A Girl Among the Anarchists Part 8

CHAPTER VII

THE OFFICE OF THE _TOCSIN_

To the ordinary citizen whose walk in life lies along the beaten track there is a suggestion of Bohemianism about the office of any literary or propagandist organ; but I doubt whether the most imaginative among them in their wildest moments have ever conceived any region so far removed from the conventions of civilised society, so arbitrary in its hours and customs, so cosmopolitan and so utterly irrational as the office of the _Tocsin_.

In other chapters I attempt to describe the most noticeable among the genuine Anarchists who belonged to it, but I wish here to convey some faint idea of the strange medley of outside cranks and _decla.s.ses_ whose resort it in time became. There appeared to be a magnetic attraction about the place to tramps, _desoeuvres_ cranks, argumentative people with time on their hands, and even downright lunatics. Foreigners of all tongues a.s.sembled in the office--Russians, Italians, French, Spaniards, Dutch, Swedes, and before very long they practically swamped the English element. The Anarchist and revolutionary party has always been more serious on the Continent than in England, and what genuine Anarchists there are here are mostly foreigners.

Trades and industries of the most heterogeneous kinds were carried on at the _Tocsin_ by unemployed persons who could find no other refuge for their tools nor outlet for their energies. In one corner old M'Dermott settled down with his lasts and leather, and there industriously hammered away at his boots, alternating his work with occasional outbursts of Shakespearian recitation. In winter the old fellow was positively snowed up in the office, where he crouched shivering over the fire until the advent of spring revived him. On the first warm sunny day he suddenly flung down his tools, and rushing out into the courtyard amazed and terrified Mrs. Wattles and her colleagues by shouting at the top of his voice, "Let me shout, let me shout, Richard's himself again!"

"'E gave me such a turn, Miss, with 'is carryin's on that I got the spasims again, an' I don't know what ever I shall do if I can't find the price of a 'alf-quartern o' gin." And I took the hint, for Mrs.

Wattles's alliance was no despicable possession among the savages of Lysander Grove.

A shed was erected in the corner of the composing-room, which served by night as a dormitory for numbers of otherwise roofless waifs, and here during the daytime a young Belgian and his wife set up a small factory of monkeys up sticks, which when completed they proceeded to sell in the streets. In another corner two Italians settled down to manufacture a remarkable new kind of artificial flower with which they traded when opportunity permitted. Small plaster-casts of Queen Victoria and Marat were also manufactured here. When the influx of starving Italians necessitated it, a kind of soup-kitchen was inaugurated over which Beppe presided, and very busy he was kept too, manufacturing _minestras_ and _polenta_, a welcome innovation to me, I may mention, after a long regime of small and nauseous tarts, bread and jam, and cheese. In short, the headquarters of the _Tocsin_, besides being a printing and publishing office, rapidly became a factory, a debating club, a school, a hospital, a mad-house, a soup-kitchen and a sort of Rowton House, all in one.

When I look back on the scene now, and recall all the noise and hubbub, the singing, the discussions and disputes, the readings, the hammerings on this side, the hangings on that, the feeding, and M'Dermott's Shakespearian recitations, I find it very difficult to realise the amount of hard work which I and the other few serious and earnest comrades got through.

The chief impediment to the progress of the work, however, was Short, the compositor. On close acquaintance with this creature, I found that he did not belie my first impression of him as the laziest and most slovenly of men; and I soon realised the two dominant characteristics which had made of him a Socialist--envy and sloth. So deeply was he imbued with envy that he was quite unable to rest so long as anyone else was better off than himself; and although he did not care one jot for "humanity" of which he prated so freely, and was incapable of regenerating a flea, he found in a certain section of the Socialist and Anarchist party that degree of dissatisfaction and covetousness which appealed to his degraded soul. Besides which the movement afforded him grand opportunities for living in sloth and sponging on other people.

Short was not without his humorous side, however, when only you were in the right mood to appreciate it. His envy of the superiority which he noted in others was only equalled by his intense contempt for himself.

I can still picture the poor brute lying with his dog in a corner of the office amid a heap of rubbish, unwashed, unkempt (he never divested himself of his clothes), and verminous in the extreme. There he would blow discordant notes on a mouth-organ, or smoke his rank old pipe, eat jam tarts, and scowl his wrath and envy on the world. If he could get hold of some unoccupied person to whom he could retail all the latest bits of Anarchist scandal, or from whom he could ferret out some little private secrets, he was contented enough, or, leaning out of the office window he would deliver a short autobiographical sketch to the interested denizens of the surrounding courts. A small bill, posted outside the office door, announced that Short was prepared to undertake extraneous jobs of printing on his own account; and this was responsible for many of the queer customers who found their way to the office of the _Tocsin_.

