One day the perspiring Lamb entered the office red in the face and considerably out of breath, rapidly followed by a lugubrious individual, talking volubly in an argumentative monotone. This person seemed to be very indignant about something.
"Marcus Aurelius was a just ruler and a philosopher," he was saying, "and he saw the necessity for suppressing the Christian factions. He was among the severest persecutors of the early Christians.—What does that argue, you fool?"
"Nothing against my contention with regard to the seven-headed beast in the Apocalypse," replied the Bleeding Lamb with a defiant snort.
"The seven-headed beast has nothing to do with the case," retorted his interlocutor, putting all the warmth into his monotonous drawl of which he appeared capable. "The seven-headed beast can't alter history, and my case is conclusively proved in the course of this little work, to the production of which I have devoted the best years of my life. The seven-headed beast indeed! Pshaw for your seven-headed beast, you dunder-headed dreamer!"
Whilst I gazed on dumbfounded at this little scene, making futile efforts to grasp the vexed point under discussion, the strange new-comer, whom the Lamb addressed as Gresham, deposited on the floor a huge and shapeless brown-paper parcel, under whose weight he was staggering, and sitting down by its side he carefully untied the string, and dragged triumphantly forth tome after tome of carefully-written MSS., which he proceeded to read out without further preamble.
"'Atheism v. Christianity,'" he drawled, commencing at the title, "'being a short treatise on the Persecutions of the Early Christians, the object of which is to prove that they were persecuted by the just emperors and protected by the unjust; that, consequently, they were wrong; that Christianity is wrong, and the Deity a palpable fraud; by Tobias Jonathan Gresham,'—and let the seven-headed beast in the Apocalypse put that in his pipe and smoke it!" casting a defiant glance at the Bleeding Lamb.
As this concluding remark was made in the same monotone as the foregoing sentence, I was at some loss to determine whether or not it formed part of the title of that momentous work.
The Bleeding Lamb here cast me a knowing glance, which said as plainly as words that his unfortunate acquaintance was mad, but that it was as well to humour him, and so he magnanimously sat down on a stool facing his rival, while the latter proceeded to read out his book, which was destined soon to mount up the long list of Short's sins of typographical omissions. This was but the herald of a long series of readings from the "short treatise," which were carried on at intervals for some weeks. Minute after minute and hour after hour Gresham drawled on from one tedious reiteration to another, never raising his voice nor altering its key, till a sense of dizziness overcame his audience, and his voice became as the singing in one's ears which accompanies high fever or heralds a faint. Indeed I have never suffered from fever or faintness since that date without my sensations recalling Gresham's dreary, argumentative drawl; then gradually his voice would grow fainter and somewhat spasmodic, until at length it gave way to snores, as the weary Lamb and the atheist Lion, like the kid and the leopard of Isaiah, sank down together in a confused heap on the floor, and there slept out a miniature fulfilment of the word of the prophet.
Then there was a Polish count who found his way to the Tocsin—a most deplorable aristocratic débris, who might have stepped straight out of the pages of Dostoievsky. I never set eyes on a more depressed-looking mortal than Count Voblinsky. He looked as though he bore on his bent shoulders the weight of all the ill-spent lives in Christendom. He was a damp, unwholesome-looking man, whose appearance suggested long confinement in a cellar. He was pale and hollow-eyed, and almost mouldy; altogether a most cadaverous-looking person. He was always attired, even at eleven A.M., in an old dress suit, green and threadbare with age, and a furry tall hat, into which garments he seemed to have grown and taken root. But despite the decay of his person and his attire, there was a certain degree of aristocratic refinement about Voblinsky's features, last ghastly traces of his ancient nobility. He vaguely recalled to my mind a long-ago Continental trip of my childhood, and an unfortunate elephant in the Marseilles Jardin des Plantes who, from long inactivity in the corner of his cage, had become overgrown with moss. There was the same incongruous touch of erstwhile nobility, the same decay, the same earthy smell. By what shady and circuitous paths had the unfortunate count reached this unhappy pass? Perhaps his wife was responsible; for if ever woman was calculated not to lead her mate on to higher and better things it was the Countess Voblinska. The countess was worse than slovenly: she was downright dirty. Her tumbled, frowsy hair, with patches of golden dye in it, was surmounted by an appalling hat of incongruous dimensions and shape, trimmed with what appeared to be archaeological relics, thick in dust. To approach it brought on a perfect paroxysm of sneezing. Her clothes, which were very greasy and never brushed, hung together by strings, tatters, and safety-pins. Her hands and face were begrimed with several coats of dirt, and a top coat of poudre de riz. No ordinary imagination dared speculate on what lay hidden beneath those tattered rags she wore. She gesticulated much, and discoursed on the subject of some lecture she was to give, in the intervals of volleying forth abuse and swearing in Parisian argot at her long-suffering husband, who received it all with most ludicrous courtesy. Often a strong smell of gin mingled with the eloquent flow of the countess's language.
On the whole, however, the Anarchists and their queer associates might be regarded as a fairly temperate set. One of the most potent causes of drink is the monotony of the existences led by most people, the hopeless dreariness of their confined, narrow lives, the total lack of interest and excitement. This is not the case in revolutionary circles, where not only are there plenty of ideas afloat to occupy men's minds and distract them from the narrow circle of their dreary domestic lives, but where also the modern craving for excitement, factitious or otherwise, finds plenty of nourishment.