THE PEOPLE OF
THE RUINS
A STORY OF THE ENGLISH
REVOLUTION AND AFTER
BY
EDWARD SHANKS
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
_Copyright, 1920, by_
EDWARD SHANKS
_All Rights Reserved_
TO
ELSIE AND J. MURRAY ALLISON
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I TROUBLE 1
II THE DEAD RAT 19
III A WORLD GROWN STRANGE 35
IV DISCOVERIES 61
V THE SPEAKER 88
VI THE GUNS 115
VII THE LADY EVA 133
VIII DECLARATION OF WAR 158
IX MARCHING OUT 176
X THE BATTLE 190
XI TRIUMPH 209
XII NEW CLOUDS 226
XIII THE FIELDS OF WINDSOR 249
XIV CHAOS 267
XV FLIGHT 282
XVI THE ROMAN ROAD 301
THE PEOPLE OF THE RUINS
CHAPTER I
TROUBLE
1
Mr. Jeremy Tuft became aware with a slight shock that he was lying in
bed wide awake. He raised his head a little, stared around him, found
something vaguely unfamiliar, and tried to go to sleep again. But sleep
would not come. Though he felt dull and stupid, he was yet invincibly
awake. His eyes opened again of themselves, and he stared round him
once more. It was the subdued light, filtered through the curtains,
that was strange; and as intelligence flowed back into his empty mind,
he realized that this was because it was much stronger than it should
have been at any time before eight o’clock. Thence to the conclusion
that it was very likely later than eight o’clock was an easy step for
his reviving faculties. Energy followed the returning intelligence, and
he sat up suddenly, his head throbbing as he did so, and took his watch
from the table beside him. It was, in fact, a quarter to ten.
Arising out of this discovery a stream of possibilities troubled the
still somewhat confused processes of his mind. Either Mrs. Watkins for
some unaccountable reason had failed to arrive, or else, contrary to
his emphatic and often repeated instructions, she had been perfunctory
in knocking at his door and had not stayed for an answer. In either
case it was annoying; but Mrs. Watkins’ arrival at half-past seven was
so fixed a point in the day, she was so regular, so trustworthy, and,
moreover, life without her ministrations was so unthinkable that the
first possibility seemed much the less possible of the two. When Jeremy
had thus exhausted the field of speculation he rose and went out of his
room to speak sharply to Mrs. Watkins. His intention of severity was
a little belied by the genial grotesqueness of his short and rather
broad figure in dressing-gown and pyjamas; but he hoped that he looked
a disciplinarian.
Mrs. Watkins, however, was not there. The flat was silent and
completely empty. The blinds were drawn over the sitting-room windows,
and stirred faintly as he opened the door. He passed into the kitchen,
but not hopefully, for as a rule his ear told him without mistake
when the charwoman was to be found there. As he had expected, she was
not there, nor yet in the bathroom. There was a quiet uncanny silence
everywhere, so strange and yet at the same time so reminiscent of
something that eluded his memory, that Jeremy paused a moment, head
lifted in air, trying to analyze its effect on him. He ascribed it at
last to the obvious cause of Mrs. Watkins’ absence at this unusually
late hour; and he went further into the bathroom, whence he could see,
with a little craning of the neck, the clock on St. Andrew’s Church in
Holborn. This last testimony confirmed that of his watch. He returned
to the sitting-room, struggling half-consciously in his mind with a
quite irrational feeling, for which he could not account, that it was a
Sunday. He knew very well that it was a Tuesday--Tuesday, the 18th of
April, in the year 1924.
When he came into the sitting-room he drew back the blinds and let in
the full morning light, and by its aid he surveyed unfavorably his
overcoat lying where he had thrown it the night before, coming in late
from a party. He looked also with some disgust at the glass from which
he had drunk a last unnecessary whisky and soda previous to going to
bed. Then he paddled back wearily with bare feet to the narrow kitchen
(a cupboard containing a gas-stove and a smaller cupboard), set a
kettle on to boil, and began the always laborious process of bathing,
shaving, and dressing. At the end he shirked making tea, or boiling
an egg, and he sat down discontentedly to another whisky, in the same
glass, and a piece of stale bread.
