People E-Book

Edgar Wallace

• Herausgeber: Al-Mashreq eBookstore
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 215

Beschreibung

People by Edgar Wallace is a compelling exploration of human nature, delving into the lives of ordinary individuals whose fates intertwine in extraordinary ways. Set against the backdrop of a bustling city, the narrative reveals the hidden struggles, desires, and secrets that drive people to the brink of desperation. With masterful storytelling, Wallace weaves together a series of gripping vignettes, each exposing the complex emotions and moral dilemmas faced by the characters. As the tension builds, the lives of these seemingly disconnected people converge, leading to a dramatic and unforgettable climax. This is a thought-provoking and suspenseful read that will leave you questioning the true nature of humanity.

Leseprobe

People

Edgar Wallace By Himself

Author: Edgar Wallace

Edited by: Seif Moawad

Copyright © 2024 by Al-Mashreq eBookstore

First published as "Egar Wallace by Himself"

by Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1926

No part of this publication may be reproduced whole or in part in any form without the prior written permission of the author

All rights reserved.

Table of Contents

People

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

Landmarks

The Council of Justice

Cover

INTRODUCTION

I AM aware that this autobiography differs drastically in many respects from the memoirs which appear from time to time in volumes written by men and women who have been associated with the great and the famous, even as it differs from those recollections which appear in the popular press and have to deal with half-forgotten scandals and the better forgotten transactions of sometime millionaires.

Essentially it is the story of the poor, and of one atom that climbed out of the thick mud which clogs the feet of the battling millions. If it encourages one ambitious child to strive to eminence, if it helps make lighter the lot of one man or one woman and gives hope where there is no hope, it will not have been written in vain.

Incidentally, this little autobiography is in itself a tribute to the system under which we live. There cannot be much wrong with a society which made possible the rise either of J. H. Thomas or Edgar Wallace, that gave "Jamie" Brown the status of a king in Scotland, and put Robertson at the War Office as Chief of the Imperial General Staff.

We were the poor who were not satisfied with our poverty; the lowly who grew to the stature of our faith and are growing still, I hope.

I have sought nothing so illusory as "success"—rather have I found new footholds from which to gain a wider view, new capacities for gratitude towards my fellow-man, and a new and heartfelt sense of humility as, from my little point of vantage on the ever-upward path, I watch the wondrous patience and courage of those who are struggling up behind me.

CHAPTER I

GENERALLY speaking, there is no mystery about birth, even in the least creditable circumstances. The most mysterious thing that can happen to any man is not to be born at all. Less mystery why, swathed (one presumes) in voluminous shawls, one should be carried from Ashburnham Road to a little court hard by the Deptford Creek which separates the Royal Town of Greenwich from the unsalubrious purlieus of Deptford.

I was adopted at the age of nine days. Otherwise there might have been for me a romantic upbringing in Greenwich Workhouse or one of those institutions whither motherless and fatherless persons of nine days old and having no visible means of support are brought to maturity. Happily, there was a philanthropist who heard of my plight, and having for the workhouse the loathing which is the proper possession of the proud poor, he dispatched Clara to fetch me,

"She's adopted", said Mr. Freeman, an autocrat in his way.

Nor when he discovered that he had been mistaken as to my sex did he vary his humane decision.

In name and fact he was Freeman—a liveryman of the Haberdashers' Company; a Freeman of the City of London—he could trace his ancestry back for five hundred years through family and city records. And he was a fish porter at Billingsgate Market. A stocky, big-featured man, with a powerful nose and a chin beard such as Abraham Lincoln wore.

I never saw him write anything but his name. I never saw him read anything but the New Testament—a big, calf-bound volume with leaves that were yellow from age. He used to "break out" about twice a year and drink brandy. Then was the Testament laid reverently aside, and he would fight any man of any size and beat him. Once he fought for two hours, perilously, on the edge of a deep cutting.

He had the strength of an ox; balanced on the flat leather hat he wore in business hours, he could carry heavy cases of fish, and they were no more to him than such chaplets as the patricians wore.

He never did a crooked thing in his life. His wife was the gentlest mother that ever lived. She could not write, but she could read. Mostly she read aloud the murders in the Sunday newspapers, and we discussed historic criminals—Peace, Palmer (whose trial she remembered) and such moderns as Mrs. Maybrick. I loved them and they loved me. They are dead, and I am the poorer for it.

