Robin Paige: Death in Hyde Park

The Coronation was over, too, several days ago, and Jack had already made two or three extended safaris into the wilds of the East End. A dirty face and a knockabout costume gave him a marvelous sense of anonymity and freedom, while the coins in his pocket and the gold sovereign stitched into the armpit of his jacket made him feel secure. It was true that he wanted to sink down out of sight, but he certainly didn’t want to lose himself in the wretched hell-hole. If he got into a situation that was too dangerous for him to handle, he wanted to be able to buy his way out.

Jack had spent the afternoon in the company of a fiery young Socialist from the S.D.F. and a beaten-down sweat-shop worker who had taken them to Frying-pan Alley to visit the hole in which he worked, an eight-by-seven room that housed five men who spent fourteen hours a day attaching the uppers of shoes to the soles. Outside in the street, a spawn of children cluttered the slimy pavement, like tadpoles (Jack thought) just turned frogs on the bottom of a dry pond. He reached for a pen and his notebook. He had a hundred impressions to jot down before he forgot them: images of hungry men, damned women, and doomed children, their plight making them stupid and heavy, without hope, without (worse) imagination. There was no question that the East End situation was a bad one, although he had occasionally glimpsed a determined resilience that would not allow these people to be kept down long, given half a chance to better themselves, and to be honest, it was hardly worse than the New York slums. But he had made a reputation as an adventure writer by focusing on the dark and dangerous side of things, on brutishness and inhuman savagery, the more brutish and inhuman the better. Readers expected brutality from Jack London, and that was what People of the Abyss would be about: people who had been so inhumanly, so pitilessly brutalized that they had no hope.

But there was one impression that wouldn’t appear in his book. Jack had been walking on Hampstead Road when a police van drew up to the curb in front of a green-grocer’s shop and a half-dozen policemen charged into the building. From the crowd of onlookers he had learned that the raiders’ target was an Anarchist newspaper on the second floor, the employer of the wretched boy who had blown himself to bits on Coronation Day. He watched, interested, as the policemen dragged three handcuffed men out of the door and shoved them roughly into the van. They were in for it, he thought-sympathetically, for he had been roughed up by the police himself, and had spent some months in jail.

At that moment, a bird’s nest fell at Jack’s feet, the eggs smashing on the pavement. He stepped out into the street and looked up to see a remarkable sight: a woman making her precarious way across the wet roof, then leaping nimbly across the gap between buildings to a rusty iron fire-ladder. While he watched, this lithe, strong young woman, her hair loose and wet, swiftly descended the ladder and dropped to the pavement right in front of him, dazzling him with her sudden smile. It was a smile of intrigue and mystery. It reminded him somehow of Anna’s smile, and yet it promised a greater excitement, for the girl seemed to hold nothing back, seemed easy in her body and eager for any challenge, for every adventure that the world might offer. In the long, intimate look they shared (longer and more intimate, perhaps, in Jack’s recollection than in the reality of it) he felt he had found exactly the woman he had been looking for all of his life.

But in the next instant, she had vanished, swallowed up by the noisy, milling crowd. He started to follow her, but she was fleet-footed, and he quickly gave it up as a bad job. He returned to the crowd and learned her name by the simple expedient of asking. Suspecting that she may have been attempting to escape from the police, he inquired of a male bystander whether a woman was connected somehow with the Anarchist paper.

“Connected, is she?” The man gave a snort. “I’d say she’s connected. She’s the bloody editor. Been raided more than onct, too. Damn persistent lot, those Anarchists. Knock ’em down and they come back for more.”

“And her name?”

“Conway,” the man said. “Charlotte Conway.”

Jack had just written that name in his notebook and drawn a double circle around it when there was a tap at the door.

“Teatime, sir,” Mrs. Palmer called.

Jack sighed. He wanted-he needed — to write, and his typewriter waited invitingly on the table under the window. He was not getting anything like his daily quota of a thousand words, and he would have to write fast if he intended to take the manuscript back to New York at the end of October. But he was also hungry, and he always wrote better when his belly was full. He put down his pencil and raised his voice. “Thank you, Mrs. Palmer. I’ll be down in a moment.”

Later, when Jack thought back over what happened during his stay in England, he would recall this occasion as vitally important, because it would lead him to Charlotte Conway. When he went downstairs to eat bread and marmalade and drink tea with Mrs. Palmer and her two pretty and flirtatious young daughters, he found that an even prettier and more flirtatious young woman had been invited especially to meet the famous American adventure writer. Her name was Nellie Lovelace, a former resident of the East End and now an actress of some fame. She was starring in a musical at the Royal Strand Theater, and before they had finished their first cup of tea, she had invited him to attend her Saturday night performance.

Charles Sheridan poured a glass of after-dinner port and handed it to his friend, Bradford Marsden. “Sit down, Marsden,” he said, gesturing to a chair in the smoking room at Sibley House, the Sheridans’ London home. “I want to hear more about this new business enterprise of yours.”

But Bradford Marsden had picked up the Sunday Times from the table and was reading the front-page headline. “One wonders where this will lead,” he said grimly. “Sounds like a repetition of the bombing at Greenwich Park seven or eight years ago, but with a clearer intent.” He dropped the paper onto the table and sat down in the leather chair opposite Charles. “This sort of thing simply cannot be tolerated, Charles. The Yard must put an end to it, once and for all.”

Charles Sheridan pulled thoughtfully on his after-dinner pipe. “Well,” he said, “as to this particular incident, it would appear that the bomber has put an end to it-although not quite the end that he anticipated.”

Charles and Bradford had been friends from childhood, but they hadn’t been close since Bradford had involved himself with Cecil Rhodes and his Rhodesian enterprises. That connection had ended with Rhodes’s death the previous March, and Bradford had created a new investment brokerage business, which was doing quite well, it seemed. His marriage to Rhodes’s goddaughter appeared to be progressing smoothly, too-at least, if one could judge by the way they had behaved at dinner that evening. Edith was intelligent and pretty and had produced a male heir within the first year. No wonder Bradford looked so smugly pleased with things, although Charles had to admit that his friend’s self-assured conviction that this was the best of all possible times grated a bit. He himself saw the world rather differently.