Chapter V: Vive L’anarchie!

I drew a deep breath. He was the poor man’s saint; his symbol has descended to the poor man’s banker.

Yet my confidence after all was not all misplaced. St. Nicholas, at a pinch, would provide my dowry.

It flashed across me at a stroke what those golden balls meant. Never before had I divined their meaning—their intimate connection with my newly-chosen patron. I caught at it now clearly. Nicholas, I knew, was the saint of the people—the saint of the labourer who toils for daily bread, of the fisherman who struggles with the stormy sea, of the orphan, of the slave, of the child, the captive, the prisoner, the unfortunate. No wonder, then, that his golden balls have survived as the badge of that generous profession which freely lends to all the poor who leave a pledge behind.

I accepted the omen. Tempest-tossed as I was, my precious type-writer might save me for the day from the present distresses. I hurried back to my attic in a street off Soho, packed it up in its case, and carried it with difficulty in my own small arms to the shrine of St. Nicholas.

My errand, I grant, was new, and repugnant. But necessity, like our magistrates, knows no law. I will not pretend that I passed those dubious portals without a flush of shame. Still, I passed them bravely.

“How much?” asked the acolyte.

I was inexperienced in the ritual of the sordid temple. “Three pounds?” I queried tentatively.

He cut me short with a gesture of contempt. “We could do thirty shillings.”

“I _paid_ twenty pounds for it,” I murmured.

He shrugged his shoulders. “An error of judgment, I should say. Thirty shillings. Do you take it?”

I was anxious to escape from the squalid place. Bundles of shabby clothes in square pigeon-holes daunted me. “I accept,” I said, gasping. He counted out the money, and handed me a ticket.

I fled, like one followed by a roaring wild beast. No quicker flies the Arimaspian whom the gryphon pursues. Nor did I pause or halt till I reached my own bower. Safe back in that stronghold, I bolted and locked the door, and washed the pollution off me in an orgy of cold water.

Then the dignity of womanhood reasserted itself. I sat back in the one arm-chair, and reflected. A freak is dear to my soul. I would pay my weekly bill before starting, carry my knapsack with me, and engage the room for another week in advance, in case the anarchists should chance to prove too anarchic for my taste. And after that, who dare call me imprudent? ’Tis the habit of twenty-two to burn its boats. When it takes measures for preserving them, you should give it credit for singular forethought.

I had still my faithful bicycle. I rose betimes next morning, and endued myself in my cycling costume, which, like all else about me (I trust), is rational. The Commissioner and I stole silently down the stairs. Before London was well awake we had left Westminster Bridge behind us in the haze, and were off on the open road, on our way towards Horsham, two palmers bent for the Holy Land of Anarchy.

How light and free I felt! When man first set woman on two wheels with a pair of pedals, did he know, I wonder, that he had rent the veil of the harem in twain? I doubt it; but so it was. A woman on a bicycle has all the world before her where to choose; she can go where she will, no man hindering. I felt it that brisk May morning as I span down the road, with a Tam o’ Shanter on my head, and my loose hair travelling after me like a Skye terrier.

“This,” thought I to myself, “is truly my Odyssey. To play at being a latter-day Ulysses in London, among those crowded streets, is like a child’s game—too much make-believe. But mounted here on the ship of the high-road, scudding gaily down hill, or luffing against head-winds on a steep upward slope, I feel myself the heroine of a modern sea epic. As I coast by narrow straits of hedge-bordered lane, round some lumbering cart, I steer with care betwixt headland and whirlpool. Siren inns hang out signs to beckon me into port; piratical carts, buccaneering drays, skidding fast down long slopes, strive to crush me as they pass like living Symplegades. In perils oft, I yet feel the fresh wind in my teeth, and see the foam of May break over hawthorn promontories. Troy lies behind; in front of me beckons the peaceful Ithaca of my anarchist settlement.”

The road, indeed, was a pleasant one. Lying at first among suburban quarters, pink with blossom at that perfect moment of the year, and heavy with lilac, it grew greener by degrees as it stretched out to the rising plain of Surrey and then swelled up slowly into the great breaker of the chalk downs. That huge wave of land rises in a long curve on the side towards London, but curls over abruptly by Box Hill and Dorking, like a billow that has hardened in the act of breaking. My way led me through a deep gorge that cuts the slope of this ridge at right angles, beside a wandering stream, as though one stroke of some great magician’s wand had cleft a way for it through the barrier. The ravine is bordered to the left by a cliff-like edge, overgrown with juniper bushes. They call it the Vale of Mickleham. Spring had put on her best frock for my visit. I rode at a good pace. Commissioner Lin toiled behind, with his tongue out. Then we broke into the open, where a steeple showed the way, and through a billowy common, crest after trough alternately, dotted thick with holly-trees, across the Weald of Sussex. A still, pearly-pale sky hung over the misty level. Despondent donkeys munched furze-tops and mused pessimism. Trains dashed under bridges with long streamers of steam, as I rode over them unabashed—huge monsters of burnished brass, snorting death from their throats, such as would have terrified the timid Achæan sailors. But I took no heed of them—I, the braver daughter of an iron age, trained to disregard dragons of that mechanical sort, and to fear only those against whom St. Nicholas is potent—I had seen one but yesterday on Margaritone’s panel. The horses that passed over by my side reared and quivered at the ungainly monster; but my undaunted steel palfrey, himself a scion of the iron age, showed no sign of weakness. Or if he trembled at all, ’twas something wrong in the gearing.

A mile or two from Horsham I diverged, as directed, down a cross-road to the left. ’Twas a level lane in champaign country, bordered by a low hedge of close-clipped maple. The fields were of leaden clay—so much I saw where they were ploughed—muddy, and all but impassable in wet weather, to meet which state of morass every cottage was approached by a small paved causeway of flags, giving a singularly distinctive note to the district. Many such I passed, each built of pale red brick, each tiled with mossy tiles, and each approached through a square of front garden by its town-like pavement. The lanes were a maze, running aimlessly hither and thither. One after another, as I tried it, led me back by circumvolutions to a rustic Clapham Junction, the centre of Nowhere. Judge if I was nonplussed.

At one of the cottages I reined up at last, and, leaning from my saddle, called out to a boy who was weeding the front patch: “Can you tell me where I shall find the anarchist settlement?”

The boy looked up, taken aback. It was clear that the rationality of my dress astonished him. And, indeed, ’tis so rare to be rational in this world that I was not surprised at his surprise. He stared at me with a frank provincial stare; I am not sure that he did not design heaving half a brick at me, in recognition of my originality. But he contented himself with a few contumelious epithets, which did not hurt me. I flung him a penny; this softened his heart. He answered, after a pause, “I guess you mean them furriners.”

The American blood in me was flattered by that “I guess.” Thus my ancestors must have spoken here in Sussex long ago, before they went over in the _Mayflower_, to fight in due time at Lexington. It is a point of honour with all Massachusetts folk to have gone over in the _Mayflower_. She was a sloop of 180 tons, and must have carried thousands of steerage passengers. I am not sure about the tonnage, but there can be no doubt as to the passengers.

“They are probably foreigners,” I replied, coming back to this century. “At any rate, they are new-comers. And I was told they had settled down somewhere near Pinfold.”

He waved his hand vaguely towards the quarter of the sunrise, and gave me directions of complicated topography. But he added, after a moment for internal reflection, “They bain’t the sort o’ folk for the likes o’ you to visit.”

“Thank you,” I answered, “I am an anarchist myself.” And I spurred on my mount, round the corner where he directed me.

The day, which was brisk when I started, had become by this time hot and windless, and the sun beat mercilessly. After various intricate twists and turns, ill-deciphered from uncertain instructions, I found myself at last by the side of a pond which formed the one fixed point in my guide’s geography. He had called it “a horse-pond.” It was a pretty little pool: tall glossy weeds grew lush by its edge; a grey-leaved willow drooped into it; Naiads lurked among the broad green disks of the water-lilies at its farther end. I was glad it was so taking. I accepted it as an omen of success in my wild-goose chase. From the first I was not without misgivings of my own wisdom in thus seeking to fraternise with unknown anarchist brethren. But I knew how often fortune brings in some boats that are not steered; and I took the beauty of this “horse-pond” as a foretaste of what I should find in the anarchist settlement.

An old woman, with sleeves tucked up and the parboiled arms of a laundress, stood near the door of a new brick cottage hard by. “Can you tell me,” I called out, “where I can find Rothenburg?”

I omitted the Mr., as my Cambridge friend had warned me that that harmless prefix acted on your anarchist like the picador’s dart on the bulls of Andalusia.

“Rottenborough?” the old woman answered, transforming his name, as is the wont of her class, into something significant in her own language. “He’s down yonder by the new glass-house.” And she pointed with her hand towards a deep clay field just behind her cottage.

I dismounted, and led my bicycle gently through the mud. There was no eglantine. At the far end of the field, under shelter of a hedge which backed it to the north, I saw a slender, pale-faced young man in a blue Continental blouse, digging a trench with a pick, to whose use he was evidently but little accustomed.

“Are you Rothenburg?” I asked, in French.

He looked up and smiled. My costume took his fancy. “I am,” he answered in the same language, but with a marked Alsatian accent. “What do you want with me, comrade?”

“I am an anarchist,” I said, simply, rushing straight to the point. “I wish to join your community.”

He laid down his pick, and came up out of the trench. I could see him better now—a pallid, anæmic young man, with a high narrow forehead, watery restless eyes, thin yellow hair, and twitching hands that played nervously all the time with a shadowy moustache. I judged him at sight the very type of an eager-hearted ineffectual enthusiast—a man born to failure as the sparks fly upward.

He looked me over, all surprised. “We are a party of working men,” he objected, at last; “artisans, sempstresses, labourers. We do not desire or court the aid of the _bourgeois_.”

Now, I can endure most things, but not to be called a _bourgeoise_. I coloured a little, I suppose; at any rate, I answered, “I am an _ouvrière_ myself. I have nothing to do with the _bourgeoisie_. I have ridden down from London to link my fate with yours. Are you the head of this colony?”

He flushed somewhat in turn—or rather, faint streaks of pink stole over that bloodless face. “We have no head,” he answered. “We are thorough-going anarchists. Equality is our aim. Since when do you belong to our party?”

“Since I was born,” I retorted, boldly. “I am anarchic by nature. Wherever there is a government, I am always against it. Let me join your band—and I promise disobedience.”

He eyed me suspiciously. This confession of faith seemed rather to disturb than to reassure him. He paused a moment. “How did you hear of us?”

“Casually, in an eating-house in London, from a Cambridge economist who had been here to see you. When he spoke of you, I thought to myself, ‘These are the people I want. I recognise my kind. I must go and join them.’”

“Ha! He was a co-operator. A voluntary co-operator. But he had not the whole truth. If he sent you here, you may be wrong—you are perhaps a Marxian?”

I perceived that there was an orthodoxy and a heterodoxy of anarchism; in which case, of course, I should be on the heterodox side. “You will find me sound,” I said, seeking to temporise, “in my uncompromisingly anarchic anarchism of anarchy.” I thought I could hardly be more mutinous than that. If ’twas rebellion they wanted, I was honestly prepared to rebel against the rebels.

He drew out a cheap gun-metal watch. “It is dinner-time,” he said, temporising in return. “The comrades will have assembled. Come up and discuss. We will see whether they are content to accept you as a companion.”

I confess I was disappointed. This seemed painfully close to a legislative assembly—at the very least to a folk-moot or parish council. Did they mean to decide things by base show of hands? And if so, wherein did your anarchist differ from the ordinary coercive governmental authority?

In the Utopia I had framed for myself, every man (or woman) did that which was right in his own eyes—without prejudice to his equal freedom to do that which was wrong, if he chanced to be so minded. Here, I saw just a common joint-stock company—Anarchy, Limited.