George R. Sims

“ I remembered her again only when her murder revealed the fact that she had been living a lonely lodging-house life for years in London, and had disappeared; to be found in circumstances which added one more mystery of crime to the capital's crowded record.
Not long ago I found myself late at night in a dark, ill-lighted street in the south-east of London. I had been through an area of narrow byways and alleys that has long been the despair of the authorities, an area that to walk through at night requires a certain amount of confidence in one's powers of self-protection. ”

“ The humid, mud-trampled pathways that run on either side are the highways of tragedy—the beaten track of the last footsteps. Here by the water-way that brings the golden freight from the great river to the heart of the busy town is the parting of the ways of Time and Eternity for many a one who lays down the burthen of life.
Not a pleasant place this, on a night of gloom, to linger and look and think. One raises one's eyes from the black water and sees far off the lights of the vehicles that cross the bridges in a steady stream, and the movement of busy life is a relief at once. ”

“ Because the secret is so carefully guarded, this phase of our poor humanity is unfamiliar to us. Its existence is hardly suspected. But it is the lifelong sorrow in many a home that the world thinks a happy one.
When the sorrow is that of a noble family, and the afflicted one is the heir to a proud name and a vast estate, we hear of it. The secret cannot in such circumstances always be guarded. A whisper of it is certain to get about. But with those less conspicuously before the world the secret may be kept until the grave hides it for ever. ”

“ There are mysteries blazoned forth with all the glamour that the contents-bill and the headline can give them, and there are mysteries that are jealously guarded by those high in authority, lest public curiosity should seek to fathom them.
There are mysteries in splendid mansions and in squalid garrets which contain all the elements of criminal romance, and yet pass with the police and the press as matter-of-fact incidents of London's daily life. ”

“ These are the mysteries of life and death that find their way to the House of Rest by the waterside. They are mysteries perhaps only in the sense that they are phases of the great human drama of which the busy world sees little. We pass our way without a thought of the strange happenings hidden from us by a few thin walls. Upon the mimic stage the fourth wall is always down. On the stage of life it stands and hides from all the working out of the great scheme of things. It is the fourth wall that makes many a mystery over which the world puzzles unexplainable. ”

“ This tragedy of vengeance, as thrilling as any story that is told of the Italian Vendetta or the Russian Terrorism, happened in a quiet London suburb. These people lived in modest apartments, without a vestige of romance about them to suggest to the landlady, or the servant girl who waited on them, that they were men whose death-sentence had been pronounced by the committee of a secret society in Eastern Europe, and that one by one they were to fall to the pistol-shot of the man who had drawn the lot which made him their executioner. ”

“ In the next bed lies a young man who is rapidly approaching convalescence. His happy wife bends over him with tender love in her eyes. The sunshine of returning life and the shadow of a dreadful death are separated only by a few inches of polished floor and a little table on which stands a bowl of roses.
The world once rang with the story of the Tichborne Claimant. The romance of that colossal imposture will be told again and again for many a long year to come. ”

“ Wherever I have gone it has always been alone or with someone whom the inhabitants of the area—whether honest or criminal, toilers or idlers, decent folk or outcasts—have always regarded with a friendly eye.
Often a journey has been made alone. It has been made by day and by night, and though there have been times when I have been glad to see the beaten track and the lights and the traffic again, I have never received either insult or injury. And I have Been in spots that are officially recognized as the most dangerous in London. ”

“ There are strange things happening every day in this vast, mysterious world that we call London of which no word will ever be spoken. One or two human beings will know the secret, but it will remain hidden away in their hearts to the end.
Sometimes from the lips of a dying man or woman comes a confession that startles and shocks the few interested relatives gathered round the bedside. Sometimes even in these deathbed revelations—the last despairing effort of the burthened conscience to find relief while still a flicker of life remains—there is still a reticence and a reservation. ”

“ They are to be found in the broad terraces of the West as often as in the narrow alleys of the East. In the criminal courts it is not always the prisoner in the dock who has the ghastliest skeleton in his cupboard. When the police van passes the aristocratic equipage with the coronetted panels, the elegantly dressed occupant of the latter may have the haunting terror of to-morrow in her heart, while the outcast on her road to Holloway is by comparison free from care. There are mysteries in the lordly mansions of the West that make wealth a mockery and rank a disaster. ”

“ Along the main thoroughfares of London, from the West to the East, from the North to the South, there is never the intense loneliness of the streets that lie off the track. There the late Londoner and early Londoner divide the night between them, and as the late brougham or cab bears the tired pleasure-seeker home to rest, the carts and the wagons begin to wend their way to the markets and the docks and the great railway stations. ”

“ It is here that hundreds of our rural immigrants drift in ignorance or in despair of London's vastness and inhospitality, and here they rapidly deteriorate, and become in time as evil as their environment.
There is no mystery about the character of the people in these streets of shame. And yet the element of mystery greets you at every turn, whether you wander these byways of wickedness by day or by night.
If you would explore the mysteries of the Avemus, it is not in the houses or the streets that you will see the veil lifted. ”

