Chapter 14

"Why not, why not?" he quickly interposed. "You always impress me by your easy handling of facts. And why won't my money be of use to the social revolution?" Scornfully she started up again and began walking.

"Why? Because convictions can't be bought with cash! Why! Because philanthropy is the most selfish of vices. You may do good here and there--but you do more harm. You create more paupers, you fine gentlemen, with your Mission houses and your Settlement workers! You are trying to cover the ugly sores with a plaster of greenbacks. It won't heal the sickness--it won't heal it, I tell you." Her eyes were flaming and she stamped the floor passionately.

"We workers on the East Side have a name for you millionnaires. We call you the White Mice. You have pretty words and white lies, pretty ways and false smiles. Lies! lies! lies! You are only giving back, with the aid of your superficial fine ladies, the money stolen from the true money earners. You have discovered the Ghetto--you and the impertinent newspaper men. And like the reporters you come down to use us for 'copy.' You live here in comfort among us and then go away, write a book about our wretchedness and pose as altruistic heroes in your own silly set. How I loathe that word--altruism! As if the sacrifice of your personality does not always lead to self-deception, to hypocrisy! It is an excuse for the busybody-rich to advertise their charities. If they were as many armed as Briareus or the octopus, their charity would be known to each and every hand on their arms. These sentimental anarchs! They even marry our girls and carry them off to coddle their conscience with gilded gingerbread. Yet they would turn their backs on Christ if he came to Hester Street--Christ, the first modern anarch, a destructionist, a proletarian who preached fire and sword for the evil rich of his times. Nowadays he would be sent to Blackwell's Island for six months as a disturber of the peace or for healing without a license from the County Medical Association!"

"Like Johann Most," he ventured. She blazed at the name.

"No jokes, please. Most, too, has suffered. But I am no worshipper of bombs--and beer." This made him laugh, but as the laugh was not echoed he stared about him.

"But Yetta,--we must begin somewhere. I wish to become--to become--something like you.--"

She interrupted him roughly:

"To become--you an anarch! You are a sentimental rebel because your stomach is not strong enough for the gourmands who waste their time at your clubs. If your nerves were sound you might make a speech. But the New England conscience of your forefathers--they were nearly all clergymen, weren't they?--has ruined your strength. The best thing you can do, my boy, is to enter a seminary and later go to China as a missionary; else turn literary and edit an American edition of Who's Who in Hell! But leave our East Side alone. Do you know what New York reminds me of? Its centre is a strip of green and gold between two smouldering red rivers of fire--the East and West Sides. If they ever spill over the banks, all the little parasites of greater parasites, the lawyers, brokers, bankers, journalists, ecclesiastics, and middle men, will be devoured. Oh, what a glorious day! And oh, that terrible night when we marched behind the black flag and muffled drums down Broadway, that night in 1887 when the four martyrs were murdered, the hero Lingg having killed himself. What would you have done in those awful times?"

"Try me," he muttered, as he pulled down his cuffs, "try me!"

"Very well, I'll try you. Like Carlo Cafiero, the rich Italian anarch, you must give your money to us--every cent of it. Come with me to-night. I address a meeting of the brethren at Schwab's place--you know, the saloon across the street, off the square. We can eat our supper there, and then--"

"Try me," he reiterated, and his voice was hoarse with emotion, his pulse painfully irregular.

II

Notwithstanding his vows of heroism, Arthur could not force himself to like the establishment of Schwab, where the meeting was to take place. It was a beer-saloon, not one of those mock-mediæval uptown palaces, but a long room with a low ceiling, gaslit and shabby. The tables and chairs of hard, coarse wood were greasy--napkins and table-cloths were not to be mentioned, else would the brethren suspect the presence of an aristocrat. At the upper end, beyond the little black bar, there was a platform, upon it a table, a pianoforte, and a stool. Still he managed to conceal his repugnance to all these uninviting things and he sipped his diluted Rhine wine, ate his sandwich--an unpalatable one--under the watchful eyes of his companion. By eight o'clock the room was jammed with working-people, all talking and in a half dozen tongues. Occasionally Yetta left him to join a group, and where she went silence fell. She was the oracle of the crowd. At nine o'clock Arthur's head ached. He had smoked all his Turkish cigarettes, the odour of which caused some surprise--there was a capitalist present and they knew him. Only Yetta prevented disagreeable comment. The men, who belonged to the proletarian class, were poorly dressed and intelligent; the women wore shawls on their heads and smoked bad cigarettes. The saloon did not smell nice, Arthur thought. He had offered Yetta one of his imported cigarettes, but she lighted a horrible weed and blew the smoke in his face.

