The Revolutions Read Online Free PDF Page B

enough fellow. He didn’t like to rub it in.
    Arthur gestured at the newspaper. “What do you think, Mr Borel? Foul play, yes or no?”
    “How could I know, Mr Shaw?”
    “No smoke without fire. One hopes they’ll catch the villain responsible soon; put things back in order.”
    “One hopes. I think there will be trouble.”
    There’d already been trouble. In Whitechapel, Jewish windows that had survived the storm were broken by stones. A German bookshop near the Museum was burned, and a Russian businessman was found dead in Notting Hill. The Daily Telegraph hinted that Afghan agents were at work in London, and the Omnibus suspected Indian malcontents. The police raided Limehouse. A lot of Indians and Frenchmen and Irish and sailors and gypsies and fortune-tellers and radicals of various sorts were rounded up and arrested for various petty crimes, but no murderers were discovered by those methods. Astrologers said that the stars promised discord, and that the coming year was a bad one for engagements, business ventures, and childbirth. Mr Borel had forbidden his wife and daughter to go outside.
    Josephine and Arthur were oblivious to most of this. London’s bad mood didn’t infect them. They were suddenly out of step with their times: blissfully, almost sinfully so. They spent the winter walking, and writing long letters, and exchanging cards, flowers, gifts, poems, love-notes. Dearest love. My own darling heart, my only, my fondest, my soul. They compared notes on their dreams, and attended lectures. They made plans to move to the seaside, to Brighton perhaps, where Josephine would write poetry in a room looking out on the sea, and Arthur would take the train into London twice weekly to meet with newspaper editors … They kissed in Regent’s Park by the lake, in the spot where the rotunda had been, under the disapproving glare of police officers.
    Arthur proposed towards the end of February, at the edge of a half-frozen pond in the park, the words turning crystalline in the cold air as he spoke them. A mere formality by that point; an inevitability. The main impediment to their engagement was that it took Arthur two weeks to get his foster-father to send him his late mother’s ring down from Edinburgh—the old sod dragged his feet, counselling against marrying a clever woman.
    In fact, the winter would have been entirely blissful, and quite dream-like, if not for one fly in the ointment; the usual: money.
    Several of Josephine’s clients, being highly strung types, had fled London after the storm. Meanwhile, the Mammoth had gone silent. A lightning-struck warehouse and flooded printing press had put it out of commission. It hadn’t paid Arthur in a month; then two months; then three.
    *   *   *
     
    “I should acquaint you,” Arthur said, “with the system of my debts.”
    Josephine frowned. “You have a system?”
    “One may regret the necessity but be proud of the engineering. First the Mammoth —a notoriously forgetful beast—pays me late. A tradition of long standing, but my landlord and the grocer, not being literary folk, don’t see the charm of it; so to pay them I borrow from Borel, or from Waugh—who has a good inheritance, and, besides, will one day be a doctor. To pay Waugh and Borel I borrow from Uncle George—who is something of a big man in publishing and makes a very good living off comic stories about chaps messing about in boats, and is forgiving of debts, but only up to a point. And so in extremis I borrow from my foster-father in Edinburgh to pay George. The old man is not forgiving. It is for God to forgive, he says, as if that were the most baffling and ineffable of all His attributes. And then because of the money I send to Edinburgh, the rent is late. And so on.”
    “A well-oiled mechanism.”
    “Except that the storm has played hob with it. Sand in the gears. Old Borel has windows to mend, and George has a roof to mend, and Waugh— same boat , Waugh says, same bloody