“ One of the great mysteries of a vast city is how all the people in it manage to get a living. If you take a day of London life, apart from its work, and consider the hundreds of thousands of people who are merely amusing themselves and spending collectively a sum of money in the process which, if put in round figures, would astound you, you are faced with a greater mystery still. ”

“ Kings and queens in historical romance, princes and princesses in pantomime, duchesses in society comedy, of my working life in close communion with the warm-hearted children of Thespis, lift a corner of the veil, it will be but to show how much there is to admire in the men and women who, out of the rays of the limelight, often lead brave, self-sacrificing, and very human lives. ”

“ She gave a solemn promise to a dying man not to reveal it, and yet she has confessed that the temptation to do so is great. She asserts that if she opened her lips a mystery which startled London, and which is still unsolved, would be a mystery no more. But the dying man gave her his confession as the professional nurse by his bedside and under an oath of secrecy, and she holds that she is bound by it. There is one person in the world who knows the secret of that mystery—and only one. ”

“ There is a London doctor who has a home of this sort. If you were conducted over it, and saw its inmates, you would think that he must have nerves of iron to pass his life in such weird companionship. Young, middle-aged, and old, the patients are every one of them so marred by nature that ordinary life among their fellow-creatures is impossible.
Once in my life, trespassing in a private wood in search of primroses, I came suddenly upon a group of human beings so strange in their appearance, so awful, that for a moment I believed that I was the victim of an hallucination. ”

“ Knowing his name, his ancestry, and the position his kith and kin have held in public life, the man is to me a mystery. His poverty I can understand—I have seen the brother of a world-famous divine in a wretched room in a slum in the Borough, and I have seen his children given boots that they should not have to go barefooted to school in the winter-time—but this man has hidden himself away in a criminal area, in a street that is notorious, and here with his wife and child he must rub shoulders night and day with the vilest of the vile. ”

“ There are idylls of the slums and alleys as charming as ever poet penned; there are stories to be told of the dwellers in mean streets that lift our thoughts far above the sordid things of earth.
But these are romances pure and simple, and in them is no element of mystery. The romances I have in my mind as I write are those in which the poverty conceals from the eyes of the world a truth it would be greatly interested to learn.
When the London season is at its height the daily papers are filled with the gay or great doings of the aristocracy. ”

“ Skulking through the silent, deserted streets go men at war with society, men living by crime, who under the cover of darkness ply their perilous trade, ready armed to kill if need be, either the sleeping householder or the guardian of the night who interrupts them at their villainous work.
Sometimes they have accomplished their task and are returning to their homes with the spoil upon them, but so cunningly concealed that they can pass the policeman strolling on his lonely beat without exciting his suspicion. ”

“ There is one phase of London at the dead of night which is remarkable, but it is not advisable to investigate it if you are alone. To see it you must spend an hour or two in "the streets with the open doors," and these streets are not to be recommended to the stranger between the hours of I and 4 a.m.
Picture to yourself a long row of three-storey houses, grimy, monotonous, dilapidated. There is not one house that has not broken window-panes, either stuffed with rag or pasted across with newspaper. The stucco has peeled away in many places. Where it is left it is black with grime. ”

“ To have money, friends, fame, and public favour at one period of your life, and then to know poverty, loneliness, neglect—that is the experience that adds bitterness to the cup of sorrow many an old favourite has to drain to the dregs before the merciful curtain falls.
It happened to me once, behind the scenes, to find lying on the mimic battlefield of a Drury Lane drama three corpses, and each of the "supers" who impersonated a soldier, with nothing to say and nothing to do but fall down at a given cue, had been a popular actor, and the lessee and manager of a London theatre. ”

“ In London, because it is the capital of the world, are the mysteries of many lands. London is a city of refuge for the outcasts of the Continent. It is an international Alsatia, where the laws from which the alien inhabitants have fled cease to run. There are quiet cafés and restaurants and clubs hidden away in back streets in which men and women meet and eat, drink, dance, and play cards according to their mood, and plot between whiles the deeds that will be ranked with the master crimes of the age. ”

“ There is one street that from end to end has not a single house in it where there is not a broken window. These houses are packed with a low type of humanity. Every house is a lodging-house, and many of them are lodging-houses for women only.
In the daytime drunken, dissipated-looking women loll in the doorways or thrust their tousled heads out of the upper windows. If you enter these houses and go down into the common kitchen you will find scores of women, young and middle-aged, sitting round the coke fires, listless, often morose. ”

“ When they have their day out from the workhouse, when they come ragged and wretched from the lodging-house, and pass the hours as best they can, they attract no attention.
A woman in weather-stained clothes, with a battered hat on her unkempt hair, with the skirts of her dress caked with the mud of the streets, does not appeal to the curiosity of the well-to-do people who pass her by. They do not imagine that there is any mystery about this woman, still young, still good-looking, who has sunk so low. ”