One of the queerest of all the queer oddities who haunted it was a small man of hunted aspect, known to every one as the "Bleeding Lamb." He had acquired this peculiar name from the t.i.tle of a booklet which he had written under the direct inspiration of the Holy Ghost, a sort of interpretation of the Apocalypse, wherein was foretold a rapid termination of the universe. The printing of the "Bleeding Lamb" was undertaken by Short, whose dilatoriness in executing his work doubtless prolonged by a few years the existence of the terrestrial globe.

There was all the fervour of a prophet in the eye of the "Bleeding Lamb," but inspiration ceased here, and even what there was of inspired and prophetic in his eye was overcast by a certain diffident and deprecating look. He was the victim, poor man, of a twofold persecution in which heaven and earth joined hands to torment him--the archangel Michael and the Metropolitan police being the arch offenders.

One of the first things that struck you about the Bleeding Lamb was the helpless look of his feet. They were for ever shuffling and stumbling, getting in the way, and tripping up himself and others. His hands too had a flabby and inefficient expression, and his knees were set at a wrong angle. His stature was insignificant, his colouring vague; longish hair and beard of a colourless grey matched the grey of his prophetic and persecuted eye.

He would enter the office furtively, and cast a rapid glance round as though he almost expected to find the archangel Michael or an inspector of the Metropolitan police lurking in a corner, and it would take him some few seconds before he could muster up sufficient courage to inquire, as was his invariable custom, whether anyone had been round to ask after him. On being a.s.sured that no one had called for that purpose he appeared relieved, and gradually, as he became more and more rea.s.sured, he would warm to his subject of the coming cataclysm, and launch out into prophecy. "Ah," he exclaimed to me one day after a long discourse on the universal destruction at hand, "won't Queen Victoria just shiver in her shoes when she receives the revised edition of the 'Bleeding Lamb.' Little does she dream at this moment of what is in store for her." I recollect also that Nelson was in some way connected with his prophecies and his perplexities, but in what particular connection is not quite clear to my mind. The sympathy which he apparently felt for the Anarchists was, I suppose, due to the fact that they too were engaged--on a somewhat smaller scale it is true--on a policy of destruction, and also to their avowed antagonism to the law and the police, whether metropolitan or otherwise.

The Bleeding Lamb had a formidable rival in the field of prophecy in the person of another strange frequenter of our office--a demure-looking gentleman named Atkinson who professed to be the reincarnation of Christ, and who preached the millennium. He was a less depressed-looking person than the Bleeding Lamb--whom he treated with undisguised contempt--and affected a tall hat and Wellington boots. The Lamb, on his side, denounced the Messiah as a fraud, and went so far as to suggest that he had only taken to prophecy when the alteration in the fashion of ladies' pockets compelled him to abandon his original profession. "That Lamb is not quite right in the upper storey," whispered Atkinson to me one day; "he may even become dangerous, poor creature!" Shortly afterwards I was taken aside by the gentleman in question who warned me to keep my purse in safety as "that Messiah is no better than a common thief."

The approach of either of these prophets was invariably the signal for a stampede on Short's part, who, never having completed his work, dreaded encountering the mournful scrutiny and reproachful bleating of the Lamb no less than the sad, stern rebukes and potential Wellington boots of the Messiah. Into no single item of the day's programme did he put so much zest as into the grand dive he would make into any available hiding-place, and he would lie for hours flat on his stomach under M'Dermott's bed sooner than "face the music."

One day the perspiring Lamb entered the office red in the face and considerably out of breath, rapidly followed by a lugubrious individual, talking volubly in an argumentative monotone. This person seemed to be very indignant about something.

"Marcus Aurelius was a just ruler and a philosopher," he was saying, "and he saw the necessity for suppressing the Christian factions. He was among the severest persecutors of the early Christians.--What does that argue, you fool?"

"Nothing against my contention with regard to the seven-headed beast in the Apocalypse," replied the Bleeding Lamb with a defiant snort.

"The seven-headed beast has nothing to do with the case," retorted his interlocutor, putting all the warmth into his monotonous drawl of which he appeared capable. "The seven-headed beast can't alter history, and my case is conclusively proved in the course of this little work, to the production of which I have devoted the best years of my life.

The seven-headed beast indeed! Pshaw for your seven-headed beast, you dunder-headed dreamer!"

Whilst I gazed on dumbfounded at this little scene, making futile efforts to grasp the vexed point under discussion, the strange new-comer, whom the Lamb addressed as Gresham, deposited on the floor a huge and shapeless brown-paper parcel, under whose weight he was staggering, and sitting down by its side he carefully untied the string, and dragged triumphantly forth tome after tome of carefully-written MSS., which he proceeded to read out without further preamble.

"'Atheism _v._ Christianity,'" he drawled, commencing at the t.i.tle, "'being a short treatise on the Persecutions of the Early Christians, the object of which is to prove that they were persecuted by the just emperors and protected by the unjust; that, consequently, they were wrong; that Christianity is wrong, and the Deity a palpable fraud; by Tobias Jonathan Gresham,'--and let the seven-headed beast in the Apocalypse put that in his pipe and smoke it!" casting a defiant glance at the Bleeding Lamb.

As this concluding remark was made in the same monotone as the foregoing sentence, I was at some loss to determine whether or not it formed part of the t.i.tle of that momentous work.

The Bleeding Lamb here cast me a knowing glance, which said as plainly as words that his unfortunate acquaintance was mad, but that it was as well to humour him, and so he magnanimously sat down on a stool facing his rival, while the latter proceeded to read out his book, which was destined soon to mount up the long list of Short's sins of typographical omissions. This was but the herald of a long series of readings from the "short treatise," which were carried on at intervals for some weeks.

Minute after minute and hour after hour Gresham drawled on from one tedious reiteration to another, never raising his voice nor altering its key, till a sense of dizziness overcame his audience, and his voice became as the singing in one's ears which accompanies high fever or heralds a faint. Indeed I have never suffered from fever or faintness since that date without my sensations recalling Gresham's dreary, argumentative drawl; then gradually his voice would grow fainter and somewhat spasmodic, until at length it gave way to snores, as the weary Lamb and the atheist Lion, like the kid and the leopard of Isaiah, sank down together in a confused heap on the floor, and there slept out a miniature fulfilment of the word of the prophet.

Then there was a Polish count who found his way to the _Tocsin_--a most deplorable aristocratic debris, who might have stepped straight out of the pages of Dostoievsky. I never set eyes on a more depressed-looking mortal than Count Voblinsky. He looked as though he bore on his bent shoulders the weight of all the ill-spent lives in Christendom. He was a damp, unwholesome-looking man, whose appearance suggested long confinement in a cellar. He was pale and hollow-eyed, and almost mouldy; altogether a most cadaverous-looking person. He was always attired, even at eleven A.M., in an old dress suit, green and threadbare with age, and a furry tall hat, into which garments he seemed to have grown and taken root. But despite the decay of his person and his attire, there was a certain degree of aristocratic refinement about Voblinsky's features, last ghastly traces of his ancient n.o.bility. He vaguely recalled to my mind a long-ago Continental trip of my childhood, and an unfortunate elephant in the Ma.r.s.eilles Jardin des Plantes who, from long inactivity in the corner of his cage, had become overgrown with moss. There was the same incongruous touch of erstwhile n.o.bility, the same decay, the same earthy smell. By what shady and circuitous paths had the unfortunate count reached this unhappy pa.s.s? Perhaps his wife was responsible; for if ever woman was calculated not to lead her mate on to higher and better things it was the Countess Voblinska. The countess was worse than slovenly: she was downright dirty. Her tumbled, frowsy hair, with patches of golden dye in it, was surmounted by an appalling hat of incongruous dimensions and shape, trimmed with what appeared to be archaeological relics, thick in dust. To approach it brought on a perfect paroxysm of sneezing. Her clothes, which were very greasy and never brushed, hung together by strings, tatters, and safety-pins. Her hands and face were begrimed with several coats of dirt, and a top coat of _poudre de riz_. No ordinary imagination dared speculate on what lay hidden beneath those tattered rags she wore. She gesticulated much, and discoursed on the subject of some lecture she was to give, in the intervals of volleying forth abuse and swearing in Parisian argot at her long-suffering husband, who received it all with most ludicrous courtesy. Often a strong smell of gin mingled with the eloquent flow of the countess's language.

On the whole, however, the Anarchists and their queer a.s.sociates might be regarded as a fairly temperate set. One of the most potent causes of drink is the monotony of the existences led by most people, the hopeless dreariness of their confined, narrow lives, the total lack of interest and excitement. This is not the case in revolutionary circles, where not only are there plenty of ideas afloat to occupy men's minds and distract them from the narrow circle of their dreary domestic lives, but where also the modern craving for excitement, fact.i.tious or otherwise, finds plenty of nourishment.

The office of the _Tocsin_, however, did not lack the occasional presence of the habitual drunkard. There was one queer fellow who frequently put in a dissipated appearance for the purpose of complaining of the ill-usage to which his wife's tongue subjected him. He looked forward to the Social Revolution as the only escape from this thraldom, and certainly no man ever made more strenuous, albeit ill-directed efforts, on its behalf.

Then there was a bibulous Welshman who at times would startle the unwashed denizens of the neighbouring slums by appearing in a tall hat and irreproachable shirt front. He was a doctor by profession, who succeeded in maintaining a certain reputation in polite circles, but an alcoholic soaker by inclination, one of those men who somehow contrive to keep ahead of ruin by sleeping out periods of financial distress in friends' houses.

Our proof-reader was a benevolent old gentleman of obsolete customs, who in an age of open-air cures still wore a mouth and nose respirator.

He was such an eminently respectable person that I never could quite understand why he a.s.sociated himself with anything so disreputable as the _Tocsin_. I always half suspected that he came there princ.i.p.ally on my account, chivalrously determined that I should not be surrounded _solely_ by sc.u.m. But besides this motive he had some pretensions to being a man of advanced views, and was a purchaser of "advanced"

literature. The introduction of this into the precincts of his home was a great trial to his better half, who had no kind of sympathy with such leanings. New-fangled ideas of any description were tabooed by her, and all preachers and holders of such she unconditionally consigned to h.e.l.l-fires. Her husband she regarded as a brand to be s.n.a.t.c.hed from the burning, and she and a few select female relatives worked hard to s.n.a.t.c.h him. But although new-fangled ideas on social organisation and political economy were bad enough, one thing alone was beyond all human endurance to the mind of Mrs. Crawley, and that one thing was free-love.

One day Mr. Crawley brought home "The Woman Who Did," and neglected to conceal it. It was found by his wife lying on the dining-room sofa.

"My fingers itched to seize and burn the impudent huzzy, lying there as unconcerned as though she had been the 'Private Meditations and Prayers of the Rev. Bagge,'" Mrs. Crawley confided to her Aunt Elizabeth, "but it was a six-shilling book, and I knew how Crawley valued it, and for the life of me I did not dare touch it."

It was a sore trial indeed to Mrs. Crawley to live under the same roof with such a person, but she dared not so far outrage the feelings of one whom she had sworn to love, honour, and obey, as to execute the offending lady. She long meditated some revenge, some outlet for her outraged feelings; it was long in coming, but come it did at last. The "Man Who Didn't" followed in the footsteps of his irregular mate, and in a fourpenny-halfpenny edition. This was more than the worthy matron could stand, and either he or she herself must leave the house. She summoned Aunt Elizabeth, a lady of irreproachable moral standard, the whites of whose eyes had a habit of turning up spasmodically, and the corners of whose mouth down, and to her she unburdened her feelings.

"My dear Eliza," she said, "I have too long tolerated 'The Woman Who Did,' but when it comes to the 'Man Who Didn't,' that--er--well, that disgusting 'Man Who Didn't'--and how am I to know that he didn't, the brazen creature!--it is time I a.s.serted my authority. I cannot and I will not stand him."

The offending and irresolute gentleman was then seized upon with a pair of tongs, carried in solemn procession to the remotest room in the house, and burnt. The sanct.i.ty of matrimony had rea.s.serted its rights.

A young bank clerk who accompanied Crawley to the office was a type of what I might call the conscientiously unprincipled man. It being wrong to steal, he made a point of annexing small objects. Cleanliness is next to G.o.dliness, and he devoted himself heroically to dirt; it was not at all his natural tendency, and the more disagreeable he found it the more strenuous was he in its pursuit. Being by nature punctual, he made it an absolute point of honour never to keep an appointment; and, as a lover of domestic peace, he was for ever working his way into sc.r.a.pes and rows. He was a comical object, with his limp yellow hair brushed ferociously on end, and his mild yellow eyes scowling defiance at mankind.

