuting counsel, addressed an imaginary judge as “M’lud,” the crowd as “gentlemen of the jury,” and asserted that the evidence was overwhelming as to the guilt of the prisoner, who was indeed “a naughty, naughty man.”

“The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth!” screamed a girl with big feathers in her hat, and she laughed hysterically at her own humor.

There was something grim and tragic beneath the comedy of the scene. This travesty of the law by those who had been in its clutches revealed a vicious psychology lost to all shame and decency, but was also a condemnation of society which produced such types of men and women, for the most part victims of slum life, foul surroundings, and evil upbringing, tolerated, and indeed created, by the social system of England. It needed the pen of Dickens to describe this scene, and truly it was a hark-back to the days of Dickens himself. I was astounded that such characters as Bill Sikes, Old Fagin and Nancy, and Charley Bates should still remain in the London of Edward VII, as they appeared in the living image that day in the Old Bailey.

I wandered upstairs into deserted rooms. They were strewn with papers ankle-deep, and on the table I saw a bulky volume, bound in iron, which was the old charge book, dating from 1730. To this day I regret that I did not “pinch” it, for it was an historic relic which, with scandalous carelessness, was thrown away. But I was afraid of carrying off such a big thing, lest I should find myself on a more modern charge-sheet at another court. I did, however, stuff a number of papers into my pockets, and when I reached home and examined them, I found that they were also historical documents of great interest.

One of them, for instance, was a list of eighty convicts, or so, condemned to penal servitude and transportation to Botany Bay. Many of them--boys and girls--had been sentenced to death for the crime of stealing a few potatoes, a pinafore, some yards of cotton, or, in one case, for breaking a threshing machine, and had been “graciously reprieved by His Majesty King William IV” and condemned to that ferocious punishment of penal servitude in the convict settlements of Australia, which to many of them was a living death, until by flogging, and insanitary conditions, and disease, death itself released them. That was but a few years before the reign of Queen Victoria!

It was in the new Old Bailey, very handsomely paneled, nicely warmed, lighted with delicate effects of color through high windows--doubtless the clerks of the court thought it quite a privilege for the criminals to be judged in such a place--that I saw the trial of that famous and astonishing little murderer, Doctor Crippen.

It will be remembered that he was captured on a ship bound for Halifax, with a girl named Ethel le Neve, dressed up in boy’s clothes, with whom he had eloped after killing his wife and dissecting her body for burial in his cellar.

Crippen looked a respectable little man, with weak, watery eyes and a drooping moustache, so ordinary a type of middle-class business man in London that quite a number of people, including one of my own friends, were arrested by mistake for him when the hue and cry went forth.

I was at Bournemouth at that time, in one of the aviation meetings which were held in the early days of flying. It was celebrated by fancy fêtes, open-air carnivals, fancy-dress balls, and all kinds of diversions. The most respectable town in England, inhabited mostly by retired colonels, well-to-do spinsters, and invalids, seemed to take leave of its senses in a wild outburst of frivolity. Even the Mayor was to be seen in the broad glare of sunshine, wearing a false nose. Into that atmosphere of false noses and fancy frocks came telegrams to several newspaper correspondents from their editors.

“Scotland Yard believes Crippen at Bournemouth. Please get busy.”

That was the tenor of the telegram sent to me, and I saw by the pink envelopes received by friends at table in the Grand Hotel one night that they had received similar messages. One by one they stole out, looking mightily secretive--in search of Crippen, who, by that time was nearing Halifax.

With a friend named Harold Ashton, a well-known “crime sleuth,” I went into the hall, and after a slight discussion decided that if Crippen was in Bournemouth it was not our job to find him. We were, for the time, experts in aviation, and couldn’t be put off by foolish murders.

As we went upstairs, Ashton put his head over the banisters, and then uttered an exclamation.

“Scotland Yard!”

Looking over the stair rail, I saw a pair of boots, belonging to a man sitting in the hall. True enough, they had come from Scotland Yard, according to the tradition which enables any detective to be recognized at a glance by any criminal. One of those detectives had been sent down on the false rumor, and probably hoped to find Doctor Crippen and Ethel le Neve disguised as Pierrot and Columbine on the pier.

Ashton and I decided to have a game with the man. We wrote a note in block letters, as follows:

“ARE YOU LOOKING FOR DOCTOR CRIPPEN? IF SO, BEWARE!”

By a small bribe, we hired a boy to deliver it to the detective, and then depart quickly.