The Secret Of The League Part 27

The other hara.s.sment was that Leicester lay at the mercy of an epidemic of small-pox which threatened to become historic in the annals of the scourge. In the second month the average daily number of deaths had risen to 120, and there was no sign of a decrease. In the autumn it was hoped that the winter would kill the disease; in the winter it was antic.i.p.ated that it would die out naturally under the influence of the spring sunshine. The situation affected Mr Chadwing more closely than any of his colleagues, for Leicester had the honour of returning the Chancellor of the Exchequer as one of its members. Under normal conditions Mr Chadwing made a practice of visiting his const.i.tuency and addressing a meeting every few weeks, but during the six months that the epidemic raged he found himself unable to leave London. His att.i.tude was perfectly consistent, in spite of the hard things that some of his supporters said of him in his absence: like the majority of his const.i.tuents, he had a Conscientious Objection to vaccination, but he also had an even stronger conscientious objection to encountering small-pox infection.

The 24th of November ushered in a new phase of the strife. It marked the beginning of the Dark Winter. Early in December the newspapers began to draw comparisons between the weather then prevailing and the hard winters on record. At that date it was noticeable how many rustic-looking vagrants were to be seen walking aimlessly about the streets of London. The unemployed from the country were beginning to flock in for the mere sense of warmth. The British Museum, St. Paul's Cathedral, the free libraries, and other places where it was possible to escape from the dreadful rigour of the streets, were crowded by day. At night long _queues_ of miserable creatures haunted the grids of restaurants, the sheltered sides of theatres, the windows of printing houses, and any spot where a little warmth exhaled. On the nights of the 4th, the 5th, and the 6th of December the thermometer on Primrose Hill registered 3 below zero. On the 7th pheasants were observed feeding among the pigeons in the main street of Highgate, and from that time onwards wild birds of the rarer kinds were no unusual sight in the London parks and about the public buildings. In the country it was remarked that the small birds had begun to disappear, and the curious might read any morning of frozen goldfinches being picked up in Camberwell, larks about Victoria Park, and starlings, robins, blackbirds, and such like fry everywhere. By this time dairymen had discovered that it was impossible to deliver milk unless they carried a brazier of live charcoal on their cart or hand-truck. Local correspondents in the provinces had ceased to report ordinary cases of death from cold and exposure; there were cases in the streets of London every night.

Early in December Sir John Hampden was approached unofficially by a few members of Parliament, including one or two of minor official rank, to learn his "terms." The suggestions were tentative on both sides, and nothing was stated definitely. But out of the circ.u.mlocution it might be inferred that he expressed his willingness to rescind the boycott, and to devote five million pounds to public relief at once, in return for certain modifications of the franchise and an immediate dissolution.

Nothing came of the movement, and during the first week of December the Government sent round to the post-offices and to all the Crown tax collectors notices that the licences ordinarily falling due on the 1st of January must be taken out on or before the 15th of the current month, and the King's Taxes similarly collected in advance. The League did not make any open comment on this departure, but every member merely ignored it, and when the 16th of December was reached, it devolved upon the officers of the Crown to enforce the payment by legal process. In the language of another age, the Government was faced by five million "Pa.s.sive Resisters." It soon became apparent that instead of getting in the taxes a fortnight before their time, the greater part of the revenue from that source would be delayed at least a month later than usual.

On the 20th of December one million and three-quarters State-supported unemployed of various grades presented themselves at the appointed trades unions committee rooms, workhouse offices, employment bureaux, Treasury depots, from which the Fund was administered, to receive their weekly "wage." As they pa.s.sed in they were confronted by a formal notice to the effect that the disburs.e.m.e.nt was then reduced to half its usual amount. As they pa.s.sed out they came upon another formal notice to the effect that after the following week the Grant would be "temporarily suspended." Possibly that also embodied an idea of "breaking it gently."

