CHAPTER VI--FRYING-PAN ALLEY AND A GLIMPSE OF INFERNO


Three of us walked down Mile End Road, and one was a hero. He was a
slender lad of nineteen, so slight and frail, in fact, that, like Fra
Lippo Lippi, a puff of wind might double him up and turn him over. He
was a burning young socialist, in the first throes of enthusiasm and ripe
for martyrdom. As platform speaker or chairman he had taken an active
and dangerous part in the many indoor and outdoor pro-Boer meetings which
have vexed the serenity of Merry England these several years back. Little
items he had been imparting to me as he walked along; of being mobbed in
parks and on tram-cars; of climbing on the platform to lead the forlorn
hope, when brother speaker after brother speaker had been dragged down by
the angry crowd and cruelly beaten; of a siege in a church, where he and
three others had taken sanctuary, and where, amid flying missiles and the
crashing of stained glass, they had fought off the mob till rescued by
platoons of constables; of pitched and giddy battles on stairways,
galleries, and balconies; of smashed windows, collapsed stairways,
wrecked lecture halls, and broken heads and bones--and then, with a
regretful sigh, he looked at me and said: "How I envy you big, strong
men! I'm such a little mite I can't do much when it comes to fighting."

And I, walking head and shoulders above my two companions, remembered my
own husky West, and the stalwart men it had been my custom, in turn, to
envy there. Also, as I looked at the mite of a youth with the heart of a
lion, I thought, this is the type that on occasion rears barricades and
shows the world that men have not forgotten how to die.

But up spoke my other companion, a man of twenty-eight, who eked out a
precarious existence in a sweating den.