“Is it possible for you to be discredited?”
“Quite possible. And I am too important at the moment to do anything
foolish. It would be a crime. I am very much needed yonder.” He jerked
his thumb Pestwards.
“Of course you are. But, after all, I, too, have been loyal. Can’t you
explain that to the committee?”
Radin sat down heavily. Then he looked at his watch. He leaned forward
and tapped her knee. “I am very sorry.” Nothing had ever been more
metallic, more perfunctory than his tone. “It was a mistake for you to
come here. For your own sake, you should have stayed in Pest. As things
stand--I cannot possibly interfere with the local council. They are
within their rights. They are only doing what all communes will
presently do. They are naturally proud of their readiness, their
thoroughness. If I interfered, it would throw the gravest doubts on my
own good faith, and my work would be seriously impeded. If it were a
personal matter--but it is not. In fact, there are no personal matters,
as far as I am concerned. There is only the Revolution.”
Even then, she could not believe it. “I am not asking you to make it a
personal matter.”
“Pardon me, _tovarischa_” (was it deliberately, or by mere instinct,
that he used the reeking Russian word?), “that is just what you are
doing. They would say--”
“I do not care what these creatures say about me!” she cried.
“Nor I. I was about to tell you that if I asked for immunity for you,
they would say that I demanded privileges, that my programme was good
enough for others, but not good enough for me and my friends; that I do
not really believe what I teach; that I prefer, in my heart, the old
bourgeois régime.” He looked her straight in the eyes. “Comrade Annetta,
I do not make a revolution only to go back on it. When I tell them in
the Freiheits-Platz that there is to be no privileged class, no private
property, that they are right to confiscate, to communize, I cannot
afford to have some one in the crowd fling exceptions in my face.”
“Do I understand you to mean that you yourself are willing, for
yourself, to submit to this sort of thing? To be ruled, in every detail
of your life, by a soviet?”
“Absolutely, yes. What do you take me for? A charlatan?”
“But you,” she replied, sarcastically, “are going back to Pest,
unmolested, in your automobile. Do you mean that if some mob in the city
decides to-morrow to take your car and your freedom away, and to set you
to work with your hands, or make you one of a thousand Red guards, you
will submit?”
“Theoretically, yes. Why not? But they will not do that,” he went on,
gravely, “I hope. They need me in another capacity for a time. They need
me to direct; to counsel. The people are not yet in the saddle. They
need me to set them there, and they know it. Even a revolution must have
some one to think for it.”
“And you intend always to occupy that superior position!”
“As long as may be. Because”--he spoke with great emphasis, but with no
emotion--“the Revolution needs me. Who do you think has brought the
Revolution about in Hungary? Bela Kun? Lenin, over there in Russia? By
no means. I, Radin.” There was not a trace of self-praise in his tone;
he might have been teaching her statistics from a book. “Show me any man
who can do my work better, and I gladly give my place to him. But the
man has not arrived yet.”
“I believe you.” For that matter, she did. “And”--she worked carefully
for logic--“your services are rewarded by immunity.”
“If so you choose to put it. But that is a mere matter of practical
politics. If I serve the Revolution best by being free to plan my days
and my work, that is right. If my immunity ceases to serve the
Revolution--away with it!” He flicked the ash off his cigar.
“You are very sure of yourself.”
“I have spent my life in training,” he replied, simply.
“I am not questioning your fitness, your value--your supremacy, even,”
she went on. This was, after all, the presence she had walked with among
the Italian hills. “Should I have left Vienna, given all I had, if I had
not been heart and soul with the cause and believed you to be the
mouthpiece of humanity?”
Radin scanned her carefully. “I think not. I think, as far as you
understood, you agreed. But perhaps you could not understand much.
Daughter of the American bourgeoisie and widow of Count Chudenitz!”
“You took my money, my houses, my servants, my food ...” she cried.