As he consumed this unsuitable meal he remembered his appointment for
one o’clock that day, and hoped with a sudden devoutness that the
’buses would be running after all. It was no joke to go from Holborn
to Whitechapel High Street on foot. But a young and rather aggressive
Socialist whom he had unwillingly met at that party had predicted with
confidence a strike of ’busmen some time during the evening. Certainly
Jeremy had had to walk all the way home from Chelsea, a thing he much
disliked, but then perhaps by that time the ’buses had stopped running
in the ordinary course.... They _did_ stop running, those Chelsea
’buses--a horrid place--at an ungodly early hour, he was not quite
sure what. But then he was not quite sure at what time he had started
home ... he was not really sure of anything that had happened towards
the end of the party. He remembered long, devastating arguments in
the earlier part about Anarchism, Socialism, Syndicalism, Bolshevism,
and some other doctrines, the names of which were formed on the same
analogy, but which were too novel to him to be readily apprehended.
These discussions were mingled with more practical but equally windy
disputes on the questions whether the railwaymen would come out,
whether the miners were bluffing, what Bob Hart was going to do,
and much more besides on the same level of interest. There had been
also a youth with great superiority of manner, who seemed as tedious
and irritating to the politicians as they were to Jeremy--a sort of
super-bore who stated at intervals that the General Strike was a myth,
but praised all and sundry for talking about it and threatening it. It
had been--hadn’t it?--a studio party. At least, Jeremy had gone to it
on that understanding; but the political push had rushed it somehow,
and had bored everybody else to tears. Jeremy, who did not very much
relish political argument, had applied himself to a kind of pleasure
he could better understand. He now remembered little enough of those
long, muddling disputations, punctuated by visits to the sideboard, but
he knew that his head ached terribly. Aspirin tablets washed down with
whisky would probably not be much good, but they would be better than
nothing. He took some.
In the midst of these difficulties and discomforts he began obscurely
to miss something; and at last it flashed on him that he had no morning
paper--because there had been no Mrs. Watkins to bring it in with her
and put it on his table. He realized at the same time that the morning
paper would tell him whether he had to walk to Whitechapel High Street,
and that it was worth a journey to the street door from his flat at the
top of the building to know the worst. But when he had made the journey
there was no paper. While he was reflecting on this disagreeable fact
an envelope in the letter box caught his eye. It was addressed to him
in a somewhat illiterate script, and appeared to have been delivered by
hand, since it bore no stamp. When he opened it he found the following
communication:
“DERE SIR,--Ime sorry to tell you I shal not be able to come in
to-morro as we working womin have gone on stricke in simpathy with
husbands and other working men the buses are al out and the railways
and so are we dere Mr. Tuft I dont know Ime sure how you will get on
without me but do youre best and dont forget to-day is the day for
your clean underclose they are in the chest of draws there is a tin
of sardins in the larder so no more at present from your truely,
“MRS. WATKINS.”
“Well, I’m damned....” said Mr. Tuft, staring at this touching epistle;
and for a moment he was filled with annoyance by the recollection
that he had not put on his clean underclothes. Presently, however,
he trailed upstairs again; and when he had found the sardines in the
larder the effort thus endured strengthened him for the task of making
tea. Eventually he got ready a quite satisfactory breakfast, in the
course of which his mind cleared to an exhausted and painful lucidity.
“That’s what it is!” he cried at last, thumping the table; and in his
excitement, he let the last half sardine slide off his fork and on
to the floor. He groped after it, wincing and starting up when his
head throbbed too badly, retrieved the rather dusty fish, wiped it
carefully with his napkin, and slowly ate it. The strange silence and
the odd feeling that this was Sunday morning were at last explained.
The printing works across the narrow street were empty, and through the
grimy windows Jeremy could see the great machines standing idle. Below
there were no carts, where usually they banged and clattered through
the whole working day. The printers were out on strike. Very possibly
everybody had struck; for surely nothing short of a national upheaval
could have deterred the industrious Mrs. Watkins from her work.