At ten o'clock he wished himself away. But a short, stout man with a lopsided face showing through his tangled beard, stood up and said in German:--

"All who are not _our_ friends, please leave the house."

No one stirred. The patron went from group to group saluting his customers and eying those who were not. Whether any password or signal was given Arthur could not say. When the blond, good-natured Schwab reached him, Yetta whispered in his ear. The host beamed on the young American and gave him a friendly poke in the back; Arthur felt as if he had been knighted. He said this to Yetta, but her attention was elsewhere. The doors and windows were quickly shut and bolted. She nudged his elbow--for they were sitting six at the table, much to his disgust; the other four drank noisily--and he followed her to the top of the room. A babble broke out as they moved along.

"It's Yetta's new catch. Yetta's rich fellow. Wait until she gets through with him--poor devil." These broken phrases made him shiver, especially as Yetta's expression, at first enigmatic, was now openly sardonic. What did she mean? Was she only tormenting him? Was this to be his test, his trial? His head was almost splitting, for the heat was great and the air bad. Again he wished himself home.

They reached the platform. "Jump up, Arthur, and help me," she commanded. He did so. But his discomfiture only grew apace with the increased heat--the dingy ceiling crushed him--and the rows in front, the entire floor seemed transformed to eyes, malicious eyes. She told him to sit down at the piano and play the Marseillaise. Then standing before the table she drew from her bosom a scarlet flag, and accompanied by the enthusiastic shoutings she led the singing. Arthur at the keyboard felt exalted. Forgotten the pains of a moment before. He hammered the keys vigorously, extorting from the battered instrument a series of curious croakings. Some of the keys did not "speak," some gave forth a brazen clangour from the rusty wires. No one cared. The singing stopped with the last verse.

"Now La Ravachole for our French brethren." This combination of revolutionary lyrics--Ça Ira and Carmagnole--was chanted fervidly. Then came for the benefit of the German the stirring measures from the Scotch-German John Henry Mackay's Sturm:--

Das ist der Kampf, den allnächtlich Bevor das Dunkel zerrinnt, Einsam und gramvoll auskämpt Des Jahrhunderts verlorenes Kind.

Yetta waved her long and beautifully shaped hands--they were her solitary vanity. The audience became still. She addressed them at first in deliberate tones, and Arthur noted that the interest was genuine--he wondered how long his fat-witted club friends could endure or appreciate the easy manner in which Yetta Silverman quoted from great thinkers, and sprinkled these quotations with her own biting observations.

"Richard Wagner--who loved humanity when he wrote Siegfried and regretted that love in Parsifal!

"Richard Wagner--who loved ice-cream more than Dresden's freedom--Wagner: the Swiss family bell-ringer of '48!

"To Max Stirner, Ibsen, and Richard Strauss belongs the twentieth century!

"Nietzsche--the anarch of aristocrats!

"Karl Marx--or the selfish Jew socialist!

"Lassalle--the Jew comedian of liberty!

"Bernard Shaw--the clever Celt who would sacrifice socialism for an epigram.

"Curse all socialists!" she suddenly screamed.

Arthur, entranced by the playful manner with which she disposed of friend and foe, was aghast at this outbreak. He saw another Yetta. Her face was ugly and revengeful. She sawed the air with her thin arms.

"Repeat after me," she adjured her hearers, "the Catechism of Sergei Netschajew, but begin with Herzen's noble motto: 'Long live chaos and destruction!'"

"Long live chaos and destruction!" was heartily roared.

