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The day may arrive perhaps when, having embanked the Thames, we shall follow suit to the Seine and the Rhine, by tenanting it with cheap baths for the many. Until we do so, the stale joke of the "Great Unwashed" recoils upon ourselves, and is no less symptomatic of defective sanitary arrangements than the possibility of a drought in Bermondsey. But we are forgetting our bathers.
Already, as a result of the London Mission, a new, fully organised circuit has grown up; the West London Mission alone reporting a membership which is one-tenth of the whole membership of London in 1837. The latest and most novel branch of the work is the "Bermondsey Settlement," established six years ago in the poorest district of south-east London.
There were, he said, six in the cartload which he took from Carfax and left at 197 Chicksand Street, Mile End New Town, and another six which he deposited at Jamaica Lane, Bermondsey. If then the Count meant to scatter these ghastly refuges of his over London, these places were chosen as the first of delivery, so that later he might distribute more fully.
At this point a stone platform, perhaps four feet square, was discovered, from the edge of which a flight of worn and slimy stone steps led down to a permanent boat-landing, where another gas-light flared gustily despite the protection of its frame of begrimed glass. "Good Lord!" exclaimed the young man. "What, in Heaven's name, Calendar ?" "Bermondsey Old Stairs. Come on."
But he didn't want anybody to know it." "But that doesn't prove " "Just a minute." Rapidly and concisely Kirkwood recounted the events wherein he had played a part, subsequent to the adventure of Bermondsey Old Stairs.
"Jocelyn," the Colonel would reply with scorn; "pah! There may have been a short space of time during which the fellow's long hair and windy rhetoric impressed her. But I flatter myself I've put my spoke in Mr. Jocelyn's wheel. Why, damme, sir, she's consented to stand for Grand Dame of the Bermondsey Branch of the Primrose League next year. What's Jocelyn to say to that, the scoundrel!"
Here the Student lived like a lord for Bermondsey! For he possessed two flats, one for his "butler" a sick-looking young man in list slippers, and his wife and family and the other for himself.
The book was written not away in the peace of the country, nor in the comparative quiet of a certain sunny little sitting-room I know of, looking on to a leafy back garden in Kensington, where Donald often sat and smoked and wrote, but in a little flat in a dull tenement house in a grey street in Bermondsey, where I remember visiting him with a cousin of his.
"Where is he?" Ralph asked, with interest. "The address he has sent me is some low street in Bermondsey," I answered. "It is absolutely impossible that he should have chosen such a place to stop in except as a hiding-place. I don't like the look of it, Ralph." "Then don't go," Ralph said quickly. "There is no need for you to run into danger for nothing at all."
I don't fancy there's anything in Bermondsey going to hurt me." "I hope not, sir," Ashley answered civilly. "At half-past eleven, if I do not hear from you, I shall go myself to Scotland Yard." I nodded. "And in the meantime," I said, "a taxicab, if you please." I drove to the address given me on the paper.
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