Annie Besant — 20 - THROUGH STORM TO PEACE part 1

CHAPTER XIV. THROUGH STORM TO PEACE.

Out of all this turmoil and stress rose a Brotherhood that had in it the promise of a fairer day.

Mr. Stead and I had become close friends--he Christian, I Atheist, burning with one common love for man, one common hatred against oppression.

And so in _Our Corner_ for February, 1888, I wrote:--"Lately there has been dawning on the minds of men far apart in questions of theology, the idea of founding a new Brotherhood, in which service of Man should take the place erstwhile given to service of God--a brotherhood in which work should be worship and love should be baptism, in which none should be regarded as alien who was willing to work for human good.

One day as I was walking towards Millbank Gaol with the Rev. S.

D.

Headlam, on the way to liberate a prisoner, I said to him: 'Mr. Headlam, we ought to have a new Church, which should include all who have the common ground of faith in and love for man.'

And a little later I found that my friend Mr. W.

T.

Stead, editor of the _Pall Mall Gazette,_ had long been brooding over a similar thought, and wondering whether men 'might not be persuaded to be as earnest about making this world happy as they are over saving their souls.'

The teaching of social duty, the upholding of social righteousness, the building up of a true commonwealth--such would be among the aims of the Church of the future.

Is the hope too fair for realisation?

Is the winning of such beatific vision yet once more the dream of the enthusiast?

But surely the one fact that persons so deeply differing in theological creeds as those who have been toiling for the last three months to aid and relieve the oppressed, can work in absolute harmony side by side for the one end--surely this proves that there is a bond which is stronger than our antagonisms, a unity which is deeper than the speculative theories which divide."

How unconsciously I was marching towards the Theosophy which was to become the glory of my life, groping blindly in the darkness for that very brotherhood, definitely formulated on these very lines by those Elder Brothers of our race, at whose feet I was so soon to throw myself.

How deeply this longing for something loftier than I had yet found had wrought itself into my life, how strong the conviction was growing that there was something to be sought to which the service of man was the road, may be seen in the following passage from the same article:-- "It has been thought that in these days of factories and of tramways, of shoddy, and of adulteration, that all life must tread with even rhythm of measured footsteps, and that the glory of the ideal could no longer glow over the greyness of a modern horizon.

But signs are not awanting that the breath of the older heroism is beginning to stir men's breasts, and that the passion for justice and for liberty, which thrilled through the veins of the world's greatest in the past, and woke our pulses to responsive throb, has not yet died wholly out of the hearts of men.

Still the quest of the Holy Grail exercises its deathless fascination, but the seekers no longer raise eyes to heaven, nor search over land and sea, for they know that it waits them in the suffering at their doors, that the consecration of the holiest is on the agonising masses of the poor and the despairing, the cup is crimson with the blood of the "'People, the grey-grown speechless Christ.'

If there be a faith that can remove the mountains of ignorance and evil, it is surely that faith in the ultimate triumph of Right in the final enthronement of Justice, which alone makes life worth the living, and which gems the blackest cloud of depression with the rainbow-coloured arch of an immortal hope."

As a step towards bringing about some such union of those ready to work for man, Mr. Stead and I projected the _Link_, a halfpenny weekly, the spirit of which was described in its motto, taken from Victor Hugo: "The people are silence.

I will be the advocate of this silence.

I will speak for the dumb.

I will speak of the small to the great and of the feeble to the strong....

I will speak for all the despairing silent ones.

I will interpret this stammering; I will interpret the grumblings, the murmurs, the tumults of crowds, the complaints ill-pronounced, and all these cries of beasts that, through ignorance and through suffering, man is forced to utter ...

I will be the Word of the People.

I will be the bleeding mouth whence the gag is snatched out.

I will say everything."

It announced its object to be the "building up" of a "New Church, dedicated to the service of man," and "what we want to do is to establish in every village and in every street some man or woman who will sacrifice time and labour as systematically and as cheerfully in the temporal service of man as others do in what they believe to be the service of God."

Week after week we issued our little paper, and it became a real light in the darkness.

There the petty injustices inflicted on the poor found voice; there the starvation wages paid to women found exposure; there sweating was brought to public notice.

A finisher of boots paid 2s.

6d.

per dozen pairs and "find your own polish and thread"; women working for 10-1/2 hours per day, making shirts--"fancy best"--at from 10d.

to 3s.

per dozen, finding their own cotton and needles, paying for gas, towel, and tea (compulsory), earning from 4s.

to 10s.

per week for the most part; a mantle finisher 2s.