“Again, why not? Would I have taken them so simply if I had not thought
it right? You offered the people nothing that did not belong, morally
speaking, to the people. Did I ever insult you, or myself, or the
Revolution, by thanking you?”
“You never thanked me.”
“Exactly. Because I should have considered it quite legitimate for us to
take by force, had it been physically necessary, everything that you
freely gave. That you gave freely proved you a friend of the Revolution,
merely.”
“And now that I can do nothing more for you--that my consent is not
necessary--I am not to be treated as a friend! No immunity comes _my_
way.”
Radin rose and stood above her. “Have I ever told you that you were to
be immune from the régime you were working to bring about? Did you not
believe what you said you believed? You told me you were a proletarian;
you gave, I thought, evidences of your sincerity. Did you all the time
expect to bring about a rule for others and not for yourself? To be a
sort of republican queen? If you wanted to be a bourgeoise, you should
have stayed out of the movement to abolish the bourgeoisie. The smallest
logic would have taught you that. Ours, as you well knew, is not a local
but a world programme.”
“I might at least have been treated as a friend, not as an enemy.”
“But who is treating you like an enemy?” He spoke as to a child who
cannot reason, yet with no show of irritation. “Is any one proposing to
imprison you?”
“What they propose is worse than imprisonment, as you well know.” Her
voice trembled with anger.
“_Tchk!_” He flung out his arms. “All I can say is that I thought better
of your intellect. Your sincerity I still do not question. The people
are proposing to treat you as they treat themselves. You are, as far as
may be, a citizen of the state you professed yourself a passionate
believer in. I give you nothing you did not profess to think desirable
for your own country, for all mankind. And now you want to play the old
game of exceptions! Once a bourgeoise, always a bourgeoise!... You are
not inexorable, Comrade Annetta.”
“Certainly, for myself, I do not go as far as they go.”
“That is no one’s fault but your own.”
“Did you ever tell me--in New York when you first instructed me--that I
might look forward to having all my belongings stolen, myself ...
‘nationalized’....” The word came with difficulty, but she brought it
out.
“Did I ever tell you”--he looked at his watch again, not impatiently,
but as if forced to calculate--“that I contemplated anything else? Did I
ever hint to you that I believed in one law for the masses, another for
the privileged? Did I not explicitly say that the abolition of privilege
was the root of the social revolution?”
“Yes. But I assumed that these plans were to be worked slowly--as far as
might be without injustice to the individual....”
“A revolution that comes slowly is not a revolution. And there is no
question of injustice. The injustice would be in making an exception for
the individual who objected to the policy of the government.”
“You call that orgy in Pest a government?”
“It is on its way to become so.”
“Therefore you excuse the excesses.”
“If there are excesses, I excuse them on the score of inevitability.
But I do not call the plans of your local soviet excesses. They are
doing nothing that you did not subscribe to, in theory, some years ago.”
“About women ... I never subscribed.”
“Perhaps that was a detail that we did not discuss. But the least logic
would have enabled you to see that the old-fashioned marriage is, in the
last analysis, insistence on a property right. In twenty years, every
one will take it all quite naturally. The first moment of change is
bound to seem violent to some people. When they take your pearls, you
will probably consider them thieves. I should not have expected it, but
I see that you will. In spite of all your fine talk, you do not see that
the council which takes your pearls and sells them for the common good
is not a thief.”
“Pearls are--only pearls,” she protested.
“True; a commodity. And if you proceed logically, you will see that what
you would call your ‘virtue’ is also a commodity. Anything necessary, or
even universally desired, is a commodity.”
“But”--she reverted to the less distasteful instance--“some one will
eventually wear the pearls. How can one individual have more right to
them than another?”
“Eventually, no individual will wear pearls--so long as their money
value is what it is. Only when they become valueless as sea-shells will
they be innocent. At present, I do not think any one in revolutionary
Hungary will be allowed to wear them. We can sell them to the foreigner
for money to spend on necessities.”
“I am likeliest to see them on the neck of whatever woman in the commune
has the lightest morals,” she threw in bitterly.
“Not for long, I think. And the morals of all women will be controlled
by the committee.”
“We are getting into by-paths. I ask you, once for all, Radin, are you
going to turn me over to be the victim of any peasant who chooses to
pay?”
He frowned as if in sheer weariness. “You speak over-dramatically. These
things will be arranged more calmly than that. You will be disposed of
in accordance with the best judgment of the committee. But you will
find, I think, that there is more freedom under the Revolution than
there was under the old régime.”
“Under the old régime I was free not to take a husband or a lover.”
“You will find, I believe, that most women prefer the freedom to take
one. Assuming that, we say that no woman shall take one without the
sanction of the authorities. The production of children is not a private
matter. It is of the gravest import to the state. To look upon it as a
matter of personal pleasure is obscurantism pure and simple. Because it
is fraught with such vital consequences, we must limit and control the
sexual relation as we limit and control the money-making power of the
individual.... But if I failed to make myself clear in New York, when we
had time, I cannot make myself clear now when we are all in a hurry.”
Radin rose again, and called to the man. Annette rose, too.
“Then you will do nothing for me?” she asked, in a shaking voice.
“I will tell the local committee that you are a benevolent friend of the
Revolution and to be treated with the respect due to any good citizen.
Can I do more?”
“You throw me into that?” She could hardly shape the words.
Radin turned on her then with the first flicker of irritation that he
had shown. “I? I throw you into nothing. You hung on my words in
America, and I told you nothing but truth--nothing that I have ever had
to deny. If you were amusing yourself, that was your lookout. I thought
you sincere. Especially when you came to Pest to help us, did I think
you sincere. Many of those men and women in New York, I knew well, had
not the brains to see what revolution meant. But I really believed you
had thought it out. I talked to you with the utmost freedom. And when
you came to Pest to join us, I was sure. I believe in the Revolution; I
care only for the Revolution. I would kill only obstructionists. Them I
would kill because the people must not be hindered. But I am exactly
what I was when we sat over your samovar in Sixty-second Street. I have
been perfectly honest from the beginning. If you were not honest, how
was I to know?”
He would not even ask her to bear witness to his honesty. As far as he
was concerned--this mongrel incorruptible--it stood proved. But had she
wished, she could not have denied it. She had been, at some stage or
other of the game, a fool; but, even now, she could not say where or
when. How could she have been expected _not_ to misunderstand?
Radin held out his hand for farewell. “I will recommend you as a good
proletarian down yonder--on my way back. If I did that and also tried to
smuggle you out of the country, I should not be honest. I am sorry if
you have mistaken yourself. But you, and none other, did it. The
revolution is not a box of toys. Never once have I spoken to you as if
it were. I repeat, I am sorry if you have misapprehended. But I could
not suffer you to be so much as a pinch of dust to clog the wheels. The
fault”--he tapped his forehead--“was apparently with the brain. You
adhered emotionally, not with your intellect. I did not realize that.”
“And if you had realized”--she poured forth the bitterness of her
defeat--“you would still have done the same. You would have used me.”
“I would have used you just so much as you were fool enough to let
yourself be used, _without my lying to you_. I would not have lied to
you for the sake of no matter how many millions of dollars. But if you
persisted in thinking I did not mean what I said, I could not have
helped that. I told you over and over again that I had no god except the
will of the sovereign masses; that your silly democracy meant nothing to
me; that I cared only for the Revolution. I stand where I stood then.
Good-bye--madame.”
“You may pay, too ...” she flung out.
“I dare say. Human nature is not perfect. But if I do, it will not be
because I have misunderstood myself.” He passed out of the door, honest
as ever.
Annette, Countess Chudenitz, “Comrade Annetta,” daughter of John Davidge
and cousin of Bertha Dollard, went slowly up to her bedroom. She had
decided to make them mount the stairs to find her; not to lessen their
journey by one step. It was a pity she had no pistol. Perhaps Radin
would have given her one if she had asked. Her torture, like her safety,
was nothing he had set his cold heart on. But it was too late now.
