But Vienna was, if anything, more discouraging than Kirchber_Valiant dust

VALIANT DUST

KATHARINE FULLERTON GEROULD

VALIANT DUST

MODES AND MORALS

A CHANGE OF AIR

HAWAII: Scenes and Impressions

VAIN OBLATIONS

THE GREAT TRADITION

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

VALIANT DUST

KATHARINE FULLERTON GEROULD

NEW YORK

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

1922

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS

Printed in the United States of America

[Illustration: colophon]

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I. AN HONEST MAN 1

II. HABAKKUK 40

III. MISS MARRIOTT AND THE FAUN 71

IV. MARTIN’S HOLLOW 103

V. THE KNIGHT’S MOVE 126

VI. BLUE BONNET 150

VII. EAST OF EDEN 179

VIII. SEA GREEN 208

IX. THE PENALTIES OF ARTEMIS 239

X. LONQUIER’S THIRD ACT 269

XI. THE TOAD AND THE JEWEL 299

XII. BELSHAZZAR’S LETTER 319

VALIANT DUST

AN HONEST MAN

The first time that Annette, Countess Chudenitz, met Andrew Radin was at

a hectic “function” in her cousin’s (Mrs. Livingston Dollard’s) house. I

hardly know how to describe the occasion, for it was of no social

_genre_. Radin talked for an hour; New York’s _intelligentsia_ listened,

rubbing shoulders with débutantes, bewildered matrons, and glib young

women who were officially garment-workers (on strike), but who would

have been more accurately labelled dynamite. In positions of vantage sat

the clever creatures, male and female, who were running Mrs. Dollard’s

newest publication--the third and by far the most important that she had

yet financed. They were the ones who asked the proper questions at the

proper time, and gave Radin a chance to make his points. The débutantes

were as bewildered as the matrons, but their bewilderment did not--if

you will pardon the paradox--bewilder them. They knew that this was the

proper atmosphere for them to breathe--Mrs. Dollard said so--and they

took their tea from the hands of the second footman without perceiving

that it should, logically speaking, have choked them. Radin himself

drank tea. So did the garment-workers. So did all the _intelligentsia_.

So did every one except Annette Chudenitz, to whom the whole scene was

at once incredibly familiar and alluringly strange.

Annette Davidge had married, in the ’nineties, Ishtvan, Count Chudenitz,

ornament of embassies and wily Nestor of the Ballplatz. Now, a childless

widow, by no means in love with her husband’s country, she spent the

better part of her time in America. Bertha Dollard gathered in her

garment-workers, her socialists (real ones), her Radins, knowing them

for queer, priding herself on their queerness, but feeling them none the

less sacred--as if they had been a new phenomenon, creatures half-fish,

half-divine. She had never seen anything like them, but she believed

that they, and they only, knew the truth. The Countess Chudenitz had

seen thousands like them; their features took her back to the Styrian

countryside, to the ghettos of Pest, to the streets of Vienna on the

Kaiser’s birthday. But she had never sat next them on chairs before, and

her Americanism thrilled within her. Radin held her from the first. She

had read some of it before, but she had never been face to face with

it--not without the police, in a firm wall, between. This was what her

forefathers had done for her; something that Ishtvan’s forefathers could

not have conceived, much less performed. She could meet Andrew Radin,

could talk to him as one human being to another; they could agree or

differ, in Bertha Dollard’s music-room, as if they were in naked space.

It was not sex that made her ignore the garment-workers, push aside the

brilliant young women who helped edit Mrs. Dollard’s subsidized but very

independent review, and make, with assurance, for Radin

himself--forgetting tea, forgetting the spectacle of the social salad

before her, which at another time might have intrigued her. Something in

her went fearlessly out to meet something in Radin; there was born in

her that afternoon one of those bitter passions of the brain which often

go farther than any physical infatuation to make love a disease. Sex

never called to sex more imperiously than the quality of Radin’s

intellect called to what she had of mind.

She was less than woman when she made her way to him and tacitly offered

herself. What she offered was her brain, but she did it inwardly with as

abandoned a gesture as though it had been her body. If you ask me

whether such mental surrender is not one of the known approaches of what

folk call love, I can only say that it has never struck me that way,

though there is no road which love cannot take. Annette Davidge never

had loved; so far as I know, never did love. If she could have loved any

man, it would have been Peter Dollard, her cousin Bertha’s bachelor

brother-in-law. It may be that Radin kept her, in the end, from Peter;

but, if he did, it was only by shutting her off for a time from any

human interest. Socialism, communism, internationalism, are not human

interests--which is why they invoke the New Testament in vain. Not even

by calling humanity an organism can you inject the human element into

them. Annette Davidge did not know this, though Radin probably did, at

the very moment he bent to her. It is no part of my purpose to discuss,

even indirectly, any economic or “social” problem whatsoever; only to

give you the true tale of Annette, Countess Chudenitz, for its own

interest. Heaven and hell shall have become less than names when the

irony of fate ceases to be perceived by human nature. Or, rather--let me

not plagiarize--

Earth and ocean shall be shadows when Prometheus shall be dead.

