and I failed to press it. The papers that night gave long accounts of
the opening of parliament and longer, less hackneyed descriptions of the
demonstration by the unemployed. I detected for the first time a note of
uneasiness as, for the first time, unemployment passed out of the realm
of abstract statistics and incarnated itself in ragged armies of hungry
men. I remembered Philip Hornbeck’s blithe assurance that Griffiths
could do little harm so long as the armies were scattered; well, their
banners shewed that they were scattered no longer. One nervous
leader-writer compared this march with the advance of the Marseillais on
Paris and asked angrily how the police had allowed it; another, more
valiant, rehearsed the history of the Fascismo movement in Italy and
warned the proletariat at large—without considering whether the
proletariat was likely to read such a paper—that England would never
yield to mob-violence. A third, mentioning O’Rane by name, exhumed the
controversy of the summer and enquired whether those who had voluntarily
undertaken a national responsibility could abandon it at such a time in
satisfaction of a “doctrinaire whim”. In less blunt terms than the
sandwichman had displayed, O’Rane’s ‘sentence of death’ was brought up
against him; and it was with some muddled, premonitory feeling of an
isolated conflict between Griffiths and the O’Ranes that I uttered my
warning.
“Suspend your sentence,” I said, “until the new government has declared
its unemployment policy.”
O’Rane replied with the entirely logical and utterly irrelevant thesis
that unemployment was a consequence of the war, that the community had
called the tune and must pay the piper, that one government had imposed
conscription of men’s lives and that another could impose conscription
of their wealth. The state had turned prosperous civilians into
soldiers; the state must turn these soldiers back into prosperous
civilians.
His cold reasoning and neat phrasing reminded me of a speech at some
undergraduate debating-society.
“I can only hope,” I said, “that you won’t have to say ‘no’ again.”
Hungry men had no time for debating-society arguments. I hoped, too,
that Sonia would not be forced to say ‘no’ again. Hungry men had no
taste for being ordered to walk from Westminster to Hampstead as a move
in the game with her husband. I said no more. And, amid my
self-reproaches, I find a barren comfort in the knowledge that neither
Sonia nor her husband would have listened, though one rose from the dead
to warn them.
3
Thereafter, like every one else, I waited to see the policy of the
government proclaimed. The debate on the address gave rise to some
acrimonious passages between the two front benches; a programme of
rather remote public-relief work was fluttered in the face of the labour
party; and the prime minister ostentatiously reestablished departmental
responsibility and dissociated himself from the improvisations of his
predecessor by refusing to receive a deputation of the unemployed.
Then the interest of the public sought a new stimulus.
I am inclined to think that modern journalism, with its craving for
daily excitement and its acquiescence in the superficial, has
incapacitated us for patient study. Few subjects unconnected with sex or
bloodshed can hold the attention of a newspaper-reader for more than
three days; and, when the men with schemes for employment had been
photographed as they walked to Downing Street and when a popular
novelist had protested passionately that the unemployed were not really
bolshevists, the eyes of the nation were allured by pictures of Lord
Curzon entering his train for the Lausanne conference, and
controversialists with uncertain memories enquired rhetorically the name
of the last woman to be hanged in England for complicity in murder. Like
the peace negotiations, like the war, like the domestic and
international unrest before the war, like the Irish problem, this
unemployment business became a bore: the public was accustomed to the
variety of a “continuous performance” in its cinematograph theatres, it
expected a “new programme weekly” for its political stage.
I myself was compelled for professional reasons to study problems of
public policy even after they had ceased to be fashionable. The only
excuse for continuing our paper was to be found in my uncle’s warning
that, after four years of peace, we were in at least no better position
than at the outbreak of war; at his death, we had cut our last
party-ties and were standing behind the government as friendly critic.
If the new administration shewed no improvement on the old, we should
have to consider—as I told my colleagues—whether we were to throw in
our lot with labour, whether we should lay our paper in its overdue
grave or whether we must extend to our own country the verdict of
revolutionary Russia that the old machine of national and international
government had broken down.
That verdict was pronounced in my private hearing by Griffiths himself,
with a warning that he would repeat it publicly if the government failed
to give him instant satisfaction. Our second interview was no more of my
seeking than the first. When the House rose without curing unemployment
then and there, he made it known—first of all at a mass-meeting in
Trafalgar Square and then in handbills which were distributed about the
streets—that he would instruct ministers in the meaning of unemployment
by confronting them with the unemployed. This, in the vague phrase which
he favoured, would “put things to the test”. The demonstrations at the
opening of parliament had been hardly more than a parade. “Hunger
marches” were now to be organized in every part of the country,
converging on London at the same moment. After that . . .? I noticed
that Griffiths carefully refrained from saying what would happen when
fifty, or a hundred, thousand disappointed men found themselves
empty-handed, empty-bellied, foot-sore and resentful at the closed door
of an impotent office. And I pointed out this sinister omission in the
next number of _Peace_.
There was nothing, Hornbeck told me at this time, in the speech or the
manifesto to justify police interference; but any one who remembered
Griffiths’ share in organizing the land-grabbing campaign could imagine
how this new demonstration would be conducted and how it was likely to
end. I went farther than most of my _confrères_ and denounced the
manifesto as deliberately provocative. Griffiths called to inform me
that, if I chose to print lies, he could not stop me, but that, if I was
interested in the truth, I might perhaps be not too proud to hear it
from him.
I professed a prompt eagerness for truth in any form, though I was more
interested to know what amusement or instruction he derived from so
painfully academic a journal as _Peace_. I wondered how he came to
associate me with its direction and why he visited me in Seymour Street
rather than in Fetter Lane. My curiosity on this last point was
satisfied when he ran a practised eye over the dimensions of the house
and asked me how many the establishment comprised.
“You? And your wife? And six servants?,” he recapitulated. “No kids? A
car and a man to drive it? Four meals a day? You don’t call _that_
provocative?”
“If we had fewer servants, you’d have more unemployed,” I pointed out.
“It takes three men and four women to keep the two of you alive. The
house is half empty. You waste more food in a day than my people eat in
a week. You drive about in your jewels and fine clothes among people
who’ve been cold and hungry for months. And then you tell me not to be
. . . ‘provocative’!”
I reminded him that we were supposed to be discussing unemployment.
“I shan’t remedy that by going about in rags,” I said, “or by shutting
up half the house.”
“If you were in Germany, you wouldn’t be allowed to have empty rooms.
And, if you were in Russia, you wouldn’t be allowed twenty coats when
the next man has nothing but a shirt between him and the rain.”
I reminded him that we were in England and that he had called to
demonstrate how little provocation his manifesto contained.
“If the government orders me to find accommodation for people without
homes,” I said, “if I have to clothe them and feed them, I’ll do it to
the best of my ability. I put obedience to the law above all things.”
The little red eyes glowed in anticipation of an attack. “My criticism
of you is the criticism I’ve brought before now against the people who
preach a general strike for political objects. That’s not the way to
proceed in a constitutional country. There’s no end to it short of
revolution. You object to the word ‘provocative’. . .”
“Did you _read_ what I said?,” he interrupted.
“Every word. It was admirably phrased. A single letter more would have
had you prosecuted. You’re careful not to provoke anybody in words; but
I tell you that you’re inciting people to violence by your actions. You
know their temper far better than I do. You know what you’ve taught them
to regard as the minimum standard of housing, feeding, wages and
out-of-work pay. Do you believe you’ll get it by bringing a hundred
thousand men to London?”
Griffiths hesitated perceptibly. If he said “no”, he condemned himself
for inflating his followers with false hopes; if he said “yes”, he was
confessing himself the prophet of intimidation in its crudest form.
“In time,” he answered at length.
“Do your men realize that they’ll have to wait?” He hesitated again for
fear of admitting that he had taught them too well or not well enough.
“No government in the world can submit to the dictation of a
mass-meeting. You know that. If it surrendered to-morrow, you’d have
another mass-meeting the day after. I think you know that too.”
“And still they wouldn’t have all they’re entitled to,” he murmured.
“That’s another question. My charge is that you’re bringing thousands of
men to London on false pretences. They’re probably not in the sweetest
of moods; and small blame to them. They won’t get what you’re promising
them; and they’ll turn on you.”
The red eyes flashed defiantly:
“I can look after myself.”
So far, we had kept fairly free from personal attacks, but something in
Griffiths’ manner or voice exasperated me. I had not admitted him in
order to be lectured about the number of servants who were needed to
keep me alive; the angry, ferret’s eyes gave me a curious feeling that I
must bite before I was bitten; and, seeing him—perhaps quite
unjustifiably as a vindictive, treacherous little animal, I fixed a
quality of untrustworthiness on the man.
“You will look after yourself,” I prophesied, “by putting the blame on
the government and rousing your people against law and order instead of
telling them there was never a hope of their getting any of the things
you promised.”
Though my antagonist betrayed his feelings in an angry flush, he
affected to dismiss my prediction as something unworthy of his notice:
“They said that at Woolhampton,” he answered, “when we seized the Town
Hall. I’m always stirring people up, it seems . . . Provocative . . .
because I put the blame where the blame should go! You haven’t called me
a paid agitator yet.”
“I’ve no intention of doing so. I say to your face, as I said in print,
that you’re provoking something which may end in a revolution. I take
the purity of your motives for granted. You’ve volunteered to tell me
the truth and to shew that you’re not organizing constructive
revolution.” . . .
Despite the dislike which I could not help feeling, there was no
doubting the man’s passionate sincerity. He felt for the people he
championed the same frenzied protectiveness and lust for revenge that I
should have felt if my sister had been hacked to pieces before my eyes.
Argument was out of the question; warnings were idle. I reconsidered the
phrase I had used in likening him to a spiteful ferret, for he was
touched with the greatness that is inseparable from fanaticism.
Self-advancement and self-advertising had no place in his thoughts,
though he was arrogantly confident of his authority as a popular leader
and of his power to cut knots that had baffled every other hand. In a
conversation that extended over two hours I learned nothing of his
private history; at the end I realized no better than at the beginning
why he had singled me out for his aggressive apologia. The resonant
blows of our blunt swords echoed emptily on our impenetrable harness;
and, when I saw him to the door, I was saying for the fiftieth time:
“You’re trying to stir up a revolution”; and for the fiftieth time he
was retorting: “If your precious government can’t do anything, some one
else had better have a try.”
As we crossed swords for the last time, Barbara drove up to the door.
She had been giving another sitting to Wace; and her appearance, in an
ermine coat and a diamond star, was not wasted on Griffiths, who bowed
ironically and looked her up and down as though he were assessing her in
terms of daily meat-meals.
“Well, I must be off,” he said; and I know he was recapitulating again:
“_You. And your wife. And six servants . . ._”
“I’m glad to have had this talk,” I said, “even though we’ve not
convinced each other. If you think I’ve misrepresented you, I can only
offer you equal space in our columns to put yourself right with our
readers.”
“I shan’t have time,” he answered.
“You can do it in two lines. If you’ll answer my charge that you’re
working, consciously or unconsciously, for a revolution . . .”
“I’m answering it now,” he interrupted. “From here I go to King’s Cross
and from King’s Cross to the north. Putting things to the test. I shall
be back again in just the time that it takes us to walk here.”
As he disappeared from sight, Barbara commented admiringly on his exit:
“For a third curtain, it was unsurpassed. I _do_ want to know what’s
going to happen in the last act.”
4
If I did not know then, I had a strength of conviction that amounted
almost to knowledge. There was going to be public excitement; there was
going to be loose speaking; there was going to be bad blood. And, after
that, there might well be rioting.
I have replayed the game a hundred times since that day and asked myself
what I could have done to change the issue. Before the war I should have
talked to Bertrand; and, if he had shared my apprehensions, he would
have spoken a word to the responsible ministers. With this new
government of men unknown to me, with this new House no longer even in
session, there was no one I could approach. During the war, when we
broke down most of the interdepartmental walls, a telephone message from
the Admiralty would have stirred sympathetic chords in Scotland Yard or
the Home Office. Now I had long severed my connection with the public
service; Philip Hornbeck was my one remaining link; and, if I bothered
him again, I ran the risk of being told that Griffiths was become a bee
in my bonnet.
This notwithstanding, I did ask Barbara to arrange a dinner; and I am
only sorry that I did not make the invitation more urgent.
“Is anything the matter?,” she asked in some surprise, for Hornbeck had
dined with us only two or three nights before.
“Not at the moment; but there may be trouble if some one doesn’t spike
that fellow Griffiths’ guns. In his way, the man’s right: as the
government _has_ no remedy, you can’t find an answer to people who say
they’ll take the remedy into their own hands. But the common sense of
the world won’t allow that. Griffiths will be refused a hearing; the mob
may break a few windows; and then the police will clear the streets.
It’s not worth marching an army three hundred miles to learn that old
lesson.”
“Until they’ve learnt it, they’ll go on believing in men like
Griffiths,” said Barbara.
“But it will be a more costly lesson than they realize. With the best
intentions in the world, he’s marching them into a trap. I want Hornbeck
to stop the march and break up the units before they can collect in
force.”
We telephoned to the Admiralty; but Hornbeck had left. When I got in
touch with him next day, he was engaged for several nights ahead. Rather
shamefacedly, I told him my fears; and he promised to enquire what steps
were being taken, though I felt I had wholly failed to communicate my
dread of the wasted little fanatic Griffiths. In the middle of the
following week I read that the great “hunger-march” had begun; and, when
Hornbeck dined with us, he explained that Griffiths was being given
enough rope to hang himself, but no more. One army had reached
Nottingham, a second was on the outskirts of Coventry and a third was
halting on the east side of Newbury; but they would not be allowed to
reach London. Since my interview with him, the leader and spokesman had
abandoned his former caution; and Hornbeck told me that the police were
waiting to prosecute him for inciting to crime.
“It’s a pity to wait,” I said.
“What else can one do?,” asked Hornbeck.
Perhaps my memory is biased by the events of the following week, perhaps
my instinct was right in warning me that Griffiths was one of the most
dangerous firebrands that I had ever met. He haunted me, as the shadow
of Marat must have haunted the well-to-do citizens of Paris; and I felt
an equal, unreasoning impatience with the departments that ignored him
and with the papers that advertised him. For two or three days the great
march was reported mile by mile, with a list of the victories won by
“Griffiths’ armies” over the powerless custodians of such county halls,
municipal libraries and public baths as they occupied on their way. For
the same period the government maintained a calm and dignified silence.
Then new interests demanded attention and space.
By the time that the various units joined forces in the open country
beyond Neasden, hunger-marching commanded no price in the ever-changing
tariff of news-items. London was shopping for Christmas; the Lausanne
conference was becoming every day more firm and ineffectual; Signor
Mussolini was in England; Germany had defaulted again; and the prime
ministers of the late allies were discussing with their financial
experts new and final methods of settling the problem of reparations.
I only learned that the army was at hand when I read that the government
policy for combating unemployment had been fully explained and that, in
the opinion of one private secretary, “_no useful purpose would be
served by a meeting between the Minister and the leaders of the
unemployed now collected in Wembley Park_.”
“This is the moment I’ve been dreading,” I told Barbara. “Griffiths has
made fools of these people; and he can only recover his authority by
fighting the government.”
I read next day that the leaders of the unemployed insisted upon sending
a deputation to the minister of labour. A public demonstration was
announced later; and from an evening paper I learned that, while the
police would not interfere with an orderly march through the streets, it
must not be conducted in the neighbourhood of Westminster. As I walked
home that night, I was given a handbill in which I read, over the
signature of Griffiths, that the hunger-march would be resumed next
morning and would be directed first to Buckingham Palace, then—as a
concession to constitutionalism—to the Home Office and finally—for a
reason I could not guess, since parliament was no longer sitting—to the
House of Commons. It was not for Scotland Yard to say who might or might
not have access to the king or his responsible ministers; and the
problem that chiefly vexed the spirit of Griffiths was to discover who
in fact was responsible.
“Now,” I told my colleagues when I reached Fetter Lane through a double
line of police, “there’s going to be trouble. The only thing that can
stop it will be a downpour of rain.”
“And there is in fact a hard frost,” yawned Triskett.
“This fog may do as well,” said Jefferson Wright.
“It’s pretty serious,” we all agreed.
Did any of us believe in the warnings and predictions which we uttered?
I cannot say. Everything that happened in these days is coloured by the
memory of what happened afterwards. I may conceivably take credit for
explaining before other people that these demonstrations were on a
different plane from the coal strikes and railway strikes that aroused
our uneasiness after the war; on the other hand, I may only have been
suffering from disordered nerves. It was the end of the year; I wanted a
holiday; and the self-control which I had to exercise at home sometimes
deserted me when I was at my office. Accordingly I claim no praise and
feel no shame in saying that I was nervous. The long lines of
police-pickets had not been stationed about the streets without some
purpose; and the news that trickled in throughout the morning was not of
a kind to allay anxiety.
Philip Hornbeck did indeed repeat by telephone his customary assurance
that Griffiths could be discounted. When the marchers entered Regent’s
Park, they were warned that they would not be allowed to approach
Downing Street; and, as Hornbeck walked to the Admiralty, he passed
half-a-dozen columns of dejected, leaderless men who were standing easy
or trudging slowly under banners of ineffectual protest. Even the bands,
he said, were dispirited. After one glance, the passers-by paid no heed
to a sight that was now wearisomely familiar; and, in Hornbeck’s eyes,
the gaunt, ragged army found its best friends among the constables who
tramped in a protective and restraining cordon.
“Did these fellows seem disappointed?,” I asked.
“I think they were too tired, poor devils, to feel anything. If it
hadn’t been for the bobbies, you might have thought it was another
retreat from Moscow. I believe there _was_ some plain speaking when they
found their Napoleon had left them, but I hear he’s only gone to see
about billets. The police are helping him all they can. That’s the way
we stop revolutions in England,” he chuckled.
I was reminded again of the day now long distant when O’Rane and I had
stood in a crowd of many thousands to watch the body of Terence McSwiney
drawing through the respectfully silent streets of London. The English,
I felt, behaved sometimes like characters in a comic opera: consistent
only in their inconsistency, they could not rise to a revolution. With a
longer leap into the past, my memory fastened on a moment in O’Rane’s
first year at Melton, when he watched a half-hearted attempt at a May
Day demonstration and, in disgust at the apathy of the demonstrators,
instructed them in the Marseillaise. I wondered if he recalled that day,
which was also nearly his last as a scholar of Melton. I wondered if he
and Hornbeck were right in discounting this threat of revolution.
Then I thought of the weary crowds that were pouring into London.
“If you’d put a spoke in his wheel at the beginning . . .,” I began.
“You can’t stop peaceful pedestrians from walking along the king’s
highway,” Hornbeck rejoined, “and Griffiths arranged that the armies
should only _become_ armies when they were too big to turn back.”
5
I had intended to lunch at the Eclectic in the hopes of hearing what
steps the government was taking to house and feed the hunger-marchers,
but, when I was halfway to St. James’ Street, I turned north and walked
home with a vague feeling that I must see how Barbara was getting on.
When Spence-Atkins asked me point-blank if I thought there would be any
outbreak, I had replied with conviction that I did not. That, however,
was in the office; and, as I walked west, I was disquieted by the sight
of these silent columns, marching aimlessly, halting and dissolving into
little knots of stragglers too weary to march longer. In Waterloo Place
and Regent Street, the police imposed an order which the men themselves
had been unable to maintain; but from Hanover Square to Park Lane the
army split into its elements. Through the settling fog I saw men sitting
on the kerbs and clustering on the island-refuges; they dropped in a
shapeless heap on the first convenient doorstep; and the good-humoured
constables who said “Now then, you must move along” found themselves
addressing ears that were already deaf with sleep.
“Half of them are no more than boys, sir,” one policeman pointed out to
me. “Tired out, that’s what they are. They don’t mean no harm.”
By a damnable irony, the men had chosen for their collapse a moment when
Brook Street offered a tantalizing blend of warm, savoury smells. I, who
had never known the meaning of hunger, found my appetite quickening.
“They’re tired out and _hungry_,” I said. So far as I am a judge of
accents, some of these boys had come from the Black Country, others from
Lancashire, others again from Northumberland. “I live near here. Is it
any good trying to raise some soup . . .?”
The constable shrugged his shoulders and waited while an old man, who
had fainted, was lifted on to an ambulance.
“If once you begin, sir, you’ll have the whole lot of them at your door.
It’s more than one man can tackle.”