Through the afternoon she mediated on the technique of non-resistance.
Finally, too worn out for even fear to keep her awake, she fell asleep.
When she woke, it was nearly dusk. She was stronger after her sleep, and
that she resented. She hated her own alertness, and would infinitely
have preferred the anaesthesia of exhaustion. A ray of sunlight struck
the dressing-table. She arranged her jewels for the public view. They
should not say that she kept anything back. Only her wedding-ring she
stowed away inside her clothing, thinking almost with tenderness of
Ishtvan. Then she began to hate Ishtvan for bringing her here.... But
the truth was that Radin, not Ishtvan, had brought her now; and if she
had not returned to her own country, she would never have known Radin.
Only once did her fear make her ignoble--when she stretched out her hand
to her vanity-case. But she drew her hand back; she would make no bid
for desire. As she strained her eyes towards the twilit mirror, she saw
herself stripped of beauty as of a garment. Better so. For every
reason--pride, expediency, what not--better so.
She sat down at the window then to watch the night come on. And with the
paling of the west, the brightening of the stars, the darkening of the
air, she found things to notice. Again the great evergreens were stirred
and peopled. A little later the shrubs, too, came alive. When the moon
rose clear, the shadows ceased to be stealthy. They formed in groups. In
the end it was the ordered march of confident folk. Lights flared out
from the drawing-rooms below, making a broad, yellow path upon the
grass. Along that path, several abreast, they approached. She heard the
low, staccato hum of their talk. She could better have borne guns and
torches, the loose fabric of riot that would offer interstices for
escape. This was soberness itself; evidently a meeting of the local
soviet to be held in the great rooms of the villa that had been hers.
To this had it come; that not even in the midst of red revolution last
week had she so sensed her doom as now. Annette Davidge’s humor had been
a weakling that perished in Annette’s own childhood. Her irony had grown
up with her, but it, too--a weak thing--had passed away long since in
Pest. Not with mirth, but with prostrating fear, she noted those ordered
ranks. Annette Davidge was to meet her fate at a committee-meeting--in a
drawing-room--precisely as, long ago, she had met Radin. The two
settings were extraordinarily alike. Only this time, if she listened,
she would not understand the words; and this time it meant something.
Perhaps some of Bertha Dollard’s guests, besides Radin, had meant
something before; but the tea, the debutantes, and the footmen had been
there to prove that Bertha Dollard meant nothing. Annette wished--still
without humor--that this had been anything but a meeting.
An immense distaste came to her for being summoned by the chairman. She
dragged herself up from her post by the window, took her jewels and
money in her hand, and went down-stairs to the assembly in which she had
no vote. As she entered the room, her eyes dazzled; but she laid her
treasures on the table in front of the bearded man who presided. The
woman who sat beside him snatched at the gems, but the president laid a
heavy hand on the woman’s arm and pushed them to the front of the table
where all could see. Then Annette sat quietly down in a corner; she felt
very shabby in her frayed black. The scarves and shawls and petticoats
of the peasant women over-powered her. Their eyes raked her--all the
eyes present, focussing themselves into one stare, which she felt like a
burning-glass. But presently the chairman spoke again, and the heads
turned back to him. His hand played with the gold before him. Annette
fixed her gaze upon the glinting pile. The strange sounds the man
uttered probably concerned her; but she left those strange sounds over
there, as she had left her money and her jewels. She refused to have
anything to do with it--with any of it. There was something austere in
the bearded man’s guarding of her valuables. But she was tired of honest
men.
Before, in Bertha Dollard’s house she had been unaware of her crisis,
because she had misunderstood. Now, in spite of her ignorance of their
speech, she understood better. Yet she had the luck, a second time, to
be unaware of her crisis when it came. For presently, as if really
hypnotized by the glint of her own gold, she fainted--so quietly,
however, that no one noticed it.