The cry of surprise, rage, and terrified foreboding that rose from every town and village of the land when the direful news was at length understood, can never be described. Its echoes were destined to roll through the pages of English history for many a generation. The immediate result was that rioting broke out in practically all parts of the country except the purely agricultural. The people who had been promised a perpetual life of milk and honey had "murmured" when they were offered bread and water. Now there seemed every prospect of the water reaching them as ice, and the bread-board being empty, and their "murmuring" took a sharper edge. In some places there were absolute stampedes of reason. In justice it has to be remembered that by this time the most pitiless winter of modern times had been heaping misery on misery for a month, that the chance of finding work or relief was recognised to be the forlornest hope, and that very, very few had a reserve of any kind.

The indiscriminate disturbances of the 20th of December were easily suppressed. A people that has been free for generations loses the gift for successful rioting in the face of armed discipline, even of the most inadequate strength. But for const.i.tutional purposes the body of one dragooned rioter in England was worth more than a whole "Vladimir's battue" east of the Baltic.

On the 27th of December the certified unemployed drew their diminished pittance for the last time. They left the buildings in many places with the significant threat that they would return that day week, and if there was nothing for them would "warm their hands" there at the least.

There was renewed rioting that day also. The forces of law and order had been strengthened; the rioters appeared to have been better organised.

In one or two towns the rioting began to approach the Continental level.

Bolton was said to have proved itself far from amateurish, and Nuneaton was spoken of as being distinctly promising. At the end of that day public buildings had to be requisitioned in several places to lay out the spoils of victory and defeat.

Two days later every newspaper contained an "open letter" from Sir John Hampden to the Government, in which he unconditionally offered them, on behalf of the Unity League and in the name of humanity, sufficient funds to pay the half grant for four weeks longer. It was a humane offer, but its proper name was strategy. It embarra.s.sed the Government to decide whether to accept or decline. It embarra.s.sed them if they accepted, and if they declined it embarra.s.sed them most of all. They declined; or, to be precise, they ignored the offer.

By this time England might be said to be under famine. London, in its ice-bound straits, began curiously to a.s.sume the appearance of a mediaeval city. By night one might meet grotesquely clad bands of revellers returning from some ice carnival (for the Thames had long been frozen from the Tower to Gravesend) by the light of lanterns and torches which they carried. None but those who had nothing to lose ventured out into the streets at night except by companies. Thieves and bludgeoners lurked in every archway, and arrests were seldom made; beggars importuned with every wile and in every tone, and new fantastic creeds and extravagant new parties sent out their perfervid disciples to proclaim Utopias at every corner.

To add to the terror of the night there suddenly sprang into prominence the bands of "Running Madmen" who swept through the streets like fallen leaves in an autumn gale. Barefooted, gaunt, and wildly dressed in rags, they broke upon the astonished wayfarer's sight, and pa.s.sed out again into the gloom before he could ask himself what strange manner of men they were. Never alone, seldom exceeding a score in any band, they ran keenly as though with some purposeful end in view, for the most part silently, but now and then startling the quiet night with an inarticulate wail or a cry of woe or lamentation, but they turned from street to street in aimless intricacy, and sought no definite goal. They were never seen by day, and whence they came or where they had their homes none could say, but the steady increase in the number of their bands showed that they were undoubtedly the victims of a contagious mania such as those that have appeared in the past from time to time.

Almost as ragged and unkempt was the army that by day marched under the standard of Brother Ambrose towards the sinless New Jerusalem. Reading the abundant signs all round with an inspired and fatalistic eye, Ambrose uncompromisingly announced that all the portents of the Millennium were now fulfilled, and that the reign of temporal power on earth was at an end. Each day his eloquence mounted to a wilder flight, each day he dreamed new dreams and saw fresh visions, and promised to his followers more definitely the spoil of victory, and parcelled out the smiling, fruitful land. Drawn by every human pa.s.sion, recruits poured into his ranks, and when he marched in tattered state to mark the boundaries of the impending Golden City, the Legions of the Chosen rolled not in their thousands, but in their tens of thousands, singing hymns and interspersing ribaldry.

