“Short cut to the trams,” explained Fraser. “Hullo, what’s the row?”
A woman was huddled on a doorstep, wailing loudly, openly, without any pretence of hiding her stark grief. Her wisps of grey hair were blown by the wind flat across her distorted face, which she neither burrowed in her arms nor covered with a handkerchief. For she had just received tidings that her daughter had gone down in the steerage of the Lusitania, and she wanted God and man to know it.
A knot of sympathizers, neighbours and casual passers-by, stood dumbly around her, listening to the saga of Ethel Ann’s childhood, and Ethel Ann’s adolescence, and Ethel Ann envisioned powerfully but crudely as a human livid face, struggling, gulping, pleading for help ... help refused.... “They pushed ’em back into the water!” screamed the old crone. “My little ’un. Curse the Germans!—Curse ’em! They watched ’er drowning, and they laughed. A-a-aaah ...” articulation trailed away into a long-drawn-out cry of rage and mourning and hate. She strained her skinny arms in a tight line upward, as though in one gesture could be uttered all that her tongue had failed to say.
Richard felt it was impossible just to stand still and look on at this. He glowered about him in a spirit of desperate truculence. The others of the group were in exactly the same case, their eyes roaming stupidly up and down the narrow street, as though in search of some immediate measures. A carter leaning against his dray drawn up to the kerb opposite, spoke out fiercely:
“Ay. ’Uns. That’s the sort they are. Wish I ’ad one or two under my fist now. I’d show ’em what for.”
“You have got ’em under your fist now—plenty—if you know where to look!” A lantern-jawed man with the hollow eyes of a fanatic, sprang onto the tail-board of the dray. At once he formed a vortex for all the loose and aimless emotions adrift in that street. Richard and Fraser found themselves in a wedge of men and women, women predominating, swaying with that sort of concerted drunken rhythm peculiar to all crowds. Even the mother of the drowned girl stopped her wails, and stared fixedly at the demagogue.
“Germans everywhere in this country—millions of ’em, laughing up their sleeves because we’re such ruddy softs as not to chuck’em out. Laughing now, I expect, over our women and children pushed back into the icy water; English women and children. Yes, it’s a good joke, ain’t it? First-class!... I ’ad a pal on the Lusitania—well, never mind that—there’s some ’ere as ’ad more than pals. Are we going to stand it—that’s what I want to know? Are we going on trading with murderers and cowards, living cheek by jowl with ’em, buying our very bread from ’em ... poisoned bread! I tell you, there are Germans in the next street, in this street, and in a thousand other streets in England, with their dirty names over the shop-windows. Ask the Government!—ah! the Government’ll do something about it, per’aps, by and by. Ask ’em—they’ll say they’ve took the proper measures of precaution. We don’t want precaution, thank yer all the same. We want revenge on the foul scum what sank the Lusitania! We want revenge—not by and by, but now! We want revenge—and by the dying agonies of our children, and for the sake of those they’ve left, we’ll have it!”
His hearers had been like empty bottles offering no resistance to the fiery liquid he poured into them. Yes—they wanted instant revenge; that was what they had sought by their vacant stares. With a scattered howl, from which the human element seemed long since to have been drained, they swirled up the street. Richard was borne along by the impetus of their fury. He had lost sight of Fraser, who, missing him, had probably returned home; it did not matter; this was rather a lark—one of the Lusitania riots; they had been breaking out all over London since the news had come through. No—not exactly a lark ... it swelled into something more formidable and animated by a spirit of deeper satisfaction than warranted by the schoolboy description: this was action; this was war; he was in direct contact with it at last. A gang of men in an ugly temper, running in a set direction ... he could feel purpose behind the lurching, staggering passage of the mob.... They were on their way to punish the Germans—coarse hulking giants who could laugh at Ethel Ann’s drenched face helpless in a green tumble of breakers.... Brutes! damned brutes! we’ll show them!...
This was all the jerky elated comment his brain could register during the headlong stampede up the cramped alley; that—and a confused impression of the women’s faces here and there patching the rest: streaming hair, with the iron pins still clumsily caught in it; mouths open and awry; damp red skins. Mob-women—they were hideous....
The lantern-jawed man, still leader, halted abruptly in front of a small baker’s shop. “What about that?” denunciatory forefinger thrown out to indicate the name painted over the window: Gottlieb Schnabel. The crowd replied by another exultant howl ... it was beginning to merge its separate identities into the Demos-beast, at once frightful yet silly; incapable alike of retreat or initiative; a beast that uttered meaningless sounds; could be deflected hither and thither; a beast without logic or coherence; but a beast that was out, very obstinately, to maul somebody ... the Germans....