The terrific catechism of the apostle Netschajew made Arthur shake with alternate woe and wrath. It was bloody-minded beyond description. Like a diabolic litany boomed the questions and answers:--

"Day and night we must have but one thought--inexorable destruction." And Arthur recalled how this pupil of Bakounine had with the assistance of Pryow and Nicolajew beguiled a certain suspected friend, Ivanow, into a lonely garden and killed him, throwing the body into a lake. After that Netschajew disappeared, though occasionally showing himself in Switzerland and England. Finally, in 1872, he was nabbed by the Russian government, sent to Siberia, and--!

_Ugh!_ thought Arthur, what a people, what an ending! And Yetta--why did she now so openly proclaim destruction as the only palliative for social crime when she had so eloquently disclaimed earlier in the day the propaganda by force, by dagger, and dynamite?--He had hardly asked himself the question when there came a fierce rapping of wooden clubs at door and window. Instantly a brooding hush like that which precedes a hurricane fell upon the gathering. But Yetta did not long remain silent.

"Quick, Arthur, play the Star-Spangled Banner! It's the police. I want to save these poor souls--" she added, with a gulp in her throat; "quick, you idiot, the Star-Spangled Banner." But Arthur was almost fainting. His ringers fell listlessly on the keys, and they were too weak to make a sound. The police! he moaned, as the knocking deepened into banging and shouting. What a scandal! What a disgrace! He could never face his own world after this! To be caught with a lot of crazy anarchists in a den like this!--Smash, went the outside door! And the newspapers! They would laugh him out of town. He, Arthur Schopenhauer Wyartz, the Amateur Anarch! He saw the hideous headlines. Why, the very daily in which some of his fortune was invested would be the first to mock him most!

The assault outside increased. He leaped to the floor, where Yetta was surrounded by an excited crowd. He plucked her sleeve. She gazed at him disdainfully.

"For God's sake, Yetta, get me out of this--this awful scrape. My mother, my sisters--the disgrace!" She laughed bitterly.

"You poor chicken among hawks! But I'll help you--follow me." He reached the cellar stairs, and she showed him a way by which he could walk safely into the alley, thence to the street back of their building. He shook her hand with the intensity of a man in the clutches of the ague.

"But you--why don't you go with me?" he asked, his teeth chattering.

The brittle sound of glass breaking was heard. She answered, as she took his feverish hand:--

"Because, you brave revolutionist, I must stick to my colours. Farewell!" And remounting the stairs, she saw the bluecoats awaiting her.

"I hope the police will catch him anyhow," she said. It was her one relapse into femininity, and as she quietly surrendered she did not regret it.

III

Old Koschinsky's store on the avenue was the joy of the neighbourhood. For hours, their smeary faces flattened against the glass, the children watched the tireless antics of the revolving squirrels; the pouter pigeons expand their breasts into feathered balloons; the goldfish, as they stolidly swam, their little mouths open, their eyes following the queer human animals imprisoned on the other side of the plate-glass window. Canary birds by the hundreds made the shop a trying one for sensitive ears. There were no monkeys. Koschinsky, whose heart was as soft as butter, though he was a formidable revolutionist--so he swore over at Schwab's--declared that monkeys were made in the image of tyrannical humans. He would have none of them. Parrots? There were enough of the breed around him, he told the gossiping women, who, with their _scheitels_, curved noses, and shining eyes, lent to the quarter its Oriental quality.

It was in Koschinsky's place that Arthur first encountered Yetta. He was always prowling about the East Side in search of sociological prey, and the modest little woman with her intelligent and determined face attracted him strongly. They fell into easy conversation near a cage of canaries, and the acquaintance soon bloomed into a friendship. A week after the raid on Schwab's, Arthur, very haggard and nervous, wandered into Koschinsky's. The old man greeted him:--

"Hu! So you've just come down from the Island! Well--how did you like it up there? Plenty water--eh?" The sarcasm was too plain, and the young man, mumbling some sort of an answer, turned to go.