All I wish to point out now is that Annette Davidge was, one might say,

a discarnate being when she made her way through the crowd to Radin.

I have said that it is not my purpose to discuss theories. This is a

story--a raw piece of human life--not, I take my oath, a fable. Nor is

it my purpose to analyze Andrew Radin for such as may read. Equally, I

can take my oath that about Radin I do not know. I do not, that is, know

the whole of that personality--which, though it acted so simply, must

have been, with his combined gifts, so complex. Annette Davidge I think

I do know; but I trace Radin chiefly through his effect on her and

certain outstanding visible acts of his own. I do not even pretend

(though I have shrewd guesses) to be more accurately informed than you

as to his origin and his heritage. He was ever a man of mystery and, I

believe, chose to be. Otherwise, why doesn’t the world know, to this

day, whether he was--is, I should say--pure Russian, Galician,

Lithuanian, Pole, or German Jew? He was perfectly polyglot, and his

blood may have been as mixed as his speech. I confess that it does not

concern me much. He was Radin (and may be, again, though he is now as

lost to the world as Enver Pasha) and an internationalist. To Annette

Davidge he brought a whole new gospel. And yet one hates to call it a

gospel, for reasons before stated. A whole new theory of life, let us

say. Some of the catchwords she had heard before, and now and then an

editorial in _The Life Everlasting_, Bertha Dollard’s review,[1]

explained to her some side-issue that she had never understood. But

Radin was the fountain-head, and she took her pitcher all the way to

him. Radin encouraged _The Life Everlasting_ just as he encouraged a

strike here, an incendiary lecture there, sabotage somewhere else, a

bomb on the other side of the world. I doubt if he ever thought it of

prime importance, though he must have chuckled to himself over the type

of person who took it seriously. No; I take that back. Radin doubtless

thought it quite proper, moderately useful, and not at all funny, that

rich, well-educated Americans should lend their money and their

patronage to anarchy; should give funds to the socialists and tea to the

I. W. W. Radin and his like walk in a queer twilit world, never

penetrated by the rays of mirth. Saturn is their sun. Under Saturn there

is no such thing as a paradox--or a joke. As Annette Davidge had wit but

no humor, she was able to breathe that air.

[1] I call it Mrs. Dollard’s review by courtesy and for convenience.

Really, she had given it its head, and had about as much control over

it as though she had paid for a tank and sent it into action with her

blessing. Eventually, anyhow, it became self-supporting.

It was during the winter of 1913-14 that she saw most of Radin. I do not

know whether the man was ever known to like any one, but he was with her

a good deal--just as if he did like her. She gave him a substantial

amount of money for purposes that he seldom did more than sketch for

her. She trusted him completely, and, I believe, with reason; in the

sense, that is, that the money actually went, every penny of it, to the

purposes he had sketched. There was certainly a Slavic vein in that

extraordinary man, for he talked to her sometimes for hours on end, over

countless cups of tea. (She had come to a samovar, all for Radin.) Nor

was it merely master and neophyte, for Annette talked, too. Her altruism

was as different from Radin’s as grape-juice from vodka, but they called

the two by the same name as they tipped their glasses.... It was a

curious relationship. She believed implicitly everything he said, though

all along she found difficulty in co-ordinating his points. He cannot

have been interested in her philosophy, for he was adamant, a finished

product, not one inch of him left plastic--not even an Achilles tendon.

He asked no more of her than to do what he advised. I cannot conceive

that Annette could have furnished him with anything of value besides an

occasional cheque. Yet he let her talk to him as glibly as he talked to

her. Something in the quality of her mind appealed, too, to the quality

of his. Flattery, comfort, money, blind devotion, personal passion even,

he could find--did find, doubtless--elsewhere. What he got exclusively

from Annette must have been something else. I give it as my theory that

his feeling for her partook of the nature of hers for him, though

certainly it did not go so far. Annette can never have filled the brain

of this busy man as he filled hers. But that curious relationship was

mental, and fed on talk of the most impersonal. It was--if you’ll pardon

the phrase--as if two vocabularies met and interbred. Sex comes into it

only by analogy; not by the slightest participation. Radin obviously

appreciated these odd facts as well as, or better than, Annette

Chudenitz.

We did not talk of Bolsheviki in the spring of 1914. Radin, of course,

was a Bolshevik--a complete case. But the tag had not yet been invented;

decent people over here had never heard of Lenin and Trotzky; and he

passed, in Mrs. Dollard’s and Annette’s circle, rather vaguely as a

socialist, or a communist, or some such thing. The world in which he

spent most of his time, and where he was more completely understood and

more intelligently sympathized with, was quite unknown to that circle. I

doubt if he described those other groups much, even to Annette, except

by way of statistics or rotund prophecy. Annette, that is, was

permitted to know that the Social Revolution would come and would find

millions ready. And since the Social Revolution seemed, in those days,

no more imminent than Gabriel’s trumpet-call, many people alluded to it

as easily as church members allude to Doomsday. It was scarcely more

than a metaphor, though it had a thrill to it. For the next three years,

of course, no one thought of anything but war.

