'Would you not have a lemonade or something?' I said, and his eyes fairly lit up at that, so we stepped into the pub.
'It's been so hot out there today,' said the long-haired fellow, putting his hat and his papers down on the edge of the red billiard table. But it was no cooler in the pub, of course: just a different heat, with beer smell and cigar smoke mixed in.
Looking across at the papers, my eye caught the words beneath 'The Socialist Mission'. They read, 'Formerly "The Anarchist Dispatch'".
I had a glass of Ramsden's for myself, and the socialist missionary took his lemonade, which he drank off in one. Then he fell to looking at me, sideways, like, half trying to see round his hair, and half hiding behind it.
'You're anarchists as well as socialists, are you?' I asked. I was talking as if there were many, but before me was just the one fellow.
'The two go along a little way together,' he said, and then he was off, talking at me, but not looking at me once.
He started, as threatened, from the beginning. It was all about how the liberal-labour men had not improved the condition of the working man as they had promised, and nor had the trade unions, and so a new type of organisation was wanted. What was needed was the socialisation of the means of production. 'We must have a straight-aiming struggle,' he said, and 'Alan Cowan believes that class war is its most efficient locomotive.'
Well, at that word I cut in: 'Where do you stand on the railways?'The long-haired fellow moved his hair about for a while, steeling himself to say something. He had rather long, fine fingers, and I thought: he's never done a hand's turn. He was not part of the working life himself, but a kind of shadow, or echo of it.
'Railways…' he said at last: 'Run by crooks, and should be nationalised.'
'And as to Blackpool and wakes and holidays, and so on?'
'Blackpool?' he said. 'Well, I don't call that a very worthy holiday place. The working people go there and what happens? They loiter on the sands by day, suffocate in some cheap place of amusement by night.'
'Been to Blackpool yourself, have you?'
The socialist missionary gave a kind of shrug, as if he didn't knozv whether he'd been to Blackpool. 'What's that got to do with it?' he said at last, and with a little more of the brass neck to him.
'If not Blackpool, where might they go instead?' I asked him.
'Well, they might get out into the country once in a while, but that's not… I do wish Alan was here because he puts it all over so much better than I ever could, but the question is: does Blackpool help the working class fight or does it hinder?'
'I don't know,' I said.
'Take this town, Halifax,' said the long-haired fellow. 'It's like a bottle with the stopper in. Fifty-one weeks of the year, everyone's cooped up in the mills, prisoners of the wage slavery. Then for one week – wakes – the stopper comes off and it's the mad dash to the seaside. Now if that didn't happen there's a fair chance the bottle would explode.'
'Why?' I said. 'Why would it explode?'
He sighed, looked down sadly at the empty lemonade glass. 'I forgot to say the bottle is a bottle of selzer, or maybe beer. Something volatile, any road. Something likely to explode. Alan has it right but I can't remember exactly how he puts it.'
'Selzer will not expand in the bottle in any circumstances,' I said, finishing my Ramsden's.
'Well,' said the socialist,'… we'll see about that.'
I put down my pint pot. 'So you're dead set against Blackpool because folk like it?'
'In a way yes,' said the long-haired fellow, who now brushed his hair right back from his face as if he'd suddenly lost all patience with it. 'Everything that increases the dissatisfaction of the working man must push him in a revolutionary direction.'
'And what do you think of Scarborough?'
'That's another…' And here he muttered something I couldn't catch.
'Another what?' I said, and he came out with it this time, for he was a fellow who warmed up by degrees.
'Another latrine,' he said.
'Well then,' I said, 'would you blokes in the Socialist Mission ever stop a train that was carrying working people to Blackpool or Scarborough? Would you ever wreck it, I mean?'
At this, he walked over to the billiard table and took up his newspapers again. 'Why do you ask that?' he said turning around, the newspapers once more under his arm.
I told him.
'Well,' he said. 'You must come along to our meeting to know more, and you must speak to Mr Cowan himself. But I'll tell you here and now that one difference between us and the standard run of liberal-labour idiots is that we understand there is a fever for action in the mills and factories of all the working towns in the country, and if the workers won't rise of their own accord they must be pushed to it.'
I stared at the fellow, with the happy ringing of the till in the background. Had he just owned up to murder?
'But no,' he went on. 'We didn't wreck your excursion.' He half smiled in a way I didn't much like; I'd seemed in a funk, and that had galvanised him in some way. The smile changed as I watched, though, becoming something a little pleasanter. He was only a kid; good-looking, in a way; and Clive Carter would have killed for that hair of his. He should have been out courting on a Friday night like this.
'What's your name?' he asked me.
I was tired of being asked for my name, for I felt I was being written down in all sorts of bad books, but I gave it him anyway. 'Jim Stringer,' I said.
'Jim Stringer,' he repeated. You felt he wasn't given a name very often, and that when he was, he made the most of it.
'What's yours?' I said.
'Paul,' he said. And he nodded to me before walking back out into the street.
I took up the paper he'd passed to me and read it over a little. It was all a lot of big, windy promises: 'There will be a general expropriation of vast proportions'; 'All distinctions between classes and nations will be lost', and so on. Half the articles were headed: 'Alan Cowan writes', others were 'by a comrade'. I knew there was something queer about it from the outset but for a little while I couldn't say what. It was like looking at a night sky and slowly working out that there was no moon. Somewhere or other, there should have been a little complicated dull part where you were told who it was printed by and where, and how you might get in touch with the editor. But there was no such thing to be seen.
Chapter Six
I was too late for Early Doors at the Palace, and too late for the start, come to that, but I was let in after the first turn.
I was put into the one seat left, which was in the stalls and directly in front of the orchestra. As I sat down, I knew I'd made a bloomer in coming, for I could hardly breathe. There were too many hot, red people in the theatre and not enough air to go round.
The sweat began rolling off me as a board was put up announcing a dog circus. The fellow in charge of the dogs wore a tailcoat and high collar. He had long hair flattened to his small head by Brilliantine and sweat. He stood still and sweated, swaying slightly as his dogs jumped about him. He looked like a tadpole, and his dogs would leap and hang quivering in the air like jumping fishes. At the moment that any dog made a jump, the fellow with the big drum, who was about four feet away from me, would hit the biggest of his cymbals, worsening my brain ache by degrees. Why can't those damned mutts keep down, I began muttering to myself. And why would the old fellow next to me not keep still?
After the dog circus came six men who were a German or Hungarian band. Oompah music. As they played, the orchestra played along, doubling the noise and doubling the heat; there was a lot of cymbal stuff from the drummer, and I would have liked to belt him with one of the bloody things. The band played against a painting of a pale-blue mountain; the colour dazzled, and I could not look at the mountain top, which was blinding white.