When the Cuban revolution broke out a wave of sympathy for the oppressed islanders pa.s.sed over the whole civilised world, and nowhere did this find a warmer echo than in the Anarchist party and the _Tocsin_ group.

Many Anarchists were in favour of going out to the a.s.sistance of the insurgents. Opinion was divided on the question. Some said: "It is our duty to remain in Europe to carry on the work of Anarchist propaganda here. The Cuban revolution is a race struggle, and no concern of ours."

Others said: "We Anarchists are internationalists, and in whatsoever part of the world there is revolt against oppression, and wherever the revolutionary forces are at work, there is our opportunity to step in and direct those forces into the proper course, towards Anarchism."

These Anarchists saw in the uprising of this small and comparatively insignificant race against the Spanish throne the possible dawn of a wider, vaster struggle, in which the whole world would join hands to lay low thrones, altars, and judgment seats.

A small band of Italian comrades, led by an adventurous Sicilian, got up a subscription for the purpose, and left the office of the _Tocsin_, amid great revolutionary enthusiasm, to journey to the a.s.sistance of the insurgent island. Only one of their number ever returned alive to Europe to tell of the horrors and hardships of the fierce struggle there endured, of the cruelty of the Spaniards, and the uselessness of the fight from the Anarchist point of view.

The Cuban fever was very catching, and after the departure of this first band there was a regular epidemic of departure at the _Tocsin_. Carter and Simpkins turned up at the office one afternoon very much in earnest about it all and persuaded that a little British grit was what was needed in Cuba, "to keep things humming." Simpkins recalled his old army days and the valour he had several times displayed when under the influence of liquor. He waved an old belt appertaining to those times, and would, I believe, have sung something about the Union Jack and the beer of old England, had not his friend recalled him to a better sense of his duty as an Anarchist and Internationalist. It appeared that Carter had come into a small sum of money consequent on the death of an uncle, with which he was bent on paying their pa.s.sage out to Cuba. "What is an Anarchist to do in this wretched country?" he asked. "I am tired of lying in bed waiting for the revolution. It's too slow coming."

"Yah!" muttered Short under his breath to me, "the springs are out of order, and he finds it hard. That's about how much he cares for the revolution."

After Carter and Simpkins had taken their leave of the staff of the _Tocsin_ I watched a very moving scene from the window, when they bade good Mrs. Wattles farewell. The good lady was very deeply affected, and with tears in her eyes she begged them to think again before betaking themselves to "them furrin' parts" where she had heard "the drink was something awful and not fit for a Christian stomach." She was only half rea.s.sured when told that rum came from somewhere in that direction.

But Carter and Simpkins never reached Cuba. Some few minutes' walk from the office of the _Tocsin_, at the corner of Lysander Grove, stood an inviting house of call, the "Merry Mariners," where the valiant warriors dropped in on their way, to refresh themselves, perhaps in antic.i.p.ation of the dreary prospect which Mrs. Wattles's words had opened before them. When several hours later Short returned from his accustomed evening stroll round the neighbourhood, he described with great relish the pitiable termination of their voyage. He had found Carter just sober enough to cart his incapacitated disciple home on a wheelbarrow, after which he painfully betook himself to his bed, there to bemoan the tardiness of the revolution, and the broken condition of the spring mattress.

"And won't his guv'nor just give Simpkins a ragging when he gets home.

He'll give him Cuba," gloated the unsympathetic printer.

Another relief expedition from the _Tocsin_ met with scarcely more brilliant success. Beppe and Meneghino set out under the guidance of old M'Dermott, on tramp to Cardiff, whence they hoped to work their way out to the insurgent island. They, too, set out full of brave hopes and generous enthusiasm, but with too confident a trust in the beneficence of Providence as caterer to their material needs on the journey. Before a fortnight had elapsed, they also were back at the office, Beppe bearing the poor old Irishman on his shoulders in a quite crippled and exhausted condition. He had to be put to bed, and remained there several weeks, before he was in a fit state to get about again. They all complained bitterly of the inhospitality of the country-folk to whom they had appealed for help, and of the uncourteous reception they had met with in the Cardiff docks. Poor Meneghino reached London barefooted, his faithful canvas bag hanging disconsolately over his shoulder--and all with woefully vacant stomachs. They formed a comically dismal group as they collapsed into the office in an exhausted heap.