by Robin Paige
But the household in the Piedmont Hills also included Jack’s mother, his pregnant wife Bess, and their infant daughter, a stifling, suffocating responsibility. For a time-wondrous, but far too brief-it had also included the woman he loved, Anna Strunsky, she of the lustrous black hair and black eyes, a radical Socialist from a Russian Jewish family with Anarchist leanings. When Bess discovered Anna and Jack in each other’s arms, however, Anna had packed up and gone to New York, leaving Jack beside himself with lonely desolation.
Feeling trapped in a marriage to a woman he didn’t love, his writing mired in the lucrative but tedious Klondike rut, and (as always) in dire need of money to fund his extravagant life, Jack had jumped at an offer that came in late July from the American Press Association. The Boer War had just ended, and the APA wanted America’s foremost adventure writer to go to South Africa and report on the postwar situation. With enormous relief, he telegraphed his acceptance, packed his bags, and caught a train for New York-only to learn when he got there that the APA had canceled the project.
Having already bought a steamer ticket and not eager to return to Bess and his mother, Jack came up with another idea. An admirer of Jacob Riis’s graphic indictment of the New York slums, How the Other Half Lives, he proposed to capitalize on the best-selling book’s success by writing a similar expose of London’s infamous East End. He would disguise himself as a tramp so he could travel unobserved through the notorious slums. “I shall sink down out of sight,” he had written to Anna during his crossing on the steamer Majestic, “in order to view the Coronation from the standpoint of the London beasts. That’s all they are-beasts-if they are anything like the slum people of New York-beasts, shot through with starry flashes of divinity.” He would call his book The People of the Abyss.
Of course, the East End wasn’t the only allure. For one thing, Jack had never traveled to England or Europe, and there were sights he wanted to see. For another, the British publishing company Isbister had recently brought out a collection of his short stories, The God of His Fathers, and would soon publish The Son of the Wolf. Perry Robinson, Isbister’s director, assured Jack that he had many British admirers and seemed anxious to introduce him to the literary community.
Well, Robinson’s introduction-a first-rate champagne supper in one of the best hotels-was over. Isbister had done well by him, inviting a posse of literary critics and several dozen of Britain’s literary lights to meet him. Jack knew the work of several, and particularly admired that of Beryl Bardwell, whose strong women characters reminded him of what he liked to call the “Mate Woman,” women who were filled to the brim with life and refused to be bound by conventional moral codes. Jack had told Miss Bardwell about his plan to go incognito into the East End, and learned to his surprise that she was familiar with the district and had gone there more than once herself, unaccompanied. ^1 Jack’s pleasure in meeting the striking Miss Bardwell and her husband (a baron) was offset, unfortunately, by his disappointment that Rudyard Kipling had declined Isbister’s invitation. That little slight had caused him to sulk all evening.
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.
CHAPTER FOUR
DEATH IN HYDE PARK BOMBER MEANT TO KILL KING AND QUEEN! NARROW ESCAPE ON CORONATION DAY!!
London Anarchist Yuri Messenko was killed yesterday when a bomb apparently intended for King Edward and Queen Alexandra exploded in Hyde Park. Witnesses say that the assassin, who was employed at the Anarchist newspaper, The Clarion, dropped the satchel he was carrying, causing it to explode. It is thought that Messenko, and several others in the cell to which he belonged, have been the target of a Scotland Yard inquiry for the past several weeks.
This threat to the Royal lives, coming only eleven months after the assassination of the American president, William McKinley, raised new fears…
The Times, 10 August 1902
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.
Bradford, a fair-haired man, rather heavily handsome, put his feet on a leather hassock and lit his cigar. “A pity the idiotic fellow blew himself up, if you ask me. It would have been better if an example could have been made of him-and sweet revenge, as well.”
“I rather think,” Charles said quietly, “that revenge is not the best course of action. The Anarchists believe that if the police and the courts can be provoked to harsh reactions, they will awaken the anger of the dispossessed and bring on the revolution. And they may be right.” He raised his glass in a mute salute. “After all, it’s happened before, in France and in America.”
Bradford lifted his glass. “And just how do you know what’s in the Anarchist mind, old chap?” he asked jokingly. “Haven’t gone over to their side, have you?”
This question, had it been meant seriously, would not have perturbed Charles, for it had been put to him any number of times by his colleagues in the House of Lords, who did not take it kindly when he supported the trade unions or advocated the removal of public education from ecclesiastic control. It did not ruffle him because he knew that his fellow Peers were as heedless of the need for social change as they were of the conditions that propelled it.
