I, Ripper

I spent this evening rooting around the club. Since radicals believe (happily) that property is crime, they find the notion of locked doors abhorrent. Anyone radical or pretending to be radical may enter and wander the club, which sits next to one of those improvised spaces in chockablock Whitechapel called Dutfield’s Yard. It’s not a yard and there’s no Dutfield anywhere, save painted long ago on the gate. I observed that Judy would frequently open a door in the closed gate for a quick stand-up assignation in the darkness and quietude of the yard, then leave, always pulling the door shut behind her. Thus for my purposes, it was perfect.

But I had to know what species of experience the club offered, so I found myself one of a hundred or so throaty rip-roarers purporting to represent the masses as they – none more enthusiastically than myself – bellowed forth the sacred hymn of all those who believed we had to tear down before we could build up. I came a bit late, so it wasn’t until the fifth stanza that I made my contribution.

The kings made us drunk with fumes,

Peace among us, war to the tyrants!

Let the armies go on strike.

Stocks in the air, and break ranks.

If they insist, these cannibals

On making heroes of us,

They will know soon that our bullets

Are for our own generals!

Lovely sentiment, but try singing it in the mess of the 44th Argyle Foot and you’ll end up swinging from a tree overlooking the parade ground. Were they planning this year’s uprising or celebrating last year’s? Was it to be Mittleuropa or some unpronounceable republic in the far Balkans? Or maybe they were planning to go against the Great Bear herself, which meant that of the two hundred comrades the building held, at least a hundred and fifty of them were tsarist secret policemen, but they would have no interest in what happened in the yard outside their windows, only in far-off dungeons and torture rooms. However, I shared my doubts with nobody and presented to the company the very image of a happy mansion arsonist and execution squad commander. The louder I was, the more invisible I became.

After group sing, there was much hugging and babbling in a number of languages alien to my ear, but the universal thematic of the room was brotherhood, as accelerated by the effects of vodka. Everyone glowed in the pink of either revolutionary fervor or rotting capillaries. When the bottle came to me, I took a swig, finding it to be liquid fire, more appropriate for battle than society, but who was I to disagree with the masses. I hugged, I kissed, I shook hands, I raised fists, I shouted, I carried on essentially like a bad imitation of a drunken bear. However, there was no penalty for overacting on these boards.

In time, after the minutes had been discussed and accepted in several different tongues and certain policy issues debated rather too fiercely (suggesting that the participants loved debate over revolution) and the next picnic/mass action planned, postponed, and ultimately canceled, the meeting atomized, and various cliques and factions withdrew to their own counsel, and all the lone wolves too anarchistic to join were free to mosey about. I fit that category, in shabby clothes with a derby pulled low, and it was via this process that I was able to make a secret examination of the building in public, without rousing suspicion. They were too busy contemplating dreams of Thermidor and who would run the Midlands Electrification Program to pay attention to any particular individual. To their imaginations, it was the mass, not the man, that mattered. I would soon set them straight on that matter.

At any rate, the building was what one might expect of such a place, the second-floor meeting hall rather like the vaulted cathedral of the religion, all sorts of ancillary rooms off or below it, including a printing shop at the rear to crank out the necessary broadsides, a crude kitchen for brewing soup by the gallon, a reading room that collected the latest in revolutionary news from all over the world, a cellar that seemed like cellars anywhere, even under the Houses of Parliament. All in all, quite banal.

That is, unless one knew where to look.

CHAPTER TWELVE Jeb’s Memoir