Janet laughed without a trace of annoyance.
“Some of them are disgusting little egoists,” she admitted. “But, anyhow, they’re educating themselves, and frightening the Reactionaries. I like to see the Enemy getting scared.”
She used the word “enemy” to represent the Tory crowd—Joyce’s crowd—more especially the Countess of Ottery’s audience at the Wigmore Hall.
These political conversations ranged over wide fields of discussion, and Bertram seemed to amuse Janet by his efforts to moderate her extreme views. She became more violent to tease him into argument, and when he called her a Jacobin, who would knit below the scaffold when heads were falling, she retaliated by calling him a Girondin who would try to make revolutions with rose-water.
All this talk seemed to have relation to things happening, or likely to happen, away beyond Battersea Park, through the length and breadth of England.
The Coal Strike had begun. The railways had cut down their service of trains to a bare minimum. Factories were closing down in all the industrial towns. Millions of men were idle and living on strike pay. The Army Reserve had been called out, the Middle Classes were being recruited under the scheme of General Bellasis, and the Miners were in daily conference with the Engineers and Transport Workers, who were discussing the question of a general strike. If the “Triple Alliance” voted for that, not a wheel would turn in England, and civil strife would certainly break out, unless something like a miracle intervened.
So far no violence had happened. The miners had come up from the pits, and were whitewashing their cottages. They had made a fatal mistake already, alienating public opinion, which, until then had been steadily in favour of their side of the argument. The Pump men had been withdrawn from the pits, and some of the mines were already being flooded.
“A logical act,” said Janet. “The Pump men received their lock-out notices with the others. The mine-owners must take the responsibility.”
“Rotten tactics and bad morality,” said Bertram. “The men ought to safeguard their own means of life.”
So they argued, as all other men and women in England then, in every household where opinions differed on one side or the other, and where there was a sense of imminent disaster to the old foundations of civil life.