I remember dimly the sinking of the Princess Alice. Greenwich had a maritime flavour in those days. It was a town of blue-jerseyed men, and in every other house in our neighbourhood was the model of a full-rigged ship. And over most parlour mantelpieces hung a collection of brightly coloured china rolling-pins, the exact significance of which I have never understood, except that they had to do with foreign travel.

My first vivid recollection in life is one of a sort of possessive pride in prison vans. The gloomy "Black Maria" that rumbled up the Greenwich Road every afternoon. I recollect giving the infants' class at St. Peter's School a miss and toddling up Trafalgar Street to see the gloomy tumbril pass in the rain, with a shiny warder sitting on a little knifeboard behind and a top-hatted driver under the tarpaulin apron in front.

I think Young Harry was in the van on his way to Wandsworth. And Young Harry was my adopted "brother." All his life he hated policemen and he had a passion for fighting them. Later, Tom took up this hobby, and they were both in Wandsworth together when, as a very small boy, I walked all the way to Wandsworth Prison to see it with my own eyes. I had a very proud feeling about Wandsworth Prison—I felt that it belonged to me; just as one feels towards the handsome residences which are occupied by rich relations.

Neither Tom nor Harry did anything much worse than assault the constabulary—but they did this so consistently that they were scarcely ever at home. Harry, lean of body and face, with a pair of deep-set dark eyes; Tom, fair and handsome: they have passed over. Drink killed them in the lifetime of their father.

"Young Dick", Harry used to say to me in all solemnity (one of my names is "Richard"), "if you don't eat up your pudden, how d'you expect to hit coppers?"

George Freeman heard of the discreditable exploits of his sons with scarcely a ruffle.

"Father, Harry's got three months."

He would look up from his large-print Testament. "Do him good", was his invariable comment—he was a loud conversationalist; in such moments as these he shouted.

Queer that he and his gentle wife should rear such children as they had. He lived a Christian life, was just to all men, fearless—he could not lie.

At three o'clock every morning, winter and summer, he left his house for Billingsgate Market. When I was old enough I sometimes accompanied him. Our way led through the street along which runs the boundary wall of Guy's. At exactly the same spot every morning he stopped, took off his hat (I must do the same) whilst he prayed shortly for all those who suffered in those long wards. He was an inmate once and brought away the legend of an infallible ointment which cured everything. I went through the early part of my boyhood smeared with it, for he believed that the cure of such inevitable trials as measles, scarlet fever, and indeed any disease, lay in the treatment of the symptoms. There are many earnest and learned social reformers who enjoy the same delusion.

Down Love Lane, off Eastcheap, was a dimly-lit coffee-shop, redolent of fish. Here a man, and even a boy, could feast royally for threepence—wonderful coffee in cone-shaped mugs, and new bread and country butter. How often, wedged between the porters, have I sat, my jaws working, my ears cocked for that flow of language which is Billingsgate's pride. And I heard nothing, for I was a child and your labouring man is a gentleman. I suspect that they choked back many lurid illustrations and comments—I have seen warning glances flash from man to man. And when once a large red-faced porter forgot himself: "There's a child present!" said half a dozen voices in chorus.

How those men worked! Their hobnailed boots rattling over the slippery pavement of the market—along the planks that spanned between wharf and the G.I.C. boats that lay alongside. I have stood on the quay hour after hour in the glory of a summer morning. In the chill of winter, watching the boats. Ice-rimed boats from Grimsby, tubby eelboats from Holland, big ship and little ship. "Collectors" that had come rolling from the Dogger Bank with their holds packed with silvery fish that was officially "alive."

Mrs. Freeman hated the market that she had never seen. She hated it for the toll it had taken of her sons. It was to her a Fagin's kitchen of iniquity.

"Never work in the market, Dick", she warned me.

My career was mapped out. I was to be properly educated—which meant that I was not to leave school at the age of ten, as the others had done.

Billingsgate has for me only one unhappy memory. George Freeman had a weakness for hats. There used to be an old Jewish pedlar—one supposes he died in Park Lane worth his million—who carried hundreds of second-hand hats of all sizes except mine. Old George favoured a Derby hat with a high crown such as Mr. Churchill made unpopular. It was something between a top-hat and a billycock. He used to pay as much as threepence for them. How often have I, with a sinking heart, watched him approach with a look of triumph on his rugged, handsome face, and a newly acquired hat in his hand! How often have I sat in the dimly-lit coffee-shop in Love Lane whilst a committee of porters have folded strips of newspaper to stuff inside the lining that my small head might not be altogether extinguished! Mrs. Freeman invariably thought there was one layer of paper packing too many for my comfort, and took it out.

A new hat meant chapel. With a plaid scarf round my neck and the atrocious dark tower supported on my ears, I must accompany him to the Wesleyan kirk, there to be bored for one hour and forty minutes by a superman I could not hear, probing into mysteries which I could not understand.

Church is a terrible experience for children—a cruel experience. A lecture on Chinese metaphysics or Arch-Masonry, or Einstein's Theory of Relativity, is as intelligible. How bewilderingly painted, enamelled, covered with mystic signs and obscured by smoky vapours, is the simple Jesus to the average poor child who hears of Him through the medium of the grown-up's pulpit!

I slept in the next room to "father" and "mother", and every night brought the inevitable exchange:

"Night, Dick."

"Night, father."

"Said yer prayers?"

"Yes, father."

Pause.

"You'll go to hell if you don't."

"Yes, father."

A longer pause.

"I don't know that you will."

School and the promised education came at the age of six. I learnt to sign my name "Dick Freeman." George gave me a penny and carried the scrawl to the market for the admiration of his friends.

School. A big yellow barracks of a place, built (or rumour lied) on an old rubbish-pit into which the building was gradually sinking. We used to put chalk marks on the wall near the ground to check the subsidence. And every morning when I turned the corner of Reddin's Road, Peckham, and saw the Board School still standing where it did, I was filled with a helpless sense of disappointment. And the fires that were never lit, and the evil blackboard where godlike teachers, whose caligraphy is still my envy, wrote words of fearful length. The drone of the class-rooms, the humourless lessons, the agonies of mental arithmetic and the seeming impossibilities of the written variety. There were golden days—poetry days. We learnt the "Inchcape Rock", of that Sir Ralph the Rover who sailed away

"And scoured the seas for many a day.

At last grown rich with plunder's store,

He steered his course for Scotland's shore."

And Casabianca, and Brave Horatius, and so by degrees to the Master. I learnt whole scenes of Macbeth and Julius Caesar and Hamlet, and could—and did—recite them with gusto on every and any excuse.

There was one very bright day indeed. Mr. Newton, the class master, initiated a practice which I hope is still a feature of elementary education: he read to us—and chose the "Arabian Nights." The colour and beauty of the East stole through the foggy windows of Reddin's Road School. Here was a magic carpet indeed that transported forty none too cleanly little boys into the palace of the Caliphs, through the spicy bazaars of Bagdad, hand in hand with the king of kings.

Out of school, life ran normally. Up before breakfast, and with a mat bag ranging the Old Kent Road for the day's provisions. (I did most of the shopping.) A pound of sixpenny "pieces" from Mills the butcher, two-penn'orth of potatoes from the greengrocer's, a parsnip and a penn'orth of carrots—I came to have a violent antipathy to Irish stew. "Pieces" are those odds and ends of meat, the by-products of the butchering business. I was something of a connoisseur in pieces; could tell at a glance the tainted "end", guessed unerringly the depth of fat in a scraggy nob of mutton. One could buy fourpenny pieces, but only the very poor touched these. They were almost low, and one lost caste if detected buying them.

The clean, decent poor! Their women are more wonderful than the daughters of kings. I've shopped with them; stood at their front doors talking to them—they seldom asked you inside for fear you saw their makeshifts. Their lace curtains white as snow, the perennial geraniums behind the polished glass of their front windows, their chicken-houses and pigeon-lofts in the back yard above which on Tuesdays and Wednesdays waved and fluttered the spotless banners of their decency.

You saw their women hanging out the washing: stout women dying of cancer and smiling through it. Gripping their clothes-pegs in their teeth, propping up lines, arresting their labours to wipe wet foreheads with wetter arms and exchange a jest with the woman next door. Working, bearing and dying. The insurance man calls once a week that they may make provision for a decorous burying—their very ambitions are headed towards the grave.

