by Bob Biderman
On July 4, 1885, readers of the Pall Mall Gazette had been issued with ‘A Frank Warning’ which announced that if Ministers were prepared to allow the bill to drop because the public was not keenly aware of its importance, then it was up to the Gazette to publish the findings of his Special and Secret Commission of Inquiry which he had set up to investigate the issue of child prostitution.
Promising an actual journey into a Dantean sexual underworld was not the act of someone who cares nothing for increasing his newspaper’s readership. Indeed, it could have been argued by the many cynics who watched Stead’s virtuosity with green-eyed amazement that voyeurism was still voyeuristic even when given the mantle of crusade, no matter how noble.
In the end, the series was reprinted in pamphlet form, selling well over a million copies in the course of a year. Translations sold equally well in Germany, France, and Sweden where people queued up at newspaper kiosks to get their dose of British smut.
It was, in all, a brilliantly effective journalistic enterprise that managed to balance bare-knuckle investigative reporting on the thin edge of salaciousness. Whether it toppled over into prurience may have been in the mind of the beholder, but Stead’s accusations went further than sexual titillation. For those he charged with purchasing the wives and daughters of the poor to satisfy their lust were the rich and powerful – the business magnates, politicians and, worst of all, the judges. ‘I heard of much the same people in the house of ill-fame as those of whom you hear in caucuses, in law courts and on the “Change,”’ he wrote. And, for some, that was a sentence too far.
Just six months after the Criminal Law Amendment Bill was finally passed, due in no small part to the dust kicked up by the Maiden Tribute series, Stead and several of his colleagues were charged with criminal acts relating to one of the more dramatic incidents cooked up to expose the ease with which the trade in young girls was accomplished. In order to prove how simple the business was, Stead purchased a young girl named Eliza Armstrong from her mother, through a woman intermediary, herself a reformed prostitute now working for the Salvation Army. Eliza, who was only thirteen, was taken to a midwife – a known abortionist – who attested to the child’s virginity. She then was taken to a room in a hotel.
Here the story gets a bit murky. Unbeknownst to young Eliza, the hotel was actually a brothel. Somehow, for reasons unclear, she was given a whiff of chloroform provided by the abortionist who had certified to the girl’s virginity. The chloroform was supposedly to make the seduction easier – but, according to Stead, could be explained as simply part of the reality theatre which was taken step by step until… Until what?
Stead entered the child’s room. She was groggy but still awake. Looking over at the bearded man staring at her with his dark, intense eyes, she became frightened and screamed. Her terror frightened Stead, himself. He fled. It wasn’t till the next morning that someone from the Salvation Army came to take the child away, sending her to a secret location in France.
What sort of theatre was that? What was Stead up to? What kind of game was he playing? How far did he have to go to prove what everyone knew would happen next anyway?
The case of Eliza Armstrong could have easily destroyed a weaker man, but not Stead. The trial was his pillory but also his vindication. To be martyred on the alter of the Maiden Tribute Story was proof, if proof be needed, of his danger and effectiveness.
He was given six months in prison – even though the jury who convicted him found he was misled by intermediaries but that his actions were animated by only the highest motives. They pleaded for leniency. But the judge gave him six months in prison anyway.
And who was the prosecuting attorney that led the fight for Stead’s conviction? Someone quite familiar to us, for it was none other than Harry Poland, the very same Harry Poland whose cold-blooded vehemence had now condemned Israel Lipski to the gallows.
Needless to say, there was no love lost between Stead and Poland. And one might be forgiven for thinking that perhaps there was a trace of empathy Stead felt for the poor Jew caught in the jaws of the same machine that had tried to swallow him up.
Z, as we know, was already a qualified admirer of Stead’s vociferous brand of journalism. He had been fascinated with the freedom of language Stead had encouraged, and the passions it aroused. The staid and boring pages of the Times paled in comparison. There was no question about it – the newspaper which was paving the way into the 20th century was undoubtedly the Pall Mall Gazette.
But Z was also aware that truth was often a victim of clatter. The beating of drums and the blaring of trumpets might be good for a march but sometimes drowned out the harsh whispers of reasoned discourse.
However – and this was an ‘however’ that was bold, capitalized and underlined in red – Z also understood there was no other paper in England, no other editor than Stead who would have the daring, the temerity, the reckless disregard for institutional and personal safety and well-being, who could throw caution to demonic gales and take on a story of a friendless, foreign immigrant most people – most of the establishment, anyway – desperately wanted, for some mysterious reason, to see swinging from a rope and then to be forever, erased from history as the removal of some unsightly stain on the mythological robe of the metaphorical Queen Victoria.
CHAPTER 26
HAYWARD HAD WRITTEN a letter which Z duly passed on to Stead that afternoon at the Café Royal. It read: ‘Sir, – The poor fellow Lipski has this day been found guilty. I spent a considerable time with him in prison. I tested a statement made by him most severely and his plain, straightforward demeanour and his excellent character fully convinced me that he was not guilty of the charge brought against him. There are one or two points that are especially noteworthy. First, that his landlady, who pushed open the door, is not at all sure that the door was locked. Secondly, that the one ounce of nitric acid stated to have been purchased by the prisoner was, according to the doctor’s evidence, all consumed in poisoning the woman, and it must have taken at least another ounce to have destroyed the coat. Also that the man’s elbows had the skin rubbed off them and the skirt of the coat was burnt in such a way as to indicate that the man must have been lying on his back at the time. I do hope that these things may be considered and that some efforts may be made to spare the man’s life.’
Stead read the letter and then looked at Z with his amazing eyes that bore into flesh like red-hot sunlight through a prism and asked if Z himself thought Lipski to be innocent. Whereupon Z replied that he felt the case against Lipski hadn’t been proven and therefore he could not conclude that he was guilty.
It was an unsafe verdict, Stead agreed, and to send a man to the gallows on such a basis would itself be a criminal act. Therefore he was willing to put the powers of his newspaper at Lipski’s service on one condition…
There was a moment of hesitation. Z looked out beyond their table and, for an instant, became aware of the myriad of conversations taking place at the very same time in the Domino Room. At each table was a different world, a different universe. Stories were being told, ideas were being debated, lies expounded, reputations sullied, challenges accepted, passions aroused. And here at their table Stead was telling him that he would defend Lipski on one condition. What condition was that he wondered?
Stead lit up a finely wrapped cigar that had been on a voyage of adventure poets could only dream about and allowed the musky fumes to envelope his head, disappearing momentarily behind a veil of smoke. His condition, the disembodied voice now said, was the Gazette would get first notification of any information that would be relevant to the appeal. Could Z promise that?
Of course Z couldn’t promise anything of the sort, though he certainly thought that Hayward and the rest of the Committee of Defence would have little problem with that idea. As for himself, he was simply the messenger, a toothless intermediary who felt drawn to help in the defence of a man who was a victim of
injustice.
But such things occur all the time in London, Stead reminded him. He could give him twenty stories of injustices happening that very day, each one would make him weep and wring his hands in bitter shame. Why was he so motivated to help in this particular situation?
What was he to say? That he identified with this sad, benighted lad as an immigrant Jew from Poland who had somehow lost his footing and slipped through the fissure that ran like an invisible seismic crack through London’s East End, falling into a spiritual chasm where one could drop eternally downward into the hell of inner horror? Would the collective plight of the Eastern European refugee make sense to a man who was toying around with the ideas of Madame Novikoff and her romance with the transcendent Tsar and the manifest destiny of Mother Russia?
It was best to turn the question around and ask what Lipski meant to Stead. Which is what Z did. And Stead responded without hesitation that Lipski, himself, meant nothing to him – though he was impressed with the young man’s reported dignity and self-possession. What attracted him to this case was the blatant disregard for the basic rules of natural justice without which no civilisation worthy of the name could long survive. This above all was what drove him to unsheathe his powerful sword. For it wasn’t the strong and mighty who deserved protection but the meek and humble – which is why God had given puny David the means to vanquish the philistine Goliath.
But was he not troubled to be seen protecting the unctuous immigrants, the beggarly Jews – the very people he had accused of bringing famine and disease to the native sons of England? Didn’t he see the dangers in stirring up a hornet’s nest of latent hatreds?
And, even more, didn’t Stead know who Z was? Looking into his face, into his eyes, didn’t he see that Z had ‘Jew’ written all over him? Didn’t he suspect that Z was Lipski in another guise? Didn’t he think that a Jew is a Jew is a Jew – some might be wealthy, some might be poor but they all have something peculiar about them, something of the night? Certainly Stead thought this, didn’t he? Isn’t that what he would have said if he could – sitting there with Z that day in the Domino Room at the Café Royal?
Perhaps. Perhaps not. What Stead thought was many things, some in blatant contradiction to some others. But, for him, Justice was more than an abstract idea; it was a visceral manifestation of everything good and holy. Like a latter-day St. George, he felt it was his earthly duty to slay the Dragon of Foul Play. And if in the process he could sell a few papers, well, who could blame him?
CHAPTER 27
AT THE SAME time Z was meeting with Stead at the Café Royal, Maggie was on a mission of her own. However, unlike Z, who was acting chiefly as an intermediary, Maggie’s undertaking was a more risky venture.
What Myers had suggested, what he said was necessary, was somehow to gain insight into the judge’s mind. For if a respite was to be agreed, it would have to be with Fitzjames Stephen’s acquiescence. And for that to happen, for them to finesse this, so to speak, it would need a strategy that was seasoned with the proper information. Had the judge some second thoughts about the case now he had a moment to reflect? If so, what part of his cranial lobes required massaging to help along the process of re-evaluation? And if he were firm in his resolve – as Myers suspected he was – then what did he see as the political vulnerabilities that the verdict had laid open? For, like everyone in service to the Queen, there was not only moral rectitude, but career to think about. And when all was said and done, he suspected that career came before rectitude for each of them.
But how was she to find this out? How was she to discover the intimate thoughts of a reclusive judge in such short order?