II
HABAKKUK
When they carried Kathleen Somers up into the hills to die where her
ancestors had had the habit of dying--they didn’t gad about, those early
Somerses: they dropped in their tracks, and the long grass that they had
mowed and stacked and trodden under their living feet flourished
mightily over their graves--it was held to be only a question of time. I
say “to die,” not because her case was absolutely hopeless, but because
no one saw how, with her spent vitality, she could survive her exile.
Everything had come at once, and she had gone under. She had lost her
kin, she had lost her money, she had lost her health. Even the people
who make their meat of tragedy--and there are a great many of them in
all enlightened centres of thought--shook their heads and were sorry.
They thought she couldn’t live; and they also thought it much, much
better that she shouldn’t. For there was nothing left in life for that
sophisticated creature but a narrow cottage in a stony field, with
Nature to look at.
Does it sound neurotic and silly? It wasn’t. Conceive her if you
can--Kathleen Somers, whom probably you never knew. From childhood she
had nourished short hopes and straitened thoughts. At least: hopes that
depend on the æsthetic passion are short; and the long perspectives of
civilized history are very narrow. Kathleen Somers had been fed with the
Old World: that is to say, her adolescent feet had exercised themselves
in picture-galleries and cathedrals and palaces; she had seen all the
right views, all the right ceremonies, and all the censored
picturesqueness. Don’t get any Cook’s tourist idea, please, about Miss
Somers. Her mother had died young, and her gifted father had taken her
to a hundred places that the school-teacher on a holiday never gets to
and thinks of only in connection with geography lessons. She had
followed the Great Wall of China, she had stood before the tomb of
Tamburlaine, she had shaded her eyes from the glare of Kaïrouan the
Holy, she had chaffered in Tiflis and in Trebizond. All this before she
was twenty-five. At that time her father’s health broke, and they
proceeded to live permanently in New York. Her wandering life had
steeped her in delights, but kept her innocent of love-affairs. When you
have fed on historic beauty, on the great plots of the past, the best
tenor voices in the world, it is pretty hard to find a man who doesn’t,
in his own person, leave out something essential to romance. She had
herself no particular beauty, and therefore the male sex could get on
without her. A few fell in love with her, but she was too enchanted and
amused with the world in general to set to work at the painful process
of making a hero out of any one of them. She was a sweet-tempered
creature; her mental snobbishness was not a pose, but perfectly
inevitable; she had a great many friends. As she had a quick wit and the
historic imagination, you can imagine--remembering her bringing-up--that
she was an entertaining person when she entered upon middle age: when,
that is, she was proceeding from the earlier to the later thirties.
It was natural that Kathleen Somers and her father--who was a bit
precious and pompous, in spite of his ironies--should gather about them
a homogeneous group. The house was pleasant and comfortable--they were
too sophisticated to be “periodic”--and there was always good talk
going, if you happened to be the kind that could stand good talk. Of
course you had to pass an examination first. You had at least to show
that you “caught on.” They were high-brow enough to permit themselves
sudden enthusiasms that would have damned a low-brow. You mustn’t like
“Peter Pan,” but you might go three nights running to see some really
perfect clog-dancing at a vaudeville theatre. Do you see what I mean?
They were eclectic with a vengeance. It wouldn’t do for you to cultivate
the clog-dancer _and_ like “Peter Pan,” because in that case you
probably liked the clog-dancer for the wrong reason--for something other
than that sublimated skill which is art. Of course this is only a wildly
chosen example. I never heard either of them mention “Peter Pan.” And
the proper hatreds were even more difficult than the proper devotions.
You might let Shakespeare get on your nerves, provided you really
enjoyed Milton. I wonder if you do see what I mean? It must be perfect
of its kind, its kind being anything under heaven; and it must never,
never, never be sentimental. It must have art, and _parti pris_, and
point of view, and individuality stamped over it. No, I can’t explain.
If you have known people like that, you’ve known them. If you haven’t,
you can scarcely conceive them.