"Hold on there!" said Koschinsky. "I expect a very fine bird soon. You'd better wait. It was here only last night; and the bird asked whether you had been in." Arthur started.

"For me? Miss Silverman?"

"I said a bird," was the dogged reply. And then Yetta walked up to Arthur and asked:--

"Where have you been? Why haven't you called?" He blushed.

"I was ashamed."

"Because you were so, so--frightened, that night?"

"Yes."

"But nothing came of the affair. The police could get no evidence. We had no flags--"

"That scarlet one I saw you with--what of it?" She smiled.

"Did you look in your pockets when you got home? I stuffed the flag in one of them while we were downstairs." He burst into genteel laughter.

"No, I threw off my clothes in such disgust that night that I vowed I would never get into them again. I gave the suit to my valet."

"Your valet," she gravely returned; "he may become _one of us_."

"Fancy, when I reached the house--I went up in a hansom, for I was bareheaded--my mother was giving the biggest kind of a ball. I had no end of trouble trying to sneak in unobserved."

She regarded him steadily. "Isn't it strange," she went on, "how the bull-dog police of this town persecute us--and they _should_ be sympathetic. They had to leave their own island because of tyranny. Yet as soon as they step on this soil they feel themselves self-constituted tyrants. Something of the sort happened with your own ancestors--" she looked at him archly--"the Pilgrim Fathers were not very tolerant to the Quakers, the Jews, Catholics, or any sect not their own. Now you do not seem to have inherited that ear-slicing temperament--"

"Oh, stop, Yetta! Don't make any more fun of me. I confess I am cowardly--I hate rows and scandals--"

"'What shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his liberty?'"

"Yes, I know. But this was such a nasty little affair. The newspapers would have driven me crazy."

"But suppose, for the sake of argument," she said, "that the row would not have appeared in the newspapers--what then?"

"What do you mean? By Jove, there was nothing in the papers, now that I come to think of it. I went the next morning out to Tuxedo and forgot--what do you mean by this mystery, Yetta?"

"I mean this--suppose, for the sake of further argument, I should tell you that there was no row, no police, no arrests!" He gasped.

"O-h, what an ass I made of myself. So that was your trial! And I failed. Oh, Yetta, Yetta--what shall I say?" The girl softened. She took both his hands in her shapely ones and murmured:--

"Dear little boy, I treated you roughly. Forgive me! There was a real descent by the police--it was no deception. That's why I asked you to play the Star-Spangled Banner--"

"Excuse me, Yetta; but why did you do that? Why didn't you meet the police defiantly chanting the Marseillaise? That would have been braver--more like the true anarchist." She held down her head.

"Because--because--those poor folks--I wanted to spare them as much trouble with the police as possible," she said in her lowest tones.

"And why," he pursued triumphantly, "why did you preach bombs after assuring me that reform must come through the spiritual propaganda?" She quickly replied:--

"Because our most dangerous foe was in the audience. You know. The man with the beard who first spoke. He has often denounced me as lukewarm; and then you know words are not as potent as deeds with the proletarians. One assassination is of more value than all the philosophy of Tolstoy. And that old wind-bag sat near us and watched us--watched me. That's why I let myself go--" she was blushing now, and old Koschinsky nearly dropped a bird-cage in his astonishment.

"Yetta, Yetta!" Arthur insisted, "wind-bag, you call your comrade? Were you not, just for a few minutes, in the same category? Again she was silent.

"I feel now," he ejaculated, as he came very close to her, "that we must get outside of these verbal entanglements. I want you to become my wife." His heart sank as he thought of his mother's impassive, high-bred air--with such a figure for a Fifth Avenue bride! The girl looked into his weak blue eyes with their area of saucer-like whiteness. She shook her stubborn head.

"I shall never marry. I do not believe in such an institution. It degrades women, makes tyrants of men. No, Arthur--I am fond of you, perhaps--" she paused,--"so fond that I might enter into any relation but marriage,--that never!"

"And I tell you, Yetta, anarchy or no anarchy, I could never respect the woman if she were not mine legally. In America we do these things differently--" he was not allowed to finish.

She glared at him, then she strode to the shop door and opened it.

