A Girl Among the Anarchists

by Isabel Meredith

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 title 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 assured that no one had called for that purpose he appeared relieved, and gradually, as he became more and more reassured, 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."