He went to his window and threw it wide open to make a nearer
inspection. The traffic which usually thronged the noisy little street,
the carts and cars which stood outside the newspaper offices and
printing works, were absent. A few of the tenement-dwellers lounged at
their doors in such groups as were commonly seen only at night or on
Saturday afternoons or Sundays. Jeremy felt a faint thrill go through
him. This looked like being exciting. He had seen upheavals before, but
never, even in the worst of them, had he seen this busy district in a
state of idleness so Sabbatical. There had been ’bus strikes and tube
strikes in 1918 and 1919, and since. The railwaymen and the miners had
come out together for two days late in 1920, and had made a paralyzing
impression. But throughout these affairs somehow printing had gone on,
and newspapers had continued to be published, getting at each crisis,
according to the temperaments of their proprietors, politer or more
abusive towards the strikers. At the end of the previous year, 1923,
when a very serious situation had arisen, and a collapse had been
narrowly averted, there had been a distinct and arresting note of
helpless panic in both politeness and abuse. During the last few days,
while the present trouble was brewing, neither had much appeared in the
papers, but only an exhibition of dithering fright.
But Jeremy had grown on the whole accustomed to it. He had ceased
to believe in the coming of what some of the horrible people he had
met at that studio referred to caressingly as the “Big Show.” The
Government would always arrange things somehow. The wages of lecturers
and investigators in physics (of whom he was one) never went up,
because they never went on strike, and because it was unlikely that
any one would care if they did. He had not been able to believe
that a time would ever come when there would be no Government, no
Paymaster-General, no Ministry of Pensions, to pay him his partial
disability pension. But this morning unexpected events seemed much
more probable. There was not much of the world to be perceived from
his window looking down the street, but what there was smelt somehow
remarkably like real trouble.
2
Jeremy Tuft was not unused to “trouble” of one sort and another. When
the Great War began in 1914 he was a lecturer on physical science in
one of the modern universities of Northern England. He had published a
series of papers on the Viscosity of Liquids, which had gained him a
European reputation--that is to say, it had been quoted with approval
by two Germans and a Pole, while the conclusions had been appropriated
without acknowledgment by a Norwegian--and he received a stipend of
£300 per annum, to which he added a little by private coaching in his
spare time. With what was left of his spare time he tried to make the
liquids move faster or slower or in some other direction--in view of
his ultimate destiny it matters very little which--and at all events
to gather such evidence as would blow the Norwegian, for whom he had
conceived an unreasonable hatred, quite out of the water.
War called him from these pursuits. He did not stand upon his
scientific status or attainments; but concluding that the country
wanted MEN to set an example, he hastened to set an example by applying
for a commission in the artillery, which, after some difficulty, he
obtained. When the first excitement and muddle had been cleared away,
so he supposed, no doubt the specialists would be sorted out and set to
do the jobs for which they were best fitted. He was a naturally modest
man; but he could think of two or three jobs for which he was very well
fitted indeed.
He passed through Woolwich in a breathless rush, and learnt to ride
even more breathlessly. As the day for departure overseas drew near he
congratulated himself a little that the inevitable sorting-out seemed
to be postponed. He would get a few weeks more of this invaluable
experience in a sphere which was completely unfamiliar to him; he
would perhaps even see some of the fighting which he had never really
expected. When, five days after his arrival in the Salient with the
battery of sixty-pounders to which he was attached, one of the guns
blew up with a premature explosion and drenched him in blood not his
own, he felt that his experience was reasonably complete, and began
to look forward to the still deferred sorting-out. Unfortunately, it
continued to be deferred; but after a little while Jeremy settled down
with the battery, and rose in it to the rank of captain.
His companions described him as the most consistent and richly eloquent
grumbler on the British front; and he filled in his spare time by
poking round little shops in Béthune and such towns, and picking
up old, unconsidered engravings and some rather good lace. In the
early part of 1918, his horse, in a set-to with a traction-engine,
performed the operation of sorting-out which the authorities had so
long neglected; and Jeremy, when his dislocated knee was somewhat
recovered, parted forever from the intelligent animal, and went to use
his special attainments as a bottle-washer in the office of Divisional
Headquarters. The armistice came; and he was released from the army
after difficulties much exceeding those which he had encountered in
entering it.
In April, 1922, he was again a lecturer in physics, this time at a
newly-instituted college in London, receiving a stipend of £350 per
annum, to which he was luckily able to add a partial disability pension
of £20. In his spare moments he pursued the Viscosity of Liquids
with a movement less lively than their own; but he had forgotten the
Norwegian’s name. He lived alone, not too uncomfortably, in his little
flat in Holborn, a short distance from the building where it was his
duty to explain to young men who sometimes, and young women who rarely,
understood him, the difference between mass and weight, and other such
interesting points. He was tended daily by the careful Mrs. Watkins,
and he had a number of friends, mostly artists, whose tendency to live
in Chelsea or in Camden Town he heartily deplored.
On this morning of April, 1924, the first day of the Great Strike or
the Big Show, Jeremy set out at a few moments after eleven to keep his
appointment with a friend who lived in a place no less inconvenient
than the Whitechapel High Street. The streets were, as they had seemed
from his windows, even emptier and quieter than on a Sunday, and most
of the shops were closed. But there was, on the whole, a feeling of
electricity in the air that Jeremy had never associated with that day.
It was when he came into Fetter Lane and saw a patrol of troops lying
on the grass outside the Record Office that he first found something
concrete to justify this feeling.
“There _is_ going to be trouble, then,” he muttered to himself,
admitting it with reluctance, as he walked on steadily into Fleet
Street; and there his apprehensions were again confirmed. A string
of lorries came rapidly down the empty roadway, past him from the
West, and they were crowded with troops. Guards, he thought--carrying
machine-guns in the first lorry.
Jeremy paused for a moment, staring after them, and then as he turned
to go on he saw a small special constable standing as inconspicuously
as possible in the door of a shop, swinging nervously the truncheon
at his wrist. His uniform looked a little dusty and unkept, and there
was an obvious moth-hole on one side of the cap. His whole appearance
was that of a man desperately imploring Providence not to let anything
happen.
“That man’s face is simply asking for a riot,” Jeremy grunted to
himself; and he said aloud, “Perhaps you can tell me what it’s all
about?”
The special constable started suspiciously. But seeing that Jeremy was
comparatively well-dressed, and seemed to be a member of what in those
days was beginning to be known as the P.B.M.C.[A] he was reassured.
Jeremy’s air of clumsy geniality and self-confidence was, moreover,
far removed from the sinister aspect of the traditional Bolshevist. “I
don’t know really,” he said in a complaining voice, “it’s so difficult
to find out with no newspapers or anything. All I do know for certain
is that we were called out last night, and some say one thing and some
another.”
“How long have you been on duty?” Jeremy asked.
“Only an hour,” the special constable replied. “I slept at the station
all night on the floor.”
“Like old times in billets, what?” Jeremy remarked pleasantly,
_observing a silver badge on the man’s right lapel_.
“No.... Oh, no.... I wasn’t ever in the army really. They invalided me
out after three days. I’m not strong, you know--I’m not fit for this
sort of thing. And we didn’t get any proper sleep.”
“Why not?”
“We were afraid we might be attacked,” said the special constable
darkly. “Nearly all the police are out. There was only an inspector and
a sergeant at the station besides us.”
“Well, who else is out?” Jeremy asked.
“The railwaymen came out yesterday, and the ’busmen last night. All the
miners are out now. And the printers, too. They say the electrical men
are out, too, but I don’t know about that.”
“Looks like almighty smash, don’t it?” Jeremy commented. “Where are all
those troops going?”
“I don’t know,” said the special constable. “Nobody really knows
anything for certain.”
“Cheerful business,” Jeremy grumbled, mostly to himself. “And how the
devil am I going to get to Whitechapel High Street, I wonder?”
“To Whitechapel High Street?” the special constable cried. “Down in the
East End? Oh, _don’t_ go down there! It’ll be _frightfully_ dangerous
there!”
“That be damned,” said Jeremy. “I can’t say you look as though you were
feeling particularly safe yourself, do you?” And with a wave of his
hand he passed down Fleet Street in an easterly direction.