"Farewell to you, Mr. Arthur Schopenhauer Wyartz, amateur anarchist. Better go back to your mother and sisters! _Mein Gott_, Schopenhauer, too!" He put his Alpine hat on his bewildered head and without a word went out. She did not look after him, but walked over to the old bird-fancier and sat on his leather-topped stool. Presently she rested her elbows on her knees and propped her chin with her gloveless hands. Her eyes were red. Koschinsky peeped at her and shook his head.

"Yetta--you know what I think!--Yetta, the boy was right! You shouldn't have asked him for the Star-Spangled Banner! The Marseillaise would have been better."

"I don't care," she viciously retorted.

"I know, I know. But a nice boy--_so_ well fixed."

"I don't care," she insisted. "I'm married to the revolution."

"Yah, yah! the revolution, Yetta--" he pushed his lean, brown forefinger into the cage of an enraged canary--"the revolution! Yes, Yetta Silverman, the revolution!" She sighed.

XIV

HALL OF THE MISSING FOOTSTEPS

So I saw in my dream that the man began to run.

--_Pilgrim's Progress_.

I

As the first-class carriage rolled languidly out of Balak's only railway station on a sultry February evening, Pobloff, the composer, was not sorry.

"I wish it were Persia instead of Ramboul," he reflected. Luga, his wife, he had left weeping at the station; but since the day she disappeared with his orchestra for twenty-four hours, Pobloff's affection had gradually cooled; he was leaving the capital without a pang on a month's leave of absence--a delicate courtesy of the king's extended to a brother ruler, though a semi-barbarous one, the khedive of Ramboul.

Pobloff was not sad nor was he jubilantly glad. The journey was an easy one; a night and day and the next night would see him, God willing,--he crossed himself,--in the semi-tropical city of Nirgiz. From Balak to Nirgiz, from southeastern Europe to Asia Minor!

The heir-apparent was said to be a music-loving lad, very much under the cunning thumb of his grim old aunt, who, rumour averred, wore a black beard, and was the scourge of her little kingdom. All that might be changed when the prince would reach his majority; his failing health and morbid melancholy had frightened the grand vizier, and the king of Balakia had been petitioned to send Pobloff, the composer, designer of inimitable musical masques, Pobloff, the irresistible interpreter of Chopin, to the aid of the ailing youth.

So this middle-aged David left his nest to go harp for a Saul yet in his adolescence. What his duties were to be Pobloff had not the slightest idea. He had received no special instructions; a member of the royal household bore him the official mandate and a purse fat enough to soothe his wife's feelings. After appointing his first violin conductor of the Balakian Orchestra during his absence, the fussy, stout, good-natured Russian (he was born at Kiew, 1865, the biographical dictionaries say) secured a sleeping compartment on the Ramboul express, from the windows of which he contemplated with some satisfaction the flat land that gradually faded in the mists of night as the train tore its way noisily over a rude road-bed.

II

Pobloff slept. He usually snored; but this evening he was too fatigued. He heard not the sudden stoppages at lonely way stations where hoarse voices and a lantern represented the life of the place; he did not heed the engine as it thirstily sucked water from a tank in the heart of the Karpakians; and he was surprised, pleased, proud, when a hot February sun, shining through his window, awoke him.

It was six o'clock of a fine morning, and the train was toiling up a precipitous grade to the spine of the mountain, where the down-slope would begin and air-brakes rule. Pobloff looked about him. He scratched his long nose, a characteristic gesture, and began wondering when coffee would be ready. He pressed the bell. The guard entered, a miserable bandit who bravely wore his peaked hat with green plumes à la Tyrol. He spoke four tongues and many dialects; Pobloff calculated his monthly salary at forty roubles.

"No, Excellency, the coffee will be hot and refreshing at Kerb, where we arrive about seven." He cleared his throat, put out his hand, bowed low, and disappeared. The composer grumbled. Kerb!--not until that wretched eyrie in the clouds! And such coffee! No matter. Pobloff never felt in robuster health; his irritable nerves were calmed by a sound night's sