VI
Gerda went home only for weekends now; it was too slow a journey to make every morning and evening. She stayed during the week at a hotel called the Red House, in Magpie Alley, off Bouverie Street. It was a hotel kept by revolutionary souls exclusively for revolutionary souls. Gerda, who had every right there, had gained admittance through friends of hers who lodged there. Every evening at six o’clock she went back through the rain, as she did this evening, and changed her wet clothes and sat down to dinner, a meal which all the revolutionary souls ate together so that it was sacramental, a breaking of common bread in token of a common faith.
They were a friendly party. At one end of the table Aunt Phyllis presided. Aunt Phyllis, who was really the aunt of only one young man, kept this Red House. She was a fiery little revolutionary in the late forties, small, and thin and darting, full of faith and fire. She was on the staff of the British Bolshevist, and for the rest, wrote leaflets, which showered from her as from trees in autumn gales. So did the Rev. Anselm Digby. Mr. Digby had also the platform habit, he would go round the country denouncing and inciting to revolution in the name of Christ and of the Third International. Though grizzled, he belonged to the League of Youth, as well as to many other eager fraternities. He was unbeneficed, having no time for parish work. This ardent clergyman sat at the other end of Aunt Phyllis’s table, as befitted his years.
The space between the two ends was filled by younger creatures. It was spring with them; their leaflets were yet green and unfallen; all that fell from them was poetry, pathetic in its sadness, bitter in its irony, free of metrical or indeed of any other restraints, and mainly either about how unpleasant had been the trenches in which they had spent the years of the great war and those persons over military age who had not been called upon to enter them, or about freedom; free love, free thought and a free world. Yes, both these subjects sound a little old-fashioned, but the Red House was concerned with these elemental changeless things. And some of them also wrote fiction, quiet, grey, a little tired, about unhappy persons to whom nothing was very glad or very sad, and certainly neither right nor wrong, but only rough or smooth of surface, bright or dark of hue, sweet or bitter of taste or smell. Most of those in the room belonged to a Freudian circle at their club, and all were anti-Christian, except an Irish Roman Catholic, who had taken an active part in the Easter uprising of 1916, since when he had been living in exile; Aunt Phyllis, who believed in no churches but in the Love of God; and of course, Mr. Digby. All these people, though they did not always get on very well together, were linked by a common aim in life, and by common hatreds.
But, in spite of hate, the Red House lodgers were a happy set of revolutionaries. Real revolutionaries; having their leaflets printed by secret presses; members of societies which exchanged confidential letters with the more eminent Russians, such as Litvinoff and Trotzky, collected for future publication secret circulars, private strikebreaking orders, and other obiter dicta of a rash government, and believed themselves to be working to establish the Soviet government over Europe. They had been angry all this summer because the Glasgow conference of the I.L.P. had broken with the Third International. They spoke with acerbity of Mr. Ramsay Macdonald and Mr. and Mrs. Philip Snowden. But now, in August, they had little acerbity to spare for anything but the government’s conduct of Irish affairs.