From the Angle of Seventeen

by Eden Phillpotts

Mr. Harrison, our esteemed chief, was a Conservative, and he by no means believed that everything that happens is for the best. He heartily disliked the crowds in the Square and was always glad when the time came to close the office and pull down the iron shutters. The directors also, who dropped in as of yore to sign policies, took a very unfavourable view of the situation and spoke harshly of the proletariat. They had a theory that the leaders of the people ought to be hung for sedition, privy conspiracy, and other crimes; and the newly made lord, known as Corrievairacktown, said he would like to see the Guards called out to send the vermin back to their holes at the point of the bayonet. He was a very unbending man in the matter of Capital versus Labour, and seemed to think that soldiers was really the last word on every subject.

Then, after a period of undoubted danger, there came the terrible day when Mr. John Burns felt it his duty to climb up between the Trafalgar Square lions and wave the republican flag of blood red above a sea of upturned faces. The air was dark and murky; Nature wept, so to speak, and heavy clouds hung low above the unnumbered thousands who listened with panting bosoms to the impassioned utterances of their leader. Like trumpet notes his fiery syllables rent the welkin, and there was a movement in the masses of the assembled hosts, like billows driven by the wind over the sea. Their white faces were as foam on the darkness of dirty waves.

Fired to the fiercest enthusiasm by Mr. Burns, the proletariat now began to shout and yell with the accumulated hunger and frenzy of centuries of repression, and it was evident to the unprejudiced eye that they meant to make themselves respected and get back a little of their own, as the saying is. A hoarse and savage growl rent the air, and like hail the speaker, whose glittering eyes and black beard were distinctly visible from the windows of the Apollo, lashed his audience into a seething whirlpool of anarchical fury. Here and there the populace seemed to start forward on predatory thoughts intent; then they stood their ground again; and there were momentary intervals of silence in the riot, like the moments of silence in a thunderstorm. During one of these we distinctly heard a harsh and grating sound three doors down the street. It was a jeweler putting up his shutters. In that sound you might say was an allegory, for it typified the idea of Capital funking Labour. A few moments afterwards, Mr. Harrison himself stepped from his private chamber, walked to the outer door, and gravely and fearlessly surveyed the ominous scene. The masses were now out of hand, and their leaders, probably much to their own surprise and regret, had awakened a storm of unreasoning ferocity which threatened to plunge the West End into the horrors of civil war. At any rate Mr. Harrison appeared to think so, for after studying the temper of the crowd, he returned to us and uttered these memorable words:

“Gentlemen,” he said, “this is revolution! Pull down the shutters!”

Messengers hastened to obey his orders, and when iron curtains had crashed down between us and the stage of this stupendous spectacle, we took it in turn to look out through the letter-box.

Mr. Harrison, with all the courageous instinct of a British sea-captain, decided not to leave the Apollo that night unless a great change should come over the spirit of the scene, but for my own part I was panting to rush out and join the revolution—not with a view to assist it in any nefarious project, but to study it from the artistic standpoint. Before I could start, however, the ferocious crowds had split up and swept in different directions. They went towards the west chiefly, and bursting in upon defenseless streets, that had not heard what was going on, surprised them painfully and helped themselves from the shops before their proprietors could arrest their onslaught. I came upon the people presently—to find them very far removed from what you might call a conciliatory attitude.

XV

There is nothing like personal contact with a thing to make you understand its reality, and when the revolution knocked my hat off into the road I felt myself faced with no idle dream. There was something about the top-hat of the common or garden clerk that angered the revolutionists, and they did not seem to recognise in me a toiler like themselves. Yet the only difference was that I worked a jolly sight harder than most of them, and they little knew that at that moment I was hurrying about among them simply to take mental notes in a highly sympathetic and artistic spirit. Mine was not the only top-hat that roused their ire; in fact, they regarded this hateful but honourable head-covering as an embodiment of Capital; therefore they knocked it off whenever they saw it among them. Legally this was assault, if not battery, but they cared nothing for that, and in another and more ferocious sort of upheaval, no doubt, they would have knocked off the heads under the hats as well as the hats themselves. This, however, they did not do; in fact, the revolution, taken piecemeal, which is the only way a single pedestrian can take it, was an utter coward, for at the word “copper,” whole gangs of twenty or thirty men would evaporate, only to form again as soon as the guardians of the peace had disappeared. Such, indeed, was the celerity of the revolution when threatened with the law, that again and again the police charged thin air. Doubtless this was the result of hunger, for had the people been well fed, they would have been braver. But, of course, if they had been well fed, they would not have revolted. In fact, a revolution is a very good example of cause and effect.

My top-hat was knocked off for the third time in Oxford Street, and at the same moment somebody grabbed at my watch-chain and tried to possess themselves of my “Waterbury.” In fact, the top-hat was really a source of danger, and, at the third loss, I ignored the hat, now much the worse for wear, and left it for the younger members of the revolution to play football with. I then went on bareheaded, until reaching a small shop in a back street that had not been penetrated by the mob. Here I purchased a cloth cap of dingy appearance and a brown muffler, and, thus accoutered, I plunged into the fray once more.

The men in Oxford Street were armed with stones, and when a private carriage passed down the way, they broke the windows. The hansom, the harmless four-wheeler, and the groaning omnibus they did not molest; but a private carriage awoke their worst passions, and they smashed the windows, utterly regardless of the harm they might be doing to the occupant—fair or otherwise.