A very different spectacle was afforded by the bands of the Gilded Youth which by day patrolled the approaches to houses of the better cla.s.s, wherever smoke had been seen issuing from the chimneys, and by night with equal order and thoroughness turned out the public gas lamps in the streets, until many of the authorities at last gave up the lighting of the lamps as a useless formality.

It was impossible for the occupants of a house that had incurred their enmity to have them removed by force, or to maintain an att.i.tude of unconcern in the face of their demonstration, yet everything they did came under the term of "Peaceful Picketing" within the provisions of the Act, and an attempt to fix responsibility upon the Unity League for the high-handed action of its agents in a few cases where the Gilded Youth had gone beyond their powers, failed ignominiously through the precedent afforded by the final settlement of the celebrated Tawe Valley Case.

In the provinces the rioters were burning coal, burning coal-pits, smashing machinery and destroying property indiscriminately, blind to the fact that some of the immediate effects were falling on their fellow-workmen, and that most of the ultimate effects would fall upon themselves. In London and elsewhere the bands of the Gilded Youth were going quietly and systematically about their daily work, "peacefully"

terrorising house-holders into submission, and carefully turning out the public lamps at night as soon as they were lit. To the reflective mind it was rather a dreadful power that the time had called into being: an educated mob that "rioted peacefully" and did nothing at all that was detrimental to its own interest.

Each morning people a.s.sured one another that so unparalleled a frost could last no longer, but each night the air seemed to be whetted to a keener edge, and each day there came fresh evidences of its power. Early in January it was computed that all the small birds that had not taken refuge in towns were dead, partly through the cold itself, but equally by starvation, for the ground yielded them nothing, and the trees and shrubs upon which they had been able to rely for food in former winters had long since perished. There were none but insignificant hollies to be seen in English gardens for the next generation, and in exposed situations forest trees and even oaks were split down to the ground.

All this time there was very little destructive rioting going on in London on any organised scale, but every night breadths of wood pavement were torn up by the homeless vagrants, who were now allowed to herd where they could, and great fires set burning at which the police warmed themselves and mingled supinely with the crowd. By day the police went in pairs, by night they patrolled in companies of five. For the emergency of serious rioting the military were always kept in readiness; against the more ordinary depredations on private property the owners were practically left to defend themselves. In those dark weeks watch duty became one of the regular occupations among the staff of every London business, and short shrift was given to intruders. Inquests went like marriages in busy churches at Easter-tide--in batches, and the morning cart that picked up the frozen dead had only one compartment.

The time was past when the effects of the vast disorganisation could be localised. Every trade and profession, every trivial and obscure calling, and every insignificant little offshoot of that great trunk called Commerce was involved in depression; it was not too much to say that every individual in the land was feeling some ill effect. Frantic legislation had begun it ten years before; the coal war had brought it to a climax, and the grip of the long, hard winter had pressed like a hostile hand upon the land.

It had resolved itself into a war of endurance. Coal was no longer the pivot; it was money, immediate money with which to buy bread at the bakers' shops, where they carried on their trade with the shutters up and loaded weapons laid out in the upper rooms.

Not the least curious feature of the struggle was the marked disinclination of the starving populace to pillage or bloodshed.

Doubtless they saw that whatever they might individually profit by a reign of terror, their cause and party had nothing to gain from it. Such an outburst must inevitably react unfavourably upon the Government of the day, and it was _their_ party then in power. But they had not the mob instinct in them; they were not composed of the ordinary mob element. In the bulk they were neither criminals nor hooligans, but matter-of-fact, disillusionised working men, and the instincts of their cla.s.s have ever been steady and law-abiding. In Cheapside a gang of professional thieves blew out the iron shutter of a jeweller's shop with dynamite, and securing a valuable haul of jewellery in the momentary confusion, sought to hide themselves among the mob. Far from entering into their aspirations, the mob promptly conveyed them to the nearest police station, and returned to the owner the valuable articles that had been scattered about the street. The climax of the incident was reached by half a dozen of the most stalwart unemployed gladly accepting a few shillings each to guard the broken window until the shutter was repaired.

At the collieries, the mills, the workshops, and the seats of labour there were outrages against property, but away from the immediate centres there was neither cupidity nor resentment. Whenever disturbances of the kind took place they were invariably in pursuit of food or warmth. The men were dispirited, and by this time they regarded their cause as lost. Their leaders, in and out of Parliament, were cla.s.sed either as incompetent generals in a war, or as traitors who had misled the people. The people only asked them now to make the terms of surrender so that they might live; and they did not hesitate to declare roundly that the old times when they had had to look after themselves more, and had not been body and soul at the disposal of semi-political Unions, were preferable on the whole.

The position of the Cabinet was daily growing more critical. Its chiefs were execrated and insulted whenever they were seen. All the approaches to the House were held by military guards, and the members reached its gates singly, and almost by stealth. Every day placards, written and printed, were found displayed in public places, calling on the Government that had no money to let in one that had. "You thought more of your position than of our needs when Hampden offered us help," ran one that Mr Strummery found nailed to his front door. "You have always thought more of your positions than of our needs. You have used our needs to raise yourselves to those positions. Now, since you no longer represent the wishes of the People, give way to others."

The delay of the Government in throwing up an utterly untenable position was inexplicable to most people. Many said that the reason was that Hampden refused to take office under the existing franchise, and no one but Hampden could form an administration in that crisis that could hope to live for a day. Whatever the reason might be, it was obvious that the Government was drifting towards a national tragedy that would be stupendous, for in less than a month's time, it was agreed on all hands, the daily tale of starved and famished dead would have reached its thousands.

Still the Government hung on, backed in sullen submission by its automatic majority. Changes in the Cabinet were of almost daily record, but the half dozen men of prominence remained. Cecil Brown was the last of the old minor men to be dropped. A dog trainer, who had taken up politics, succeeded him. "It is too late now," Cecil Brown was reported to have said when he learned who was to be his successor. "They want bread, not circuses!"

CHAPTER XVII

THE INCIDENT OF THE 13TH OF JANUARY

"I do not altogether like it," said A.

"Do you prefer to leave things as they are, then?" demanded B.

A. went over and stood by the window, looking moodily out.

"It is merely a necessity," said C.

"The necessity of a necessity," suggested D. happily.

"Perhaps you are not aware," said B., addressing himself to the man standing at the window, "that the suggestion of arresting Salt did not come from us in the first case."

"Is that so?" replied A., coming back into the room. "I certainly a.s.sumed that it did."

"On the contrary," explained B., "it was Inspector Moeletter who reported to his superiors that he had succeeded in identifying the mysterious man who was seen with Leslie Garnet, the artist, about the time of his death. He would have got his warrant in the ordinary way, only in view of the remarkable position that Salt occupies just now, Stafford very naturally communicated with us."

"The only point that troubles us," remarked C. reflectively, "is that none of us can persuade himself in the remotest degree that Salt killed Garnet."

"I certainty require to have the evidence before I can subscribe to that," said B. "The man who is daily killing hundreds----"

"Ah, that is the difference," commented D.

"Where are the Monmouth colliers now?" asked C., after a pause.

"Newbury, this morning," replied D. "Reading, to-night."

"And the Midland lot?"

"Towcester, I think."

"If Hampden formally asks for protection for the oil store at Hanwood, after the miners' threat to burn it, what are you going to do?" asked A.

"I should suggest telling him to go and boil himself in it, since he has got it there," replied C.

"There will be no need to tell him anything but the bare fact, and that is that with twenty-five thousand turbulent colliers pouring into London and adding to the disaffected element already here, we cannot spare a single man," replied B.

"I quite agree with that," remarked D., drawing attention to his freshly-scarred cheek. "I had a tribute of the mob's affection as I came in this morning."

"That's your popularity," said C. "Your photograph is so much about that no one has any difficulty in recognising you. How do you get on in that way, B.?"