In the spring of 1914, the Countess Chudenitz found it necessary to

return to Austria--business of some sort, under her husband’s

complicated will. She was living in his Styrian stronghold when the

Archduke was murdered at Serajevo. The Countess Chudenitz had little

sympathy for war; and though she had at Kirchberg no access to the

facts, she had distrusted the Ballplatz for many years. It was all that

Count Berchtold and his kind stood for, which had driven her back, with

avid mouth, to America. Altruism was not their tipple. The mobilization

left her well-nigh servantless and tenantless. She found herself

surrounded by toothless males and weeping females. From the great

terrace that looked down upon the Enns, she saw stretches of empty

fields and forsaken vineyards. There was an unnatural number of children

in the landscape.... All the women in the villages seemed to be

pregnant.... It was a landscape given over to babes and tears.... Or so,

in those first changed weeks, she saw it; and her conception of her duty

shifted to match the physical change. This was too mediæval, by half,

for her to deal with. I neither defend nor accuse her; but I think that

if she had ever loved Ishtvan, her husband, flower of chancelleries

though he was, she might have seen her duty differently. She might, that

is, have adjusted herself to the feudal idea. Or if she had had

children. But she was too detached. A European war seemed to her not

only frightful, but decadent. She had never liked Berchtold, Aerenthal,

any of them, though she admitted Berchtold’s charm. Radin had not taught

her, certainly, to like Russia. Germany and France--yes, even

England--had involved themselves in this uncivilized behavior. She

installed a clever cousin of her husband--a cripple from childhood--to

co-operate with the aged steward; and after a distasteful week in Vienna

(where she was made to realize what she had forgotten, that she was not

an American citizen, but an Austrian subject) she left for Rome.

Let us pass over, as briefly as may be, her Roman sojourn. Physically,

it might be summed up in a single sentence: months upon months of Red

Cross work that led eventually to a breakdown and a rest cure. I think

she would have tried to get back to America, but that her American

letters were so discouraging. Her ancestral world had, apparently, lost

its head over the war. You were hardly safe in New York unless you were

pro-Ally. That made New York--to Annette, who was not pro-anything--as

unthinkable as Vienna. Even Bertha Dollard did nothing but work for

France. The President might recommend neutrality, but the fact was that

in America if you were neutral, you were called pro-German; if you were

a pacifist, you were called pro-German. Poor Annette felt homeless

indeed, and even her belated copies of _The Life Everlasting_ did not

comfort her. They lacked something. No, it was a world where, if you

were not mad, you were suspect.... Even her New York had gone back on

her. When Italy went in with the Allies, she, metaphorically speaking,

turned her face to the wall. Sonnino and Giolitti were equally bad. No

wonder that her nerves weakened, along with her body, and that she took

to a lonely little villa in the high hills.

Even in her lonely villa she found much to do, for misery stalked

everywhere. But being unorganized, the work was more fitful, less

gruelling. She could snatch quiet hours.... And in those hours she had

leisure to remember Radin. Sentence after sentence of his, page after

page, you might say, though it had all been talk, rang through her

solitude. Her subconsciousness flung up whole arguments, speeches,

perorations of Radin’s. It seemed to her that she had not really

forgotten anything he had ever said. She was enabled gradually to forget

the interval, to gaze over the bloody battle-field of Europe to a

millennial horizon. In her villa she became, as far as she had it in

her, what Radin was. There was nothing to distract her from his logic,

nothing in the squalid misery about her to contradict his premises. She

wondered where he was; but it was two years since she had so much as

heard his name mentioned. Mrs. Dollard and her kind had forgotten him;

he had been merely one sensation like another. If some of his teaching

stuck, that was all he could have hoped for.

When the Russian revolution came, Annette wondered yet more. Had he been

sucked into that maelstrom, and would he yet rise on the very crest of

some unforeseen and mighty wave? Her memory was solid Radin; she had

only in solitude to open it like a huge volume, a thick-printed _magnum

opus_. She distrusted Miliukoff, Kerensky, from the start. Annette,

without knowing it, was a Bolshevik before Bolshevism entered into the

Western vocabulary. She was internationalist, proletarian, all the rest

of it, before Kerensky requested the British to let Trotzky through the

blockade. She had never heard of Trotzky, but her heart prophesied him.

She held her tongue among her hills for lack of any one to talk to. The

peasants knew her only as a fitful ministrant to their woes--a silent,

handsome _forestiera_ with burning eyes, who helped when and where she

could and then withdrew herself from the scene. The eyes, as they did

not know, were burning for Radin; with hope that somewhere he was in a

position to make his philosophy tell, to redeem this war-mad world.

Annette Davidge hardly read the newspapers. The Italian press was not

sympathetic to her. Her magnificent, right-minded Russia was there

treated with contumely and contempt. Meanwhile, her American birth and

accent and atmosphere saved her from the natural consequences of being

an Austrian subject. She was watched, but there was nothing to report.

Official Americans in Rome held her to be pure American, bar that old

accident of her marriage. She got, of course, no mail from Austria, and

her American letters were all that was most praiseworthy from a censor’s

point of view.

No one of American birth was more miserable, in April, 1917, than the

Countess Chudenitz. America, too--and all her friends at home triumphant

over the sorry fact! Even _The Life Everlasting_--which came very

irregularly--seemed to bow down in the house of Rimmon. Yes, the world

was mad. She ministered less and less to her people. They offended her

with their chauvinism, their lust of vengeance, their tales of Austrian

atrocities. Propaganda and counter-propaganda alike made her sick. So

much passion spent on the wrong issues! As if it mattered whether the

Kaiser or King Victor Emmanuel were victorious! She fixed her eyes more

rigidly than ever on the millennial horizon. If she could only be in

Russia--the one nation in the world that was concerning itself with

fundamentals! A thick veil of censorship and silence hung between her

and Russian events, but behind that veil she felt saints and sages to be

moving; baffled, opposed, stricken, yet imperturbably bent on saving

mankind--not Russia only, but the world. Brotherhood, equality, the

rights of man--and in no corrupt or mincing Anglo-French version. After

Brest-Litovsk she would not even touch the newspapers. She was convinced

that they lied. She withdrew herself into absolute seclusion, walking in

her wilderness of a garden with the spirit of Radin. From every point of

the compass his words came back to her. They fell into alluring

sequences; his formulæ had never been so clear. Small wonder; for this

time there was no context to challenge him or distract her mind. She

wished she knew where he was, that she might send him money for his

great task of reformation. If she only knew, she would find ways.

Countess Chudenitz would stoop to any illegality or evasion to save the

world. Almost without realizing why, she lessened her gifts to the

_Croce Rossa_. An ailing child, a destitute family, could always wring

something from her; but she became niggardly with all official funds. No

one wondered: times were hard, taxes unbelievable, her status and her

fortune not quite clear in men’s minds. Who could have suspected that

she was hoarding as best she could, in the hope of some day lavishing

her hoard on the brothers of Andrew Radin?

There--just there--Annette Davidge, Countess Chudenitz, stood when the

armistice was signed.

* * * * *

The rest is narrative of the crudest. We need not dwell on the means she

employed, after the armistice, to get back to her husband’s country, or

the incidents of her progress thither. It was conscience that took her,

partly--the sense that she would find duties there which she could not

hope to find in America. War paralyzed Annette: in a world at peace she

could work as hard as any woman. True, there would still be hatred, but

with the war at an end, it was no crime not to hate. It was

characteristic of her neutrality, her pacifism, that she felt happier

once over the Austrian border; happier, that is, in a defeated than in a

victorious land. Besides, was not the emperor in hiding; was not there

hope for the empire--hope of revolution, of popular rule, of the sudden

end of a loathed régime? She would stand by her husband’s “people”;

would be their champion in their demands--play Joan of Arc, if need be,

to a peasantry on whom the millennial light was dawning. A red

republican should lead them; they should find an earnest proletarian in

the frowning stronghold. Perhaps she even saw herself presiding over the

local soviet.... At all events, she blessed the idealism that had made

her withdraw herself, season after season, from her guests, to study and

practise the local patois. Annette Davidge was not given to self-praise;

but now, for the first time in her life, she felt herself really

important. She had never before been powerful where she was right, right

where she was powerful. Happy Annette!

She found Nicholas Chudenitz still in charge at Kirchberg, and dismissed

him. His tales of hardship, of famine, of vain sacrifice and

heart-rending impotence, left her, I fear, cold. Nicholas was a

Chudenitz, an aristocrat, unfit for the new times. No doubt he had done

his best to feed and doctor the people--as though the Chudenitz estates

were the Chudenitz kennels--but the root of the matter was not in him.

She was even impatient with his gloom. If you had the right point of

view, if you burned with the holy emotions, would not bread be added

unto you? She was uneasy until Nicholas--a poor wraith of a man--got

off.

Upon the Countess Chudenitz’s immediate labors we need not dwell. Every

step she took was clogged with the mire of suspicion. Food the people

would take at her hands--but nothing else. There was no soviet for her

to talk to. All talk stopped when she appeared, except the sullen or

whining complaints. Now and then soldiers returned to their villages,

and drunken figures would caper all night round bonfires. She could see

the fitful lights, far below, from her lonely, stately,

grass-and-weed-grown terrace. She came soon to Nicholas Chudenitz’s

theory--that food was the best thing, for the time being, she could

offer them. But her negotiations for food went slowly. Letters were

lost, and telegrams seldom delivered. After a month or two of vain,

disorganized struggle, she went to Vienna to fight it out on the spot.

But Vienna was, if anything, more discouraging than Kirchberg. It was a

city of wild rumors, of occasional riots, of suffering and hatred and

menace in every form; a city where the facts of one day were the

fictions of the next; a city that changed over-night, yet always went by

some means or other from bad to worse. And--the last straw on the

breaking back of Annette Davidge--never had Vienna been so gay: with the

hectic gayety of those, alike, who have everything, and those who have

nothing, to lose. Its gloom was as if it mourned for centuries, not

years, of death; yet its frivolity had never been so brainless and

abandoned. The official folk of Ishtvan Chudenitz’s connection were, for

the most part, absent or in fateful retirement; she could not have gone

to them had she wished. Even with the new officials it was difficult to

deal, for they changed constantly. On Wednesday you won promises from a

black beard and a pair of spectacles; and on Thursday you faced a jaunty

blond youth who had never heard of those promises and would by no means

keep them. She resorted to cablegrams, but got few replies, and those

discouraging. The affairs of the world and all the individuals therein,

apparently, were to be settled in Paris; and out of Paris came only

misleading head-lines of newspapers that altered their “policy” weekly,

and went out of business even oftener. Annette Davidge, in her dusty,

dismantled sitting-room, knew not what to do. But she had learned enough

of conditions to know that Nicholas Chudenitz, whose address she

possessed, would be of no use to her, and she did not send for or seek

him. She sat waiting for the turbid tide to turn.

Then, one day, the heavens opened. It is impossible to exaggerate the

effect on Annette Davidge of the news that Radin was in Buda-Pest. When

she learned that fact, she turned, on the spot, to a fanatic. The Light

of her World was in Pest. Radin figured to her as that; also, as the

measure of all things, and as a positive solution for every difficulty,

major or minor. He would tell her what to do; he would guide her on the

path of infallible truth; he would show her how to get food, or else

prove to her that her duty was other than food-getting. Annette had been

sorely beaten down from her pedestal of importance and beneficence; she

did not hope to be the leader of the Revolution; but to work with Radin,

under him, within the sphere of his influence, would be to live to the

glory of God. Her perplexities were over if she could only get to Pest.

She would carry banners, she would work in an office, she would strip

herself of every available penny--she would do anything, however

conspicuous or however humble, so long as it had Radin’s sanction. She

did not even ask now to be allowed to save the world; it would be enough

if she could be allowed, under Radin, to help save Hungary--to help save

even Pest. Pride faded in the immanence of the master. She asked only to

be one of the crowd of chosen, a little implement for a mighty hand. She

had at the same time a shrewd notion that she could help best with such

beastly capitalistic weapons as she did, or could, possess.

Behold, then, Annette Davidge, Countess Chudenitz, in the heart of

revolutionary Pest. Her life there is indescribable. Radin--she got

through to him at once--used her in many ways. He expected her to take a

furnished house in a good street--and she took it. He expected her to

have servants, and food and wine, telephone and limousine, for the use

of himself and his various committees--and, by superhuman effort, she

got them. She was too much a woman of the world not to realize that the

leaders must be served, must have their time and energy saved. She gave

her drawing-rooms over cheerfully to the muddy boots and muddier manners

of Radin’s chief henchmen. A villa in the country that Count Chudenitz

had owned she turned over to him also. Meanwhile, as she could, she

drank in enough of Radin’s eloquence to keep her in a glow. Not speaking

Magyar, she could not understand most of the talk that went on in her

house; but she would have trusted Radin, though he only mopped and

mowed, to be serving the ends of righteousness. She was expected, she

found, to be only a landlady and a purse--not to plan or to counsel. But

again, her shrewd sense told her that it was eminently necessary that

the saviors of the proletariat should have shelter and money. You didn’t

make even a revolution with bare hands--not in these days. In return,

she was protected; furnished with grubby papers that permitted her to go

about the city--papers so dirty with much countersigning that the

dirtiest Red patrolman bowed down to them, recognizing the signs of his

own régime. When she used her car, it passed the most truculent

sentinels as being Radin’s. The masters of Pest recognized her for a

good proletarian; for some one in the counsels of Radin himself,

possibly even known to the distant godhead of Lenin. That the hunted

remnant of Pest, cowering behind its palace shutters, fitfully raided

and fitfully ignored, called her Radin’s mistress and somehow (between

appeals to Mr. Hoover) blamed America and President Wilson for her

unspeakable renegadeship, she did not, of course, know. Nor would it

have concerned her if she had, since never once had she looked upon

Radin as a man. Their scandal would have been, for her, only another

nail in the coffin of the late Count Chudenitz.

Meanwhile the Reds were making their new laws for Hungary--laws that

most citizens might have found unintelligible except for the death

penalty. Being uncertain as to what you might do and keep your life, you

went further than you conceived it necessary; you did a little more than

your damnedest. But in early 1919 Annette was privileged. Her car, her

house, her personal belongings, went untouched. She was never raided or

summoned, or stripped of anything that was hers. It did not go with

Annette’s sense of fitness to wear jewelry in these times, but when she

saw women handing over their pearls to the appointed officials, she

remembered that she had pearls of her own in her unmolested jewel-box,

and assumed that the afflicted ladies had been convicted of conspiracy,

or hoarding, or smuggling gold to Vienna or Switzerland.

Even in Buda-Pest the Countess Chudenitz was not notorious. Radin was

too clever--or perhaps too single-minded--for that. If he drew more

freely on Annette’s resources than on others’, it was because she had

more resources than his other allies. She was allowed to realize that

there were other houses, other rendezvous, other hospitalities, for him

and his innumerable committees, other loyal women besides herself. She

knew little of, and cared little for, those other women. It stood to

reason that she could not be the only internationalist of her sex.

Perhaps her cognizance of other handmaidens to the Cause served to keep

her away from meetings. Perhaps, that is, brotherhood was more to her

mind, as a slogan, than sisterhood. But let it be put down to Annette

Davidge’s credit that she was content to satisfy Radin’s demands upon

her without complacence or jealousy. Her fervor was impersonal; and when

the soviet elections drew on, she refused to write herself down

housekeeper or stenographer in order to be allowed to vote. Annette

Davidge was honest up to the limits of her logic.

Even revolutions do not always have an easy time of it. The Reds had

their own troubles, and Radin had need, indeed, to be a clever man.

Trolley-cars were running in Pest; shops were open; restaurants, also,

that served you next to nothing. All bourgeois were barred from voting;

and no one had respect or protection who did not work with his hands.

Bela Kun was great in the land. Yet, with all these advantages, Hungary

was not happy. These folk did not at once find all things added unto

them. Rumania bothered them; the unguessable decisions in Paris

bothered them; Czecho-Slovakia and Jugoslavia drove them to frenzy. In

other words, the sovereign people was irritable and illogical as folk

are only when the little money they possess has no purchasing power.

Soviet rule did not bring bread; still less, luxuries, which, as every

one knows, are an integral part of any millennium. The bourgeois were

suffering even more than the populace; but the populace, which from

childhood had been accustomed to envy the bourgeois with reason, could

not, all at once, see that. And because they were not getting what they

wanted, they threatened to take it by force, even if it was not there.

At such a time, Red leaders have to make quick decisions. A great many

quick decisions were made in 1919.... But Radin took the way of his

great compeers, Trotzky and Lenin. No one can say, I believe, what his

real policy was; how far he directed and how far he was dragged. Even

the staff of _The Life Everlasting_ cannot really have known. He may

have thought that it was better to lead a mob than to leave the mob

unled, or led by those without a philosophy. Or he may have believed the

things he told the wild torch-bearing thousands in the Freiheits-Platz:

that if their peaceful government had not succeeded, because of corrupt

remnants and the natural depravity of all but the Reddest, it was time

for something more extreme still--time for the utmost humanitarian

violence. Certain it is that when Pest became a Bolshevik hell, Radin

played Sathanas.

Annette Davidge, Countess Chudenitz, endured that hell for three days.

Her faith in Radin--whom she had not seen for a week--did not waver. Her

house stood empty, she its sole inhabitant, for those three days. The

last night she spent crouched in a corner of the cellar. As a matter of

curious fact, her house was not molested. They passed, reeling,

screaming, shooting, but they neither fired through her windows, nor

applied the torch. Too many of them had seen Radin go in and out of the

great door; they were not sure. Some said (for the people were no

nicer-minded than the aristocracy) there was a woman of Radin’s in

there--better let the place alone. There were plenty of other houses to

loot. But the noise and the lurid uncertainty were the same; and on the

third day Annette decided that she could bear it no longer. Possibly,

she said to herself, the worst element had got out of hand, and Radin

was helpless in another quarter. She did not dare trust her passports.

It might be that a new party, which would not honor them, had come into

power. As she crept up from her cellar in the comparative quiet of early

dawn, she saw the light of many fires in the city, and débris

unspeakable in the heart of her own street--furniture, empty

wine-bottles, a wrecked machine-gun, bodies.... It came over Annette,

crouching behind her window-curtain, that in the present situation she

was quite useless to the Cause. I believe that even then, if she could

have felt sure of serving Radin’s revolution, she would have crept out

into the ruined, smoking street. But to be both useless and in danger

revolted her common-sense. If no obvious duty called her, then she would

at least try for safety.

The city, having gone to rest well after midnight, waked late; and she

had some clear time before her. She made up a parcel of food, a parcel

of valuables, and stowed money inside her dress. She clad herself

completely, to the very skin, in clothing left behind by her maid, who

had grown panicky and fled, the week before, to Vienna. She did not

forget the bundle of passports, which might or might not serve her.

Then she crept furtively, like an animal wriggling through cover, to the

garage. The limousine would have been worse than useless, but a battered

Ford had been housed there, and she blessed the chance that had made her

learn in Italy to take such a car over rough hill roads. There was

enough petrol to start it, and she knew personally a Jew on the city

outskirts who would sell her more. Even Radin’s limousine had sometimes

chosen out-of-the-way places to stop for petrol, and the Jew in question

would, beyond the shadow of a doubt, recognize her. Of how many people

in Pest, after all, could she say that, she asked herself.

Again, of Annette Davidge’s progress to the villa (property of the late

Count Chudenitz) we do not need the detail. She skirted many dangers,

but, thanks to the early, listless hour, she escaped them. Her passports

served, the only times she was challenged--amazingly few, until you

realize that, in the very nature of things, early morning is

revolution’s slack hour. By eight she was at the villa, where she waked

the surly caretakers. The place was shrouded and dismantled, for it had

seldom been used, though she had opened it up a few months before for

Radin’s occasional use. Now and then there were interviews which were

better held outside the city. Dust lay thick everywhere, and some of the

furniture was stained and broken; larder and cellar were nearly bare;

but the garage was water-tight, and the telephone in working order. A

cheerless habitation; yet it was peace beyond peace to be removed from

the tumult of the last days. She sank into that peace as though wrapped

in the innermost fold of a cloud.

But revolutions have their own logic, and the soviet omelette takes a

notorious amount of egg-breaking. Annette had found sullenness at

Kirchberg on the Enns; here she was to see the fire when it had passed

the smouldering stage. The two caretakers (male and female) were

creatures of Radin’s, not hers--and that had always been sufficient. Now

she realized that in a world of strange faces, theirs were almost the

strangest. She trusted them for Radin, but she hardly trusted them for

herself, though they must know that the villa was hers. Certainly she

had never been so insolently served.

The villa was on the outskirts of the little town, removed from it only

by the extent of its own small park. Late that night she sat, fully

dressed, by the window of her bedroom, wondering if she had done well.

Perhaps, if she had stayed on, that day, in Pest, Radin would have come

to her, would have explained. Here, she was more uncertain than ever.

The wilderness of shrubbery and trees was darkly alive. There was no

light by which she could discern, or count, the forms that crouched,

that wriggled, that shook the boughs stealthily and made darker blots

upon the herbage. There might be only half a dozen inquisitive

marauders--peasantry come up to spy upon the villa. Or, for all her

senses could tell her, the people might be investing the grounds in

force, furtively but inimically intending--what? Annette was so used now

to the strange, scarce-human régime of revolution as to tell herself,

without humor, almost without irony, that this invasion, which might

mean arson and murder, might equally well be a mere gathering for shrill

talk. All the same, it shook her nerves.

She slept, the next day, by snatches. She did not dare--she, the friend

and helper of Radin--to set foot in the streets. Towards night she heard

a methodical succession of shots. She was used enough to chaotic

firing, yet she noticed this ... even to her innocent ears it had the

rhythm of--execution. At nightfall, she descended and addressed the man,

who could speak, with an impossible accent, a little German. His manner,

always insolent, was oddly reflective, she thought. Annette, who

understood nothing of what was going on around her, who had only

metaphors and analogies to define her context with--who could not say

“this is,” but only “it is as if”--felt that he regarded her for once

less as an enemy than as an enemy disarmed; as (why not say it at once?)

a prisoner. His insolence had told her that he hated her; now leisure

and calm seemed to have entered into his hatred. He was at ease about

her; she no longer irked him; she was caught, and could be regarded

almost with tolerance. The sense of this made her, for the first time in

her life, personally afraid. In her cellar she had known terror, but

only as one fears the lightning, which may strike but may not. There was

all the difference in the world between happening to be in a dangerous

situation and being directly, deliberately threatened. His contemplative

manner frightened her as nothing else ever had done; therefore she held

her head very high--not from bravado, but just in order to keep herself

going.

For ten minutes they talked in broken, monosyllabic German; she

standing, he seated, with a mug of beer beside him. Now and then he

drank, and set the mug down to spill over on a gilded table. He wiped

his ragged beard from time to time with a bit of Venice point torn from

a cushion cover. And it was a world in which Countess Chudenitz could

not reprove him. These, she told herself, were the inevitable initial

excesses. You cannot have capitalism at night, and smooth-running

communism before the day breaks. Even Radin could not put his formulæ

through all at once, with no hitches. She thought of Radin’s

programme--but that way lay abstract terms. Annette passed a hand over

her aching forehead--spurred herself to her last dreaded questions--got

her guttural, illiterate answers--turned on her heel and left the man.

For the first time in her life, she was feeling a sex fear.

Because her mind told her to, she dragged herself on tired feet to the

garage. Not an ounce of petrol left. The tank had been scrupulously

emptied, and the car was a mere useless heap of machinery; as cunning a

device, as logical an invention, as perfect in plan, as ever, but

deprived of all that gave it purpose and direction. Some such reflection

crossed her mind, but she bit off the analogy. She had fed on too many,

these latter days. Then she locked herself into a room on the lower

floor, to think. She was afraid to go up-stairs. Up-stairs was too

traplike.

The orgies in Pest continued, she had learned--though her uncouth

interlocutor had not called them orgies. This little town, virtuously

inspired by the example, had determined to do itself proud in another

way. The local soviet had been meeting almost continuously, and had

decided on a programme that had no blemish on its Red purity. Hungary

must not be slower than Russia; and if the larger towns would not show

the way, the small ones must. The municipality--which meant the

soviet--was, of course, self-governing and accountable to none. The

man’s gibberish had not been elaborate, but she had grasped the gist of

the programme. The “workmen’s and soldiers’ council” had, as usual, done

the planning. Within their local limits, it was to be thorough and

complete. They were very pleased with themselves, she gathered from the

intonations of her informant.

For the first time since she had known Radin, Annette Chudenitz

translated a “programme,” completely and without expurgation, into

concrete terms; dealt with revolution in plain English. Everything that

could be conceived of as property was to be seized and pooled, then

redistributed as seemed best to the council, provided always that no one

outside the working-classes was to share in the distribution. In order

not to be the dupes of capitalistic devices, they had created a kind of

“grandfather” clause: no one was to be haloed as a “worker” who had

employed labor in any way before the Revolution. That provision took

care of those folk who might have been driven to manual labor by the

Revolution itself, but had been originally tainted with bourgeoisie. All

things were to be held in common, for the good of the community itself,

allotted only temporarily to worthy individuals, and resumable at will

by the council, should the individual take too individualistic an

attitude towards his new possessions. That, on the other hand, would

dispose of the capitalistically inclined of their own class. Children,

though they might or might not be left to the care of parents, were the

wards of the municipality, and might be transferred to whatever

custody the council thought best. Women, of course, were to be

nationalized--municipalized, in this case. Works of art, jewelry,

objects of luxury, were to be sent to the melting-pot; whatever of their

substance, mineral or vegetable, could be removed for useful purposes

would be saved, the rest burned in the market-place. Animals, like

children, were wards of the council, and their custody was a matter for

determination.

The awkward sentences of the caretaker had made all this plain to her.

Her perfect familiarity with the theories of Bolshevism had enabled her

to fill in the grinning gaps. When he had sputtered lazily over his

beer, “All property in common: cattle--children--women,” she knew the

programme; knew, moreover, who would be eligible to committees and who

would not. She knew every twist and turn. Her sole surprise had been to

learn at the end that since she had once possessed the villa, she was

personally involved in the reforms--a subject of the local council, to

be officially despoiled. She had withheld her tongue from mentioning

that her legal residence was elsewhere. She could not deny that, in

their logic, the villa created for her a legal residence within reach of

their tentacles.

The villa! It was nothing to her. But the few belongings she had with

her; jewels of her girlhood, her wedding-ring.... They took

wedding-rings always, she realized; on principle, as much as for

patriotic cupidity. She fought with herself a long time before she

consented to face the essential fact, the one thing that mattered. But

face it she did, and the vision grayed her cheek and brow, her very

lips, so that she looked like a ghost in the twilight as she questioned

him.

Annette Davidge was in many ways a strong woman. When she found that

there was no petrol for her in the garage, she turned herself aside from

hysteria by sheer pluck and main force. She was sure the petrol was

merely hidden, and she would have tried to bribe the man to give it to

her, save that her common sense told her he would gain more by keeping

her there than by aiding her to escape--and that, inevitably, he knew

it. There was only one thing in the world to do, and that she must

accomplish without delay. She must get through by telephone to Radin.

She unlocked her door and sought her keeper. He should stand beside her

and hear every word. Therefore she would have to speak German. It might

be that Radin was lost to her; but she trusted still in the magic of his

name.

Indeed, if Annette Davidge had tried to reach by telephone any place in

Pest except Radin’s headquarters, she would have been defeated. It took

two hours as it was. But she got through to him at last. Her arm ached

to numbness by the time his voice answered her. The caretaker was half

asleep in his chair, but whenever she raised her voice he shook himself

awake to listen. In few words--words she had decided on and learned by

heart in her two hours’ waiting--she told him where she was, and her

necessity for seeing him; she described the independent action of the

municipality, and the danger of her being caught in this backwater, when

she belonged with the larger movement outside. She repressed, even in

her tone, every hint of her self-pity, her sense of injustice. As a

practical matter, would he come and see her, as she could not go to him?

It would also, of course, be a great compliment to the soviet....

Reluctance, wonder, annoyance, seemed to be mingled in Radin’s voice,

speaking English at the other end. Yes, he would come, in the first

hours after dawn--for an hour. Annette realized, in mid-gust of her

relief, that unless it had been otherwise convenient to him, he could

not and would not have consented; that she had virtually appealed to a

commanding general in the thick of the hour of battle. She was

proportionately grateful; but even so, it seemed natural that he should

have made an effort--with the thousands upon thousands he had had from

her. Natural--of course. Yet she turned upon the caretaker, who had

listened greedily, and ordered--as she would not have dared to do an

hour earlier--coffee for herself, in her own room. It was brought.

I have said that there was no hint of sex in the comradeship of Annette

Chudenitz and Radin. Yet even Radin cannot have helped noticing that he

faced, physically speaking, a woman he had never seen. In her shabby

maid’s dress, with her eyes hollowed out by sleeplessness, her face

paled by vigil, confinement, and fear, her very voice shaken by the

strangeness of her world, their contact lost through the events of their

separation, she must have seemed to him different indeed. They

breakfasted together in the dirty dining-room. Annette had not been so

well fed in many days. She had Radin’s presence to thank for that, she

knew. Yet her jailers were scarcely more than civil, even to him. She

remarked on this to Radin, when the meal was finished. Radin, with the

utmost frankness, at once explained....

It was then, after the incredible explanation, that Annette began really

to readjust herself. All along, she had known her danger, but she had

still thought of Radin, at least, as all-powerful, and all her fear had

departed when she saw him enter the hall. Now from his own lips she

learned that he was not omnipotent--or, in any case, that he declined to

take advantage of his omnipotence. Either he feared to interfere with

the local soviet, or--he did not wish to. Either alternative was

terrible to her, but she chose the first, and tried persuasion.

“Surely they would not touch me if you took me back in your car?”

“Perhaps--probably--not,” he agreed.

“Then--why?”