CHAPTER II

THE value of popular education has so often been discussed by men who are authorities on the subject that I hesitate to put on record my own point of view. But at any rate I can see the subject from another angle. If every boy who came from a Council school were being prepared for a definite career, it would be a simple matter for the hard-working teachers to train him towards perfection; but the truth is that eighty per cent. of the boys who go through Council schools go forth into the world to swell the ranks of unskilled labour. Their seven or eight years of dreary grind has taught them to read, to write an indifferent hand, and to figure. Within a year of leaving school even a public school boy would find it difficult to qualify for a lower certificate. How much harder is it for the poor boy who leaves a Council school, a place more often than not of unpleasant memories, to utilise the knowledge he has acquired during those seven or eight years! The weary hours he spends securing a working knowledge of the capes and bays of England—knowledge that passes in a flash almost as soon as he has taken a joyous farewell of his school!

I was a fairly intelligent boy, and I am trying to remember now just what I did learn. At geography, roughly the shape of England; nothing about the United States, nothing about the railway systems of Europe. I learnt that China had two great rivers, the Yangtse-kiang and Hoangho, but which is which I can't remember. I knew the shape of Africa and that it was an easy map to draw. I knew nothing about France except that Paris was on the Seine. I knew the shape of Italy was like a top-booted leg, and that India was in the shape of a pear; but except that there had been a mutiny in that country, it was terra incognita to me.

History: The ancient Britons smeared themselves with woad and paddled round in basket-shaped boats. William the Conqueror came to England in 1066. Henry VIII had seven—or was it eight?—wives. King Charles was executed for some obscure reason, and at a vague period of English history there was a War of the Roses.

Chemistry: If you put a piece of heated wire in oxygen—or was it hydrogen?—it glowed very brightly. If you blow through a straw into lime water, the water becomes cloudy.

English Literature: Three plays of Shakespeare which especially appealed to me, and knowledge of which was of the greatest service in after life; an acquaintance with the "Arabian Nights", and one or two poets.

Religion: No more than I learnt at Sunday school.

Drawing: Hours of hard work in an attempt to acquire proficiency in an art for which I had no aptitude.

Arithmetic: As far as decimals. In those days book-keeping was not learnt at school. You might say that all the knowledge I acquired from my lessons in arithmetic was the ability to tot columns of figures with great rapidity.

I think I would undertake to teach in a month more geography than I learnt in six years. Not, I hasten to add, because the teachers were deficient, for we had in "Tubby" Gaines one of the finest head masters that ever went to an elementary school, but because the system is as wrong as it can well be, and hour after hour of time is wasted in inculcating into a class of fifty, knowledge which is of no interest whatever except to possibly two or three.

You have to remember to take into account the attitude not only of the boys but of their parents towards school. To the average poor father and mother, school is a place which occupies a boy's time that otherwise would be spent in making himself a nuisance at home. When he gets a little older, school becomes an interference with the liberty of the subject; the boy is being detained when he ought to be earning his living.

To the average boy, school is a horrible duty, and if there are ever any who do not wake on Monday morning and groan at the prospect of another week's grind, then they are hardly normal. In any case, the time given to popular education is ridiculously inadequate. Twenty-seven and a half hours a week compares very unfavourably with the time spent by a boy at a public school. In my day, games were not encouraged; there was little or no drill, and no break in the morning. School was divided into standards, and the teacher took most of the lessons, though occasionally there was an exchange.

The real trouble with the Council school is that there is no machinery by which continuation classes can be made compulsory. No boy should be given a clearance certificate until, say, he has made himself proficient in one of the modern languages. As matters are at present, a boy leaves school more or less illiterate, with no other qualification than that required for a van or errand boy. But mostly, I think, the real deficiency in the system is that he is not taught to speak. Well acquainted as I am with the peculiar intonation of the street boy, I am frequently at a loss to understand what he is talking about. This stricture not only applies to London, but to the provinces. The horrible articulation of the average Council-trained youth is a terrible handicap to him in after life. Indeed, the only difference that exists between the Council boy and the public school boy is his voice. The nasal whine of the Cockney schoolboy is an offence. And there is really no reason in the world why he should be allowed to go into the world under such a disadvantage.

Eleven years of life passed for me—confused years in which sixpenny pieces and half-hundredweights of coal and Caius Cassius and wagonette drives to Sidcup are inextricably mixed up.

George Freeman's breakings-out are more clearly remembered. There was a sort of routine which began with his return from the market in a more jocular frame of mind, and a morning visit to the "Glengall Arms." And then a visit to the Post Office Savings Bank to withdraw fabulous sums, and then the hire of a wagonette and horse which he drove to Sidcup, where tea was to be had under the elms. Then came a period of deep depression and remorse; a certain harshness of temper, and finally the interminable reading of the Old Testament, glasses perched on his thick nose.

Those "on the drink" periods had their joys and sorrows for me. Money was plentiful—pennies to be had for the asking. There were other times when I sat on the doorstep of the hostel waiting for closing-time and cursing all public-houses that kept me out of bed. The bouts lasted less than a week—he was both a frugal and a cautious man. He carried always in his waistcoat pocket a piece of steel umbrella rib hooked at the end to retrieve his false teeth in case he ever swallowed them.

At ten or thereabouts I became a sort of associate member of a gang of burglars. They stole type from a type-founder's. I never took part in the raids carried out under the direction of a desperado very little older than myself, but I received a little of the loot and regretted that it was not more useful. And about now I met a man who asked me to buy him cigarettes—a penn'orth at a time. He gave me nice new florins and I brought him back the change. After I had changed five, I took the sixth to the nearest policeman and said:

"If you please, sir, is this money snide?"

He broke it with his finger and thumb and said that it was snide. So my employer was pinched, and the magistrate said I was a smart little boy. I kept the News of the World cutting for a long time—it was the first time my name ever appeared in print.

Eleven years passed. I made a suggestion to Mrs. Freeman, which she rejected with indignation.

"Only raggity boys sell newspapers on the streets", she said.

And I wasn't a raggity boy. Nevertheless—I had explored the fascinating part of the City. It begins at St. Paul's and ends at Temple Bar. I was a theatre-goer too—the Surrey and the Elephant and Castle gallery was like home to me. Have I not shed tears over the sorrows of Mrs. Bennett, driven from home by cruel parents and dying in the paper snow. Theatre-going was something of an adventure. It involved saving—on less than sixpence the evening was a failure. The gallery cost fourpence at the Surrey (as against threepence at the Elephant); an extra penny was required for a bottle of ginger-beer and a penny for the tram ride home.

And at home trouble began. A knock at the door... a wait... the sound of feet in the passage.

"Is that you, Dick?"

The door was always locked and bolted against the burglar who never came. God knows what he could have stolen, for Mr. Freeman's savings book was locked in the bottom drawer and he kept a policeman's truncheon hanging to the rail of his bed.

"Yes, mother."

The sound of bolts being pulled and a running commentary on my disgraceful behaviour.

"This time of night... you ought to be ashamed of yourself... you young blackguard!"

There was always a gentle slap awaiting me as I darted through, but I was a nimble dodger.

It was during the summer holidays of 1886 that I began my business career. Unknown to the Freemans, I "went to London" and was initiated into the mysteries of "sale or return." The paper I chose was the Echo, a bilious-looking sheet that was remarkable for its high moral tone and the accuracy of its tips.

On a summer afternoon I appeared outside Cook's office at Ludgate Hill beneath the windows of the very club of which I was one day to be chairman, with a bundle of Echos under my arm. It was an enthralling experience. I stood in the very centre of London. Past me rumbled the horse buses, the drays and wagons of the great metropolis. I saw great men, pointed out to me by a queer old gentleman in a frowsy overcoat and top hat who haunted Ludgate Circus. Sala—Mr. Lawson, who owned the Telegraph, the father of the present Viscount Burnham-Toole, who came occasionally to Fleet Street—Henry Irving driving in a hansom cab with a beautiful lady called Ellen Terry (they were coming from St. Paul's). I was very happy and grateful that I had the opportunity of seeing such people.

Winter came. Attendance at my pitch involved "hopping the wag", a mysterious colloquialism which meant playing truant from school. And in the winter trade was slack. All the cold bitter winds of the world circled madly in Ludgate Circus. It was a shivering, nose-nipping business. I found a novel method of generating heat. As I stamped my feet I recited in a mutter the quarrel scene from Julius Caesar.

CASSIUS: That you have wrong'd me doth appear in this: