could see the concerted rush of the police, though I was not in time to
get out of their way. It was a truncheon, I think, and not a stray stone
that brought me down. I remember excruciating pain at the side of my
head; I remember my knees giving slowly beneath me; and then, for a
time, I remember nothing more.
6
When I came to, the fire was invisible; but the battle was still raging.
My glasses were gone; my head ached savagely; and an ungentle foot had
trodden my left hand to a bleeding pulp. I felt overpoweringly sick; and
I wanted to crawl away from all this din till I had recovered my nerve.
I did not know why I was there at all.
Then I remembered O’Rane and the stable-door.
During the war, I was told by many of my friends that, in the first
moments after being slightly wounded, they became wholly demoralized:
they might have been facing intensive fire for several hours on end
without undue discomfort, but, when once they had been hit, they dodged
and cowered their way back to the clearing-station as though the heavens
were raining shrapnel upon them. My own demoralization, as I slunk away
and made for the stable-door by the other side of the house, was more
complete than I care to remember: I ducked, I sidestepped, I ran, I hid,
everywhere pursued by the reek and roar of struggling humanity,
convinced against all reason that I alone was visible in the darkness
and that every missile was deliberately aimed at me.
The stable-door was locked; I could see no one near it; and I sank to
the ground till I should faint again or be trampled to death. There was
some challenge, some pass-word for me to remember; but, when I heard a
whistle, I forgot my orders and called out: “Here I am! All clear.”
There was a precautionary pause before the door was opened. Then O’Rane
pushed a small, muffled figure towards me and stepped into the road with
a second figure, slightly larger and equally muffled, in his arms.
“Shut the door quietly and follow me,” he whispered. “It locks itself.”
“Where’s Sonia?,” I asked.
“I must go back for her. She’s rather rattled.”
I cannot say whether my recovery was the natural result of time or
whether I was infected by O’Rane’s unruffled calm. His companionship
meant much; his air of authority more; and, if I was still frightened, I
hope at least that I did not shew it. A very few steps, moreover,
brought us into comparative quiet; and I could forget the red-hot pain
in my head.
“The fog _is_ lifting,” I told O’Rane.
“The deuce it is!” He stopped suddenly and lowered his burden to the
ground. “You must take Daniel as well, while I go back. Sonia wouldn’t
face the fire-escape; and I must carry her down. There’s no time to
lose, because these fellows have been filling up on neat spirit; and I
came across a dud incendiary-bomb . . . which doesn’t look like clean
fighting. You’re in Smith Square now. Feel your way round the church
railings, then straight ahead, then to the left as far as you can go.
Knock up any of the Abbey people and say these children must be taken
in. Give them _your_ address and beat it for home. We shall join you as
soon as we can. Go carefully,” he added in a whisper. “There’s some one
coming. Oh, it’s only a woman. _She_ won’t hurt you.”
As he turned back to The Sanctuary, I gave Daniel my undamaged hand
while I hoisted little David half on to my shoulder. I had heard no
footsteps, but somewhere in this bewildering darkness I heard a woman’s
light cough. Then a voice said:
“Don’t look round! I’ll take the baby as soon as we’re safe, but I want
to keep my hands free just in case . . .”
Then we came into a narrow circle of lamp-light and I saw Barbara in
tweed jacket and trousers. She had tidied her hair away under one of my
hats; and the fingers of her right hand gripped a service revolver.
“When you didn’t come . . .” she began.
“You’ve no right to be here,” I exclaimed in horror.
“Just as much right as you, darling. I drove the car here in case any
one was . . . hurt. It’s in that street by the Church House.”
“Then will you shew me the way and take these infants to Seymour Street?
Raney will follow as soon as he can bring Sonia down.”
“And you?”
“I’m going back to give him a hand.”
“Must you?”
“There may be other people in the house. Servants.”
Barbara lifted the child off my shoulders into her arms and hurried down
a side street. The fog was lifting rapidly, too rapidly; I could see
across the street and I wondered how much could be seen on the
battlefield outside The Sanctuary.
“If you _must_ . . .” Barbara murmured. “George, I told Robson I was
coming to see if I could help you; but . . . I brought the car to take
back your dead body.”
“I’ve no intention of being killed,” I said, “but we can’t leave people
to be burnt alive.”
“Well, . . . take the revolver,” said Barbara helplessly.
When we had put the children inside the car, I went back at a run down
Great College Street to Smith Square. The fog lay in pockets so that I
could see thirty yards at one moment and less than three at another. I
fancied, as I neared The Sanctuary, that the noise had diminished; I
could see neither fire nor smoke; and, though my own road was deserted,
I thought I could hear the patter of running feet. It was more than time
for the reinforcements to have arrived; it was more than a likelihood
that, with the increasing light, experience and discipline were
favouring the police. I was halfway through Smith Square when I heard a
sound of crying and saw a woman’s figure cowering against the railings.
As I went forward, I was greeted with a scream of terror; the figure
turned to run, and I recognized Sonia.
Calling her by name, I started in pursuit and brought her back from the
scene of riot for which she was blindly heading. Her nerve was gone; and
I had dragged and carried her halfway to the car before she could speak
coherently. Then I learned that the battle was over, the fire out and
Griffiths’ army in full flight; but all this was nothing to the
unforgettable agony of the bombardment, and she sobbed hysterically as
she tried to describe her own sufferings from the moment when she
received my message from Hampstead to the moment when her husband
climbed through the nursery-window.
“Where _is_ Raney?,” I asked.
“He’s following. He said it was dangerous for us to go together; and I
should get along quicker without him. Oh, George, it was so awful! I
believe I’m going to faint.” . . .
Though I tried to comfort her, I should have had an easier task if she
had composed herself wholly or wholly collapsed. Though I had not shared
her ordeal, I felt that Sonia was making rather a pitiful exhibition of
herself. She was frightened, but so was I; so—under his Gasconnade—was
O’Rane; so—without disguise—had Barbara been. When, however, an
emergency wrested the direction of her daily life from her own hands,
Barbara behaved as tradition and inherited instinct taught her. Though
her body might play her false, the dauntless strength of breeding came
out in her spirit; she might break down in private; but, once on the
public scaffold, she shewed an Elizabethan daring and feared death less
than the ague which might make her enemies think she feared death. Alone
of us four, Sonia was more concerned for her personal alarms than for
the dignity of the order in which we had been brought up.
“It’s only a few yards to the car,” I told her. “Barbara will look after
you. And you’ll find the children quite safe. . . . D’you know which way
David was coming?”
“No. . . . I just ran for my life. He said he’d follow.” . . .
I handed her over to my wife’s keeping with no more comment than that
she was badly shaken in nerve. There might have been a noticeable
contraction of sympathy if Barbara, who had superfluously ventured into
this maelstrom through loyalty to me, heard that Sonia had run for her
life and left her blind husband to extricate herself from the danger in
which she had involved him.
“I’m just going to meet Raney,” I said. “He’s expecting us either in
Dean’s Yard or Seymour Street.”
“If we’ve gone before you come back, it’ll mean that he’s found us
first,” said Barbara. “Then you’ll come home independently. Take care of
yourself.”
“It’s all over now. Even the fog’s almost gone.”
7
As I returned to The Sanctuary for the last time, I could see—even
without my glasses—from one lamp-post to the next. The narrow streets
north of Smith Square were almost empty; and I could hardly blame a
routed enemy for shying from such sinister avenues of escape. There were
more and more people as I drew nearer to the Embankment, all of them
rather dazed and many wounded. I saw no dead, though stretchers were
being hurried up as I came in sight of The Sanctuary; and of the battle
there was no other sound than a rapid scurry of feet towards Westminster
Bridge and Vauxhall.
At the corner of Sanctuary Road I was challenged and stopped by a
policeman.
“I’m looking for the gentleman whose house has been attacked,” I
explained. “I’ve got his family in a car near by; but he’s unfortunately
blind, and I don’t want him to miss them.”
I was allowed through; and, a moment later, I stood in the midst of one
of the strangest scenes that I have witnessed. To see, to smell and to
touch, it was a blend of shambles and distillery under the combined
influence of earthquake and fire. The ground was in places waist-deep
with stones; for twenty feet round the house I heard the glass crackling
as I walked. More than once I slipped in an ominous pool of blood; and
the air was sickly with the smell of whisky and singed clothing.
I whistled and called O’Rane’s name, but there was no answer. Every
approach was now guarded by police; and on either side of the cordon I
heard scuffling as the last unyielding attackers were put under arrest.
In the middle of the open square, the wounded were laid out to await the
ambulances. I borrowed a lantern and flashed it down the lines, but
there was no one remotely resembling Raney.
“I’m going to try the house now,” I told the policeman nearest the
stables. “If you’ll give me a leg up, I can get over the wall and up the
fire escape.”
There was no one in the yard, no one in the house. As a last hope, I
interrogated two or three of the constables; but, if any of them had
found time to notice anything my description did not help to identify
one half-seen figure in a surging crowd of many thousands.
“Well, if he turns up,” I said to the inspector, “will you tell him that
all’s well and that his family has gone to Mr. Oakleigh’s house?”
Then, handing him a card, I bent my steps in the direction of the Church
House.
The fog had lifted; and only a faint haze remained. For the first time
in many hours I looked at my watch to explain what seemed to be stars.
It was nine o’clock; and I became suddenly conscious of great hunger,
great fatigue and almost unbearable pain in my head and hand. At the
same moment I began to see the events of the afternoon in their
perspective.
Nothing quite of this kind had happened for a hundred years. Barbara had
confirmed what the policeman told me: this outbreak was isolated and
unique. Within the next day or two I was to meet men who had driven
unsuspectingly across the battlefield from luncheon-parties an hour
before the battle; I was to meet others who drove across the same ground
an hour after the surrender and only imagined that the road was under
repair. It was local, it was brief; but it was new. Had I seen the
beginning or the end? Sardou, I remember, makes one of his characters
say: “_An_ émeute _is when the mob is conquered; then they are all_
canaille; _a revolution is when they are victorious; then they are all
heroes_.” The _émeute_ of to-day, however, becomes not infrequently the
revolution of to-morrow. I felt that, in history, this outbreak might
mark a turning-point: it would be the first active step towards a social
revolution, or it would be the last demonstration of turbulence before a
great and orderly people, with a genius for self-government, adjusted
itself slowly, pragmatically and irrationally to the new conditions.
I know now, I knew next day, that the collision which loomed so large to
me would escape the notice of the most vigilant historian. The average
headline in the average paper said no more than: =Disorderly scenes
in westminster. Feared loss of life.= Then and now I felt and feel
that what I witnessed was more than a “disorderly scene”. Little more
than eight years had passed since the threat of a European war shook us
to the foundations of our being. The ardent among us had vowed that, if
we won, we would have an order of civilization for which any man would
be proud to die. After eight years, the danger of a new war lowered more
menacingly than in the summer months of 1914. And the civilization which
we had set up to commemorate the war was to be judged on that
afternoon’s encounter. Had the association of one human being with
another, in his national and international grouping, grown so complex
that no one could control it? Had the world become like the Roman Empire
in its last days, when—for no reason that a statesman of the day or an
historian of later days could enunciate—the mighty machine ceased to
revolve? If the aim of government was to secure the life and liberty of
the governed and to lead them towards prosperity and happiness,
government had palpably failed in victorious England and France, in
defeated Germany, in revolutionary Russia. My uncle warned me on his
death-bed that we were back in 1914; had he been with me now, I must
have told him that we were sunk to something incredibly lower than 1914.
After the events of this afternoon I did not believe that even O’Rane
would dispute that.
Of all the ironies that had chequered his life, I knew of none greater
than that his should be the house to be attacked by the most downtrodden
and hopeless section of the community. If their salvation could have
been helped by his death, he would have given his life for them as
lightly as another man might toss a coin to a beggar. Now, if any one
had indeed been killed, he would be held indirectly responsible.
I had come to a halt till the pain which every step sent shooting
through my head should abate. Looking again at my watch, I saw that I
must hasten. By Great College Street, O’Rane had told me, and then into
Dean’s Yard. As I turned the corner, I had to step aside to avoid an
obstacle. Glancing back, I saw that it was a man. He lay stretched on
his back, with his arms flung out, midway between two lamp-posts; and I
could not be sure whether he was wounded or drunk. I called out to find
if he wanted help; but there was no answer. Then I struck a match.
As it flared, I saw what—in some way that I shall never understand—I
had been expecting to see. It was this that had sent me back to his side
again and again; this, maybe, that had brought Barbara with her car;
this, for all I know, that appeared to her in the semblance of black
wings beating a prophetic message over the house. O’Rane’s hands were
cold as ice; the back of his head was brutally smashed. His black eyes
stared up to heaven in mild perplexity at the insoluble enigma of death
and the eternal paradox of life.
He looked a boy of twenty.
I covered his face and mounted guard over my last and best friend. . . .
WALTHAM ST. LAWRENCE,
Berkshire, 1923.
THE END
TRANSCRIBER NOTES
Mis-spelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple
spellings occur, majority use has been employed.
Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors
occur.
Page numbers have been removed due to a non-page layout.