"I can understand," I replied, "and admire, even if I deplore. Good-bye."
Slowly I moved towards the door, my eyes fascinated by the rigid lines of the sheet covering the dead woman; slowly I turned the handle and walked down the mean wooden staircase into the mean suburban street.
CHAPTER XII. — THE TOCSIN'S LAST TOLL
As I walked home from Kosinski's in the early morning I felt profoundly depressed. The weather had turned quite chilly and a fine drizzling rain began to fall, promising one of those dull, wet days of which we experience so many in the English spring. The streets were deserted but for the milkmen going their rounds, and the tired-looking policemen waiting to be relieved on their beats. I felt that feeling of physical exhaustion which one experiences after being up all night, when one has not had the opportunity for a wash and change of clothes. I was not sleepy, but my eyes were hot and dry under their heavy eyelids, my bones ached, my muscles felt stiff; I had the uncomfortable consciousness that my hair was disordered and whispy, my hat awry, my skin shiny; and this sub-consciousness of physical unattractiveness heightened the sense of moral degradation.
I felt weary and disgusted, and it was not only, nor even principally, the knowledge that Kosinski had gone out of my life which accounted for this. I felt strangely numbed and dull, curiously able to look back on that incident as if it had occurred to some one else. Every detail, every word, was vividly stamped on my brain: I kept recurring to them as I trudged along, but in a critical spirit, smiling every now and again as the humour of some strangely incongruous detail flashed across my brain.
What really weighed me down was a sense of the futility, not only of Anarchist propaganda but of things in general. What were we striving for? Happiness, justice? And the history of the world shows that man has striven for these since the dawn of humanity without ever getting much nearer the goal. The few crumbs of personal happiness which one might hope for in life were despised and rejected by men like Armitage, Kosinski, and Bonafede, yet all three were alike powerless to bring about the larger happiness they dreamed of.
I had acquired a keener sense of proportion since the days when I had first climbed the breakneck ladder of Slater's Mews, and I now realised that the great mass of toiling humanity ignored our existence, and that the slow, patient work of the ages was hardly likely to be helped or hindered by our efforts. I did not depreciate the value of thought, of the effort made by the human mind to free itself from the shackles of superstition and slavery; of that glorious unrest which spurs men on to scrutinise the inscrutable, ever baffled yet ever returning to the struggle, which alone raises him above the brute creation and which, after all, constitutes the value of all philosophy quite apart from the special creed each school may teach; and I doubted not for a moment that the yeast of Anarchist thought was leavening the social conceptions of our day.
But I had come to see the almost ludicrous side of the Anarchist party, especially in England, considered as a practical force in politics. Short and Simpkins were typical figures—M'Dermott, an exceptionally good one—of the rank and file of the English party. They used long words they barely understood, considered that equality justified presumption, and contempt or envy of everything they felt to be superior to themselves. Communism, as they conceived it, amounted pretty nearly to living at other people's expense, and they believed in revenging the wrongs of their classes by exploiting and expropriating the bourgeois whenever such action was possible without incurring personal risk. Of course I was not blind to the fact that there were a few earnest and noble men among them, men who had educated themselves, curtailing their food and sleep to do so, men of original ideas and fine independent character, but I had found that with the Anarchist, as with the Socialist party, and indeed all parties, such were not those who came to the surface, or who gave the ton to the movement. Then, of course, there were noble dreamers, incorrigible idealists, like Armitage, men whom experience could not teach nor disappointment sour. Men gifted with eternal youth, victimised and sacrificed by others, yet sifting and purifying the vilest waste in the crucible of their imaginations, so that no meanness, nor the sorrow born of the knowledge of meanness in others, ever darkens their path. Men who live in a pure atmosphere of their own creation, whom the worldly-wise pity as deluded fools, but who are perhaps the only really enviable people in the world. Notable, too, were the fanatics of the Kosinski type, stern heroic figures who seem strangely out of place in our humdrum world, whose practical work often strikes us as useless when it is not harmful, yet without whom the world would settle down into deadly lethargy and stagnation. Then in England came a whole host of cranks who, without being Anarchists in any real sense of the word, seemed drawn towards our ranks, which they swelled and not infrequently brought into ridicule. The "Bleeding Lamb" and his atheist opponent Gresham, the Polish Countess Vera Voblinska with her unhappy husband who looked like an out-at-elbows mute attached to a third-rate undertaker's business, a dress-reforming lady disciple of Armitage, a queer figure, not more than four feet in height, who looked like a little boy in her knickers and jersey, till you caught sight of the short grizzled hair and wrinkled face, who confided to me that she was "quite in love with the doctor, he was so quaint;" and numerous others belonged to that class; and finally a considerable sprinkling of the really criminal classes who seemed to find in the Anarchist doctrine of "Fais ce que veux" that salve to their conscience for which even the worst scoundrels seem to crave, and which, at worst, permitted them to justify their existences in their own eyes as being the "rotten products of a decaying society." Such were the heterogeneous elements composing the Anarchist party with which I had set out to reform the world.