2d.

a week, out of which 6d.

for materials; "respectable hard-working woman" tried for attempted suicide, "driven to rid herself of life from want."

Another part of our work was defending people from unjust landlords, exposing workhouse scandals, enforcing the Employers' Liability Act, Charles Bradlaugh's Truck Act, forming "Vigilance Circles" whose members kept watch in their own district over cases of cruelty to children, extortion, insanitary workshops, sweating, &c. , reporting each case to me.

Into this work came Herbert Burrows, who had joined hands with me over the Trafalgar Square defence, and who wrote some noble articles in the _Link_.

A man loving the people with passionate devotion, hating oppression and injustice with equal passion, working himself with remorseless energy, breaking his heart over wrongs he could not remedy.

His whole character once came out in a sentence when he was lying delirious and thought himself dying: "Tell the people how I have loved them always."

In our crusade for the poor we worked for the dockers."

To-morrow morning, in London alone 20,000 to 25,000 adult men," wrote Sidney Webb, "will fight like savages for permission to labour in the docks for 4d.

an hour, and one-third of them will fight in vain, and be turned workless away."

We worked for children's dinners.

"If we insist on these children being educated, is it not necessary that they shall be fed?

If not, we waste on them knowledge they cannot assimilate, and torture many of them to death.

Poor waifs of humanity, we drive them into the school and bid them learn; and the pitiful, wistful eyes question us why we inflict this strange new suffering, and bring into their dim lives this new pang.

'Why not leave us alone?

'ask the pathetically patient little faces.

Why not, indeed, since for these child martyrs of the slums, Society has only formulas, not food."

We cried out against "cheap goods," that meant "sweated and therefore stolen goods."

"The ethics of buying should surely be simply enough.

We want a particular thing, and we do not desire to obtain it either by begging or by robbery; but if in becoming possessed of it, we neither beg it nor steal, we must give for it something equivalent in exchange; so much of our neighbour's labour has been put into the thing we desire; if we will not yield him fair equivalent for that labour, yet take his article, we defraud him, and if we are not willing to give that fair equivalent we have no right to become the owners of his product."

This branch of our work led to a big fight--a fight most happy in its results.

At a meeting of the Fabian Society, Miss Clementina Black gave a capital lecture on Female Labour, and urged the formation of a Consumers' League, pledged only to buy from shops certificated "clean" from unfair wage.

H.

H.

Champion, in the discussion that followed, drew attention to the wages paid by Bryant & May (Limited), while paying an enormous dividend to their shareholders, so that the value of the original £5 shares was quoted at £18 7s.

6d.

Herbert Burrows and I interviewed some of the girls, got lists of wages, of fines, &c. "A typical case is that of a girl of sixteen, a piece-worker; she earns 4s.

a week, and lives with a sister, employed by the same firm, who 'earns good money, as much as 8s.

or 9s.

a week.'

Out of the earnings 2s.

a week is paid for the rent of one room.

The child lives only on bread and butter and tea, alike for breakfast and dinner, but related with dancing eyes that once a month she went to a meal where 'you get coffee and bread and butter, and jam and marmalade, and lots of it.'

" We published the facts under the title of "White Slavery in London," and called for a boycott of Bryant & May's matches.

"It is time some one came and helped us," said two pale-faced girls to me;

and I asked: "Who will help?

Plenty of people wish well to any good cause; but very few care to exert themselves to help it, and still fewer will risk anything in its support.

'Some one ought to do it, but why should I?'

is the ever re-echoed phrase of weak-kneed amiability.

'Some one ought to do it, so why _not_ I?'

is the cry of some earnest servant of man, eagerly forward springing to face some perilous duty.

Between those two sentences lie whole centuries of moral evolution."

I was promptly threatened with an action for libel, but nothing came of it; it was easier to strike at the girls, and a few days later Fleet Street was enlivened by the irruption of a crowd of match-girls, demanding Annie Besant.

I couldn't speechify to match-girls in Fleet Street, so asked that a deputation should come and explain what they wanted.

Up came three women and told their story: they had been asked to sign a paper certifying that they were well treated and contented, and that my statements were untrue; they refused.

"You had spoke up for us," explained one, "and we weren't going back on you."

A girl, pitched on as their leader, was threatened with dismissal; she stood firm; next day she was discharged for some trifle, and they all threw down their work, some 1,400 of them, and then a crowd of them started off to me to ask what to do next.

If we ever worked in our lives, Herbert Burrows and I worked for the next fortnight.

And a pretty hubbub we created; we asked for money, and it came pouring in; we registered the girls to receive strike pay, wrote articles, roused the clubs, held public meetings, got Mr. Bradlaugh to ask questions in Parliament, stirred up constituencies in which shareholders were members, till the whole country rang with the struggle.

Mr. Frederick Charrington lent us a hall for registration, Mr. Sidney Webb and others moved the National Liberal Club to action; we led a procession of the girls to the House of Commons, and interviewed, with a deputation of them, Members of Parliament who cross-questioned them.

The girls behaved splendidly, stuck together, kept brave and bright all through.

Mr. Hobart of the Social Democratic Federation, Messrs. Shaw, Bland, and Oliver, and Headlam of the Fabian Society, Miss Clementina Black, and many another helped in the heavy work.

The London Trades Council finally consented to act as arbitrators and a satisfactory settlement was arrived at; the girls went in to work, fines and deductions were abolished, better wages paid; the Match-makers' Union was established, still the strongest woman's Trades Union in England, and for years I acted as secretary, till, under press of other duties, I resigned, and my work was given by the girls to Mrs. Thornton Smith; Herbert Burrows became, and still is, the treasurer.

For a time there was friction between the Company and the Union, but it gradually disappeared under the influence of common sense on both sides, and we have found the manager ready to consider any just grievance and to endeavour to remove it, while the Company have been liberal supporters of the Working Women's Club at Bow, founded by H. P.

Blavatsky.

[Illustration: STRIKE COMMITTEE OF THE MATCHMAKERS' UNION.

] The worst suffering of all was among the box-makers, thrown out of work by the strike, and they were hard to reach.

Twopence-farthing per gross of boxes, and buy your own string and paste, is not wealth, but when the work went more rapid starvation came.

Oh, those trudges through the lanes and alleys round Bethnal Green Junction late at night, when our day's work was over; children lying about on shavings, rags, anything; famine looking out of baby faces, out of women's eyes, out of the tremulous hands of men.

Heart grew sick and eyes dim, and ever louder sounded the question, "Where is the cure for sorrow, what the way of rescue for the world?"

In August I asked for a "match-girls' drawing-room."

"It will want a piano, tables for papers, for games, for light literature; so that it may offer a bright, homelike refuge to these girls, who now have no real homes, no playground save the streets.

It is not proposed to build an 'institution' with stern and rigid discipline and enforcement of prim behaviour, but to open a home, filled with the genial atmosphere of cordial comradeship, and self-respecting freedom--the atmosphere so familiar to all who have grown up in the blessed shelter of a happy home, so strange, alas!

to too many of our East London girls."

In the same month of August, two years later, H. P.

Blavatsky opened such a home.

Then came a cry for help from South London, from tin-box makers, illegally fined, and in many cases grievously mutilated by the non-fencing of machinery; then aid to shop assistants, also illegally fined; legal defences by the score still continued; a vigorous agitation for a free meal for children, and for fair wages to be paid by all public bodies; work for the dockers and exposure of their wrongs; a visit to the Cradley Heath chain-makers, speeches to them, writing for them; a contest for the School Board for the Tower Hamlets division, and triumphant return at the head of the poll.

Such were some of the ways in which the autumn days were spent, to say nothing of scores of lectures--Secularist, Labour, Socialist--and scores of articles written for the winning of daily bread.

When the School Board work was added I felt that I had as much work as one woman's strength could do.

Thus was ushered in 1889, the to me never-to-be-forgotten year in which I found my way "Home," and had the priceless good fortune of meeting, and of becoming the pupil of, H. P.

Blavatsky.

Ever more and more had been growing on me the feeling that something more than I had was needed for the cure of social ills.

The Socialist position sufficed on the economic side, but where to gain the inspiration, the motive, which should lead to the realisation of the Brotherhood of Man?

Our efforts to really organise bands of unselfish workers had failed.

Much indeed had been done, but there was not a real movement of self-sacrificing devotion, in which men worked for Love's sake only, and asked but to give, not to take.

Where was the material for the nobler Social Order, where the hewn stones for the building of the Temple of Man?

A great despair would oppress me as I sought for such a movement and found it not.

[Illustration: MEMBERS OF THE MATCHMAKERS' UNION.

] Not only so; but since 1886 there had been slowly growing up a conviction that my philosophy was not sufficient; that life and mind were other than, more than, I had dreamed.

Psychology was advancing with rapid strides; hypnotic experiments were revealing unlooked-for complexities in human consciousness, strange riddles of multiplex personalities, and, most startling of all, vivid intensities of mental action when the brain, that should be the generator of thought, was reduced to a comatose state.

Fact after fact came hurtling in upon me, demanding explanation I was incompetent to give.

I studied the obscurer sides of consciousness, dreams, hallucinations, illusions, insanity.

Into the darkness shot a ray of light--A. P.

Sinnett's "Occult World," with its wonderfully suggestive letters, expounding not the supernatural but a nature under law, wider than I had dared to conceive.

I added Spiritualism to my studies, experimenting privately, finding the phenomena indubitable, but the spiritualistic explanation of them incredible.

The phenomena of clairvoyance, clairaudience, thought-reading, were found to be real.

Under all the rush of the outer life, already sketched, these questions were working in my mind, their answers were being diligently sought.

I read a variety of books, but could find little in them that satisfied me.

I experimented in various ways suggested in them, and got some (to me) curious results.

I finally convinced myself that there was some hidden thing, some hidden power, and resolved to seek until I found, and by the early spring of 1889 I had grown desperately determined to find at all hazards what I sought.

At last, sitting alone in deep thought as I had become accustomed to do after the sun had set, filled with an intense but nearly hopeless longing to solve the riddle of life and mind, I heard a Voice that was later to become to me the holiest sound on earth, bidding me take courage for the light was near.

A fortnight passed, and then Mr. Stead gave into my hands two large volumes.

"Can you review these?

My young men all fight shy of them, but you are quite mad enough on these subjects to make something of them."

I took the books; they were the two volumes of "The Secret Doctrine," written by H. P.

Blavatsky.

Home I carried my burden, and sat me down to read.

As I turned over page after page the interest became absorbing; but how familiar it seemed; how my mind leapt forward to presage the conclusions, how natural it was, how coherent, how subtle, and yet how intelligible.

I

was dazzled, blinded by the light in which disjointed facts were seen as parts of a mighty whole, and all my puzzles, riddles, problems, seemed to disappear.

The effect was partially illusory in one sense, in that they all had to be slowly unravelled later, the brain gradually assimilating that which the swift intuition had grasped as truth.

But the light had been seen, and in that flash of illumination I knew that the weary search was over and the very Truth was found.

I wrote the review, and asked Mr. Stead for an introduction to the writer, and then sent a note asking to be allowed to call.

I received the most cordial of notes, bidding me come, and in the soft spring evening Herbert Burrows and I--for his aspirations were as mine on this matter--walked from Netting Hill Station, wondering what we should meet, to the door of 17, Lansdowne Road.

A pause, a swift passing through hall and outer room, through folding-doors thrown back, a figure in a large chair before a table, a voice, vibrant, compelling, "My dear Mrs. Besant, I have so long wished to see you," and I was standing with my hand in her firm grip, and looking for the first time in this life straight into the eyes of "H. P.

B."

I

was conscious of a sudden leaping forth of my heart--was it recognition?

--and then, I am ashamed to say, a fierce rebellion, a fierce withdrawal, as of some wild animal when it feels a mastering hand.

I sat down, after some introductions that conveyed no ideas to me, and listened.

She talked of travels, of various countries, easy brilliant talk, her eyes veiled, her exquisitely moulded fingers rolling cigarettes incessantly.

Nothing special to record, no word of Occultism, nothing mysterious, a woman of the world chatting with her evening visitors.

We rose to go, and for a moment the veil lifted, and two brilliant, piercing eyes met mine, and with a yearning throb in the voice: "Oh, my dear Mrs. Besant, if you would only come among us!"

I felt a well-nigh uncontrollable desire to bend down and kiss her, under the compulsion of that yearning voice, those compelling eyes, but with a flash of the old unbending pride and an inward jeer at my own folly, I said a commonplace polite good-bye, and turned away with some inanely courteous and evasive remark.

"Child," she said to me long afterwards, "your pride is terrible; you are as proud as Lucifer himself."

But truly I think I never showed it to her again after that first evening, though it sprang up wrathfully in her defence many and many a time, until I learned the pettiness and the worthlessness of all criticism, and knew that the blind were objects of compassion not of scorn.

Once again I went, and asked about the Theosophical Society, wishful to join, but fighting against it.

For I saw, distinct and clear--with painful distinctness, indeed--what that joining would mean.

I had largely conquered public prejudice against me by my work on the London School Board, and a smoother road stretched before me, whereon effort to help should be praised not blamed.

Was I to plunge into a new vortex of strife, and make myself a mark for ridicule--worse than hatred--and fight again the weary fight for an unpopular truth?

Must I turn against Materialism, and face the shame of publicly confessing that I had been wrong, misled by intellect to ignore the Soul?

Must I leave the army that had battled for me so bravely, the friends who through all brutality of social ostracism had held me dear and true?

And he, the strongest and truest friend of all, whose confidence I had shaken by my Socialism--must he suffer the pang of seeing his co-worker, his co-fighter, of whom he had been so proud, to whom he had been so generous, go over to the opposing hosts, and leave the ranks of Materialism?

What would be the look in Charles Bradlaugh's eyes when I told him that I had become a Theosophist?

The struggle was sharp and keen, but with none of the anguish of old days in it, for the soldier had now fought many fights and was hardened by many wounds.

And so it came to pass that I went again to Lansdowne Road to ask about the Theosophical Society.

H.

P.

Blavatsky looked at me piercingly for a moment.

"Have you read the report about me of the Society for Psychical Research?"

"No; I never heard of it, so far as I know."

"Go and read it, and if, after reading it, you come back--well."

And nothing more would she say on the subject, but branched off to her experiences in many lands.

I borrowed a copy of the Report, read and re-read it.

Quickly I saw how slender was the foundation on which the imposing structure was built.

The continual assumptions on which conclusions were based; the incredible character of the allegations; and--most damning fact of all--the foul source from which the evidence was derived.

Everything turned on the veracity of the Coulombs, and they were self-stamped as partners in the alleged frauds.

Could I put such against the frank, fearless nature that I had caught a glimpse of, against the proud fiery truthfulness that shone at me from the clear, blue eyes, honest and fearless as those of a noble child?

Was the writer of "The Secret Doctrine" this miserable impostor, this accomplice of tricksters, this foul and loathsome deceiver, this conjuror with trap-doors and sliding panels?

I laughed aloud at the absurdity and flung the Report aside with the righteous scorn of an honest nature that knew its own kin when it met them, and shrank from the foulness and baseness of a lie.

The next day saw me at the Theosophical Publishing Company's office at 7, Duke Street, Adelphi, where Countess Wachtmeister--one of the lealest of H. P.

B.'

s friends--was at work, and I signed an application to be admitted as fellow of the Theosophical Society.

On receiving my diploma I betook myself to Lansdowne Road, where I found H. P.

B.

alone.

I went over to her, bent down and kissed her, but said no word.

"You have joined the Society?"

"Yes."

"You have read the report?"

"Yes."

"Well?"

I knelt down before her and clasped her hands in mine, looking straight into her eyes.

"My answer is, will you accept me as your pupil, and give me the honour of proclaiming you my teacher in the face of the world?"

Her stern, set face softened, the unwonted gleam of tears sprang to her eyes; then, with a dignity more than regal, she placed her hand upon my head.

"You are a noble woman.

May Master bless you."

From that day, the 10th of May, 1889, until now--two years three and half months after she left her body on May 8, 1891--my faith in her has never wavered, my trust in her has never been shaken.

I gave her my faith on an imperious intuition, I proved her true day after day in closest intimacy living by her side; and I speak of her with the reverence due from a pupil to a teacher who never failed her, with the passionate gratitude which, in our School, is the natural meed of the one who opens the gateway and points out the path.

"Folly!

fanaticism!"

scoffs the Englishman of the nineteenth century.

Be it so.

I have seen, and I can wait.

I have been told that I plunged headlong into Theosophy and let my enthusiasm carry me away.

I think the charge is true, in so far as the decision was swiftly taken; but it had been long led up to, and realised the dreams of childhood on the higher planes of intellectual womanhood.

And let me here say that more than all I hoped for in that first plunge has been realised, and a certainty of knowledge has been gained on doctrines seen as true as that swift flash of illumination.

I _know_, by personal experiment, that the Soul exists, and that my Soul, not my body, is myself; that it can leave the body at will; that it can, disembodied, reach and learn from living human teachers, and bring back and impress on the physical brain that which it has learned; that this process of transferring consciousness from one range of being, as it were, to another, is a very slow process, during which the body and brain are gradually correlated with the subtler form which is essentially that of the Soul, and that my own experience of it, still so imperfect, so fragmentary, when compared with the experience of the highly trained, is like the first struggles of a child learning to speak compared with the perfect oratory of the practised speaker; that consciousness, so far from being dependent on the brain, is more active when freed from the gross forms of matter than when encased within them; that the great Sages spoken of by H. P.

Blavatsky exist; that they wield powers and possess knowledge before which our control of Nature and knowledge of her ways is but as child's play.

All this, and much more, have I learned, and I am but a pupil of low grade, as it were in the infant class of the Occult School; so the first plunge has been successful, and the intuition has been justified.

This same path of knowledge that I am treading is open to all others who will pay the toll demanded at the gateway--and that toll is willingness to renounce everything for the sake of spiritual truth, and willingness to give all the truth that is won to the service of man, keeping back no shred for self.