It was only a few hundred yards farther on that he received his first
personal shock of the day. As he came to Ludgate Circus he heard an
empty lorry, driven at a furious rate, bumping and clanging down the
street behind him. At the same time a large gray staff car, packed with
red-tabbed officers, shot into the Circus out of Farrington Street,
making for Blackfriars Bridge. His heart was for a moment in his mouth,
but the driver of the lorry pulled up abruptly and let the car go by,
stopping his own engine as he did so. Jeremy saw him descend, swearing
softly, to crank up again; and the sight of the empty vehicle revived
in him glad memories of the French and Flemish roads. He therefore
stepped into the street, and said with a confidence that returned to
him naturally from earlier years:
“Look here, my lad, if you’re going east, you might give me a bit of a
lift.”
The soldier had got his engine going again, and rose from the starting
handle with a flushed and frowning face.
“’Oo are you talkin’ to?” he asked sullenly. “’Oo the ’ell do you think
this lorry belongs to, eh? Think it belongs to _you_?” And as Jeremy
was too taken aback to answer, he continued: “This lorry belongs to the
Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Council of Southwark, that’s ’oo it belongs
to.” He climbed slowly back into his seat, and as he slipped the clutch
in leant outwards to Jeremy and exclaimed in a particularly emphatic
and vicious tone, “Dirty boorjwar!” The machine leapt forward, swept
round the Circus, and disappeared over the bridge.
Jeremy, a little perturbed by this incident, pursued his journey,
unconsciously grasping his heavy cane somewhat tighter, and glancing
almost nervously down every side street or alley he passed, hardly
knowing for what he looked. His notion of the way by foot to
Whitechapel High Street was not very clear, but he knew more or less
the way to Liverpool Street, and he supposed that by going thither he
would be following the proper line. He therefore trudged up Ludgate
Hill and along Cheapside, cursing the Revolution and all extremists
from the bottom of his heart. The lorry driver’s parting shot still
rankled in his mind. He felt that it was extremely unjust to accuse
him of being a member of the bourgeoisie, and he was quite ready to
exchange all his vested interests in anything whatever against a seat
in a ’bus.
Close to Liverpool Street Station he came out of deserted and silent
streets, whose silence and emptiness had begun to have an effect on
his nerves, into a scene of activity and animation. A string of five
lorries, driven by soldiers, but loaded with something hidden under
tarpaulins instead of troops, was drawn up by the curb, while a large
and growing crowd blocked its further progress. The crowd was held
together apparently by an orator mounted on a broken chair, who was
lashing himself into a fury which he found difficult to communicate to
his audience. Jeremy pushed forward as unobtrusively as he could, but
eventually found himself stayed, close to the foremost lorry, on the
skirts of the crowd. The orator, not far off, was working himself into
ever wilder and wilder passions.
“The hour has come,” he was saying. “All over the country our brothers
have risen----”
“And I and _my_ brothers,” Jeremy murmured to himself, “are going to
get the dirty end of the stick.”
But as he looked about him and examined the crowd in which he was
involved, he found some difficulty in connecting it with the fiery
phrases of the speaker or with the impending Revolution which, until
this moment, he had really been beginning to dread. Now a sudden wave
of relief passed over his mind. These honest, blunt, good-natured
people had expressed the subtle influence of the day, which he himself
had felt, by putting on their Sunday clothes. They were not meditating
bloodshed or the overthrow of the State. But for a certain seriousness
and determination in their faces and voices one might have thought that
they were making holiday in an unpremeditated and rather eccentric
manner. Their seriousness was not that of men forming desperate
resolves. It was that of men who, having entered into an argument,
intend to argue it out. They believed in argument, in the power of
reason, and the voting force of majorities. They applauded the speaker,
but not when he became blood-thirsty; and time and time again he lost
touch with them in his violence. At the most frenzied point of the
oration a thick-set man, with a startling orange handkerchief round his
neck, turned to Jeremy and said disgustedly:
“Listen to ’im jowin’! Sheeny, that’s what he is, no more than
a--Sheeny.” Jeremy was neither a politician nor a sociologist. He did
not weigh a previous diagnosis against this fresh evidence and come
to a more cheerful conclusion; but he breathed rather more freely and
relaxed his grip on his cane. He was not disturbed by the confused and
various clamor which came from the crowd and in which there was a good
admixture of laughter.
Just at this moment he saw on the lorry by which he had halted a face
that was familiar to him. He looked again more closely, and recognized
Scott--Scott who had been in the Divisional Office, Scott who had
panicked so wildly in the 1918 retreat, though God knew he had taken a
long enough start, Scott who had nearly landed him in a row over that
girl in the estaminet at Bailleul, just after the armistice. And Scott,
who never knew that he was disliked--a characteristic of his kind!--was
eagerly beckoning to him.
He slid quietly through the fringe of the crowd and stood by the
driving-seat of the lorry. Scott leant down and shook him by the hand
warmly, speaking in a whisper:
“Tuft, old man,” he said effusively, “I often wondered what had become
of you. What a piece of luck meeting you here!”
“I could think of better places to meet in,” Jeremy answered drily. He
was determined not to encourage Scott; he knew very well that something
damned awkward would most likely come of it. “This looks to me like a
hold-up. What have you got in the lorries?”
“Sh!” Scott murmured with a scared look. “It’s bombs for the troops at
Liverpool Street, but it’d be all up with us if the crowd knew that.
No--why I said it was lucky was because I thought you might help me to
get through.”
“I? How could I?” Jeremy asked defensively.
“Well, I don’t know.... I thought you might have some influence with
them, persuade them that there’s nothing particular in the lorries,
or....”
Jeremy favored him with a stare of bewildered dislike. “Why on earth
should I have any influence with them?” he enquired.
“Don’t be sick with me, old man.... I only thought you used to have
some damned queer opinions, you know; used to be a sort of Bolshevist
yourself.... I thought you might know how to speak to them.” Scott,
of course, always _had_ thought that any man whose opinions he could
not understand was a sort of Bolshevist. Jeremy shirked the task of
explanation and contented himself with calling his old comrade-in-arms
an ass.
“And, anyway,” he went on, “I’ll tell you one thing. There isn’t likely
to be any revolution hereabouts, unless you make it yourself. What are
you stopping for? Did they make you stop?”
“Not exactly ... don’t you see, the General said....”
Jeremy heaved a groan. He had heard that phrase on Scott’s lips
before, and it was generally a sign that the nadir of his incapacity
had been reached. Heaven help the Social Order if it depended on
Scott’s fidelity to what the General had said! But the voice above him
maundered on, betraying helplessness in every syllable. The General
had said that the bombs were at all costs to reach the troops at
Liverpool Street. He had also said that on no account must the nature
of the convoy be betrayed; and on no account must Scott risk any
encounter with a mob. And the mob had not really stopped the convoy.
They had just shown no alacrity in making room for it, and Scott had
thought that by pushing on he would perhaps be risking an encounter.
Now, however, he thought that by remaining where he was might be
exciting curiosity.
Jeremy looked at him coolly, and spoke in a tone of restrained sorrow.
“Scott,” he said, “it takes more than jabberers like this chap here to
make a revolution. They want a few damned fools like you to help them.
I’m going on before the trouble begins.” And he drew back from the
lorry and began to look about for a place where the crowd might be a
little sparser. The orator on the broken chair had now been replaced by
another, an Englishman, of the serious type, one of those working-men
whose passion it is to instruct their fellows and who preach political
reform with the earnestness and sobriety of the early evangelical
missionaries. He was speaking in a quiet, intense tone, without rant or
excitement, and the crowd was listening to him in something of his own
spirit. Occasionally, when he paused on a telling sentence, there were
low rumbling murmurs of assent or of sympathetic comment.
“No, but look here----” came from the lorry after Jeremy in an agonized
whisper. But he saw his opportunity, and did not look back until he was
on the other side of the crowd round the speaker. He went on rapidly
eastwards past the station, his mood of relief already replaced by an
ominous mood of doubt. Once or twice, until the turn of the street hid
them, he glanced apprehensively over his shoulders at the crowd and the
string of motionless lorries.