Power, Myers had noted, was always concentrated in the hands of a very small coterie. Smaller still was the power elite in London. Maggie had the advantage of entry into that rarefied world about which people like Myers could only wonder. It’s true that Maggie was somewhere on the outer fringes, but, unlike him, it was possible for her to find a way inside. And didn’t she say that her cousin was friendly with the family of the judge’s brother?
Unfortunately, Maggie had been growing apart from her well-connected cousin over the years they had been living in London. A relationship that had once been very close had started to drift as youthful intimacies often do when transferred to the more rugged terrain of adulthood. Cracks had always been there, Maggie supposed, but she hadn’t noticed how splintered they were, like a finely lacquered vase that over the course of years had begun to show a spider web of lines foreshadowing its eventual destruction.
Theirs was still a relationship of need, however, if not always one of trust. Two young women alone in the heart of London were, for all their courage and daring, still two young women alone. Except Beatrice was never actually alone, not really. Not like Maggie who had increasingly cut herself off to focus on her writing and her art. Beatrice couldn’t understand. She couldn’t understand the fearful process of alienation that sometimes comes hand in glove with the quest for the muse who still remains elusive. For Beatrice was a creature of the intellect who had learned well the technique of sublimating passion. And yet the act of sublimation itself is an enigma. It takes you to curious places and leaves a bit of you dangling like an uncertain acrobat walking a tightrope wire that suddenly disappears into the darkness of the endless firmament.
And there was something more, something that went back to their early days of dreamy youth when certain inequalities were fantasised away. The daughter of a country prelate never doubted she was an equal match for the daughter of a wealthy businessman; the tossing of life’s odious dice is not something easily accepted by those who see themselves through internal spectacles that transform the boring monochrome into a multitude of brilliant colours. Two young girls in the euphoria of Spring could share their dreams and profess undying love to the ethereal breeze that will waft them soon away come the blistering gales of Autumn.
Both of them had compassion; both in different ways. Maggie was struck by the plight of the unfortunate, wanting to understand and nurture them. For Beatrice, the dilemma was far more abstract. It was humanity she cared about, not people. Beatrice would change the world. Maggie would despair of it.
When they first meet up again in London, Maggie was a nurse and Beatrice was a self-taught economist working with a group of social statisticians collecting every bit and detail as they codified the poverty of East End London, methodically raking each layer and stratum like archaeologists exploring the ruins of some re-discovered world. After Maggie chucked in her medical career to write, throwing caution to the winds, Beatrice began to feel a secret resentment, for the structure and discipline she had imposed upon herself was painful and stultifying and part of her ached for the freedom to express the yearnings of her counter-mind, that other self which she had so carefully entrapped within a rigid mental corset. But watching Maggie’s descent into the ghetto’s dark obscurity frightened her. For Beatrice wished simply to observe – though only from a distance. And protected by her father’s bursary, she had no real understanding of what it meant to live on the perilous edge of hunger. She knew it in abstract, but she didn’t know it in her gut – try as she might to imagine it.
Maggie knew what hunger meant and she embraced it – not because she wished herself harm, but simply because she felt that Christ could only know the suffering of his people because he suffered with them: if they went without bread, he shared their fast; if they walked without shoes, he trod the rocky earth with feet sore with bruises.
‘Poor Maggie,’ Beatrice would write in her journal, ‘with her lonely tortuous life and envious temper. And yet for those in trouble she had plenty of warm sympathy – true mitgefuhl – for the failures of society. If only she had religion, that haven of rest and peace for the lonesome worker, the one anchor in this life of strange dreams and feverish feelings…’
Envy, like the other deadly sins, is often in the mind of the beholder, p
erhaps even more than greed and lust. For Maggie was Beatrice’s alternative self, the one she so desired when in the quiet of her room she opened up her secret diary to once again explore the roots of her anguish. And because Beatrice could hardly allow herself to understand that she yearned so very much to escape her world of glittering numbers and elegant facts into the visceral grottiness of real existence, she created another Maggie in her mind – one that was so pitiful and poor, someone to be patronised.
Beatrice said nothing to her, of course – nothing specific, that is. But communication works in many forms – a glance, a gesture, an aura picked up like radio waves, instead of sound, broadcasting emotions. And most telling of all was the stillness – those moments of silence that punctuate the air with emptiness. Nothing speaks volumes. Silence echoes with the power of negation, for, like a vacuum, nature abhors it.
And yet, despite it all, they were still friends. They still had the loyalty of youth ingrained like an ethereal inner core which nurtured their forgiveness and allowed them to continue on as if they were yet who they were back then, back in the giggly days of girlish folly and deception.
So coming to Beatrice for help wasn’t easy. But come to Beatrice she did. For Beatrice knew the people who Maggie needed in order to complete her mission.
Of course it was through Beatrice that Maggie had attended the garden party some time back at the home of Leslie Stephen, Fitzjames Stephen’s brother. But that was before the judge had meant anything to her. And now she needed to know more.
What she told Beatrice wasn’t much. Maggie could, to her cousin’s annoyance, be quite circumspect. But like any spy, she intuitively accepted the dictum that one only said what others needed to hear. And Beatrice needed to know very little from Maggie’s perspective (though from Beatrice’s own point of view, she needed to know everything – or at least a lot more than Maggie was prepared to tell her).