But the landed aristocracy took comfort in their ignorance at the peril of their way of life. England had been changing in very fundamental ways for seventy years now, and the longer this fact was ignored, the harder would be the lesson, when it came. The triumphant rise of science and technology had brought the nation unimaginable riches, but had also shredded the fabric of its closely-knit society. Not only had machines eliminated the need for unskilled manual labor, but they were also rapidly displacing the skilled wheelwrights, coopers, cabinetmakers, smiths, weavers, and others, once the proud flowering of the English laboring class, now tossed on the scrap heap of the unemployed. At the same time, technology had flooded the English agricultural markets with cheap food from around the world, displacing farm workers and undermining the economic foundation of the old aristocracy: the production of their vast lands. Charles saw the crisis looming, and knew that if it came, it would be catastrophic.
Bradford and his sort, on the other hand, with their keen sense of business and nose for opportunity, represented the promise of England’s future-but only if they recognized that while controlled capitalism would strengthen the entire country, uncontrolled capitalism would surely destroy it. Could they not see that everyone, rich and poor, must have a share in the future, or there would be no future for anyone? Could not some sort of compromise be found which allowed all to share in the opportunities of business and technology, or would the anger and frustration of the dispossessed ignite a final, terrible conflagration?
So in answer to Bradford’s question, he reached under The Times and retrieved another newspaper, much thinner, scarcely a half-dozen pages. The banner declared it to be the Clarion.
Bradford frowned. “What are you doing with that garbage?”
“Better the enemy you know than the one you don’t,” Charles replied mildly, putting the newspaper down again. “The Clarion is sometimes strident, but most of it is quite well written, and it offers some interesting insights into the way these people think. This last issue suggested some ways that the fortune lavished on the Coronation might have been better spent to help those in need. It bears reading, Bradford.”
Bradford sat forward, frowning. “Answer me this, then, Charles. How is this lot to be dealt with, if not by the police and the courts?”
“Perhaps by addressing the underlying grievances,” Charles replied. “Wider suffrage, more employment, a more equitable distribution of wealth-”
“But that would mean the end of the rights of private property!” Bradford exclaimed heatedly. “Is that what you’re after?”
Charles shrugged. “Perhaps it would only be the end of the monopoly of privilege. Perhaps-”
There was a knock at the door and the butler entered. “Mr. Frederick Ponsonby to see you, m’lord.”
Charles and Bradford exchanged glances. Ponsonby was Assistant Personal Secretary and Equerry to His Majesty King Edward VII-in effect, a Royal messenger. Charles sighed and rose from his chair. A visit from this man, particularly at this hour of the evening, did not bode well. “Thank you, Richards. Show him in.”
The man entered the room. A few years younger than Charles, with a finely-modeled face and a broad forehead, he was graceful and dignified, a courtier to his fingertips. He bowed.
“Good evening, Sheridan. I’m sorry to trouble you so late. I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”
Charles smiled. “Ah, Ponsonby,” he said, with as much cordiality as he could muster-although it was not Ponsonby himself that he regretted, but that he had doubtless come on an errand. “Good to see you. You know Bradford Marsden, I believe.”
Ponsonby bowed slightly. “My congratulations on your successful ventures in South Africa, sir.”
“And my congratulations on your safe return, Ponsonby,” Bradford said, standing as well. “One day the Boers will thank us.” He stroked his blond moustache. “A pity we had to knock sense into them. All so unnecessary.”
“A pity indeed,” Ponsonby agreed dryly, his eyes darkening.
Charles knew th
at Ponsonby had seen a great deal of rough action during his nearly ten months with the Grenediers and had only recently been invalided home, a newly promoted lieutenant colonel-while Bradford had waited out the war in Rhodesia, a safe distance from the front. Covering the awkwardness, he said, “You’ll have a glass of port, Ponsonby?”
“Thank you, yes,” Ponsonby replied.
“Has His Majesty recovered from the excitement of his Coronation?” Charles asked, handing the glass.
“Quite,” Ponsonby replied, as they all sat down. “He endured the strain very well, although the ceremony must have been physically trying.” He cleared his throat. “And there was that unfortunate incident, which rather marred the day.”
“You’re referring to the death in Hyde Park, I suppose,” Charles said. “As a matter of fact, Marsden and I were just discussing it.”
“I was saying that we must put an end to this sort of nonsense,” Bradford put in, getting up to help himself to more port.
“Yes. Well, the thing of it is,” Ponsonby said, “this incident has caused Their Majesties some considerable distress. Of course, the Queen does not like to show it to the public, but since the incident in Brussels, she has been rather nervous. It seems to have affected her strongly.”