“I should think so; but the fog’s so thick that you can’t tell. . . . Did David find you?,” Sonia asked me. “He wanted to talk to you about soup-kitchens or something.”
“He hadn’t come when I left the office,” I answered.
As we went in to luncheon, Charles Neave, who had come up from the country the day before, contributed some first-hand observations on the march from Cumberland. It had been peaceful and orderly from the moment when the marchers convinced their potential antagonists that they meant to have what they wanted. Private property was scrupulously respected; but, on the principle that churches and public buildings belonged to the community, Griffiths’ ‘armies’ took possession of them as lodgings for a night. I was given to understand that there had been one or two sharp conflicts; but Crawleigh was expressing more than his own opinion when he reminded us that this was December and that the men were starving. Barns and warehouses were offered voluntarily as soon as their owners were satisfied that they would not be damaged.
“How did they manage for food?,” I asked.
“The workhouse people did what they could. I think the rest was voted by the different town-councils. There wasn’t enough to go round anywhere, but a whole lot was given privately.”
“Were there any speeches or demonstrations?,” asked Crawleigh.
“I didn’t hear any. Everybody seemed to be on the side of the marchers. They felt it was jolly hard lines and something ought to be done. Any ass who calls it bolshevism doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
“If we can only get them back as quietly as they’ve come . . .” Crawleigh began and left his sentence unfinished.
I wondered whether he too was reflecting that the most dangerous revolution is the one in which popular sympathy goes out to the revolutionaries. In the last years of the eighteenth century the history of the world would have been changed if Louis had not forbidden the Swiss Guard to fire from the windows of the Tuileries; it was in fact changed—and revolution died in giving birth to Bonapartism—when Napoleon cleared the streets of Paris with a whiff of grapeshot. I would more readily have turned a machine-gun on my own dining-room than have harassed the spent men whom I saw collapsing on the doorsteps of Brook Street; but I wondered how far the sympathy of the onlookers and the kindliness of the police would paralyse vigorous action if the spent men rose and had to be coerced.
“Is anybody in fact taking any steps?,” I asked Crawleigh. “We’ve food in the house, we can buy more.” . . .