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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 pla
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
Indeed, where was he? The party finished with a vague invitation to drop in on Professor Dare “sometime,” and it was back to the murder grind. The monster missed his weekly assignment, and then he missed his second. Was he pla
Whatever the reason, O’Co
An idle mind is indeed the devil’s plaything, so we entered full scoundrel time, and who but I would enter history as the biggest of all scoundrels. That is, at the urging of the damned Harry Dam.
I was transforming some Pitman into typing, some nonsense that would go on page 4 under an advertisement for Du Barry’s Revelenta, the flatulence and heartburn cure, when a lad approached and said, “Sir, Mr. O’Co
“Eh?”
“Now, sir. I gather it’s urgent.”
“All right, then.” I rose, put on the old brown, and followed the boy across the room and down a hall, where he knocked, and we heard a gruff Irish rasp respond, “Come in, then.”
O’Co
O’Co
“Sit,” O’Co
“I’m a teetote, sir,” I said. “My drunken father, this day sleeping under Dublin soil, drank more than enough for not only my own life but the lifetimes of any sons I might have.”
“Suit yourself. Have you met Harry? You two fellows ever cross each other in the newsroom? Though Harry is no newsroom rat, I know.”
“Hiya, pal,” said Harry, rising, putting out a big American hand. It must have been his straw boater’s hat on O’Co
“Nice coat,” he said as we shook. “Can I get the name of your tailor?”