I well recollect the last day of the trial, which I attended throughout in more or less remote regions of the Old Bailey, recruiting recalcitrant witnesses, sending food in to the defendants, &c. Two other cases were being tried at the same time, one of which was a particularly revolting murder, for which three persons were on trial. The prisoners' relatives were waiting below in a state of painful excitement. "Guilty or not guilty," was on all their lips, "release or penal servitude, life or death, which was it to be?" Friends were constantly running in and out of the court giving the women news of the progress of the trials. "It is looking black for the prisoners!" "There is more hope!" "There is no hope!" and finally "guilty" in all the cases was reported. The wife of a horrible German murderer who had strangled his employer's wife, while a female accomplice played the piano to divert her children's attention from her cries, swooned away at the news. O'Flynn's old mother went into hysterics and became quite uncontrollable in her grief when, a few minutes later the news, "Five years' penal servitude," was brought down.
CHAPTER V. — TO THE RESCUE
The first weeks of my experience in the Anarchist camp had flown by with astounding rapidity. The chapter of my experiences had opened with the expulsion of an alleged spy and agent provocateur, and had closed with a sentence of penal servitude passed on two of my new-found comrades. Between these two terminal events I seemed to have lived ages, and so I had, if, as I hold, experience counts for more than mere years. Holloway and Newgate, Slater's Mews and the Middle Temple, barristers and solicitors, judges and juries and detectives; appointments in queer places to meet queer people—all this had passed before me with the rapidity of a landscape viewed from the window of an express train; and now that the chapter had closed, I found that it was but the preface to the real business I had set my shoulder to.
The morning after the conclusion of the trial I met Armitage by appointment, and together we wended our way towards Slater's Mews. The doctor was preoccupied, and for some minutes we proceeded in silence; the problem of what to do with the Bomb was evidently weighing on his mind. At last he spoke: "It is our duty," he said, "to see that the movement be not unduly crippled by the loss of these two men. Poor fellows, they are doing their duty by the Cause, and we must not shirk ours. The Bomb must be kept going at all costs; we can ill afford to lose two workers just now, but the loss of the paper would be a yet more severe blow to our movement. How thankful I am that you are with us! It is always so. The governments think to crush us by imprisoning or murdering our comrades, and for one whom they take from us ten come to the fore. I am sure you must agree with me as to the paper."
"I quite agree with you in the main," I replied, "but I fear that the Bomb itself is past hope. It strikes me it had got into somewhat bad hands, and I fear it would be useless to try to set it on its feet again. It is hardly fair to a paper to give it a Jacob Myers for editor. Really it seems to me to have died a natural death. The entire staff has disappeared—Myers, the editor; Banter, the publisher; O'Flynn, the printer—who remains? where are the others? It seems to me they have all vanished and left no trace behind."
"Oh, that is hardly the case, I think," said the doctor in a tone of deprecation. "I went up to the office last night and found Short sleeping on the premises."
"Short? Is not he the man whom I first saw wrapped in the red flag of glory?"
"Yes, that is the man; perhaps his appearance is somewhat disadvantageous, but he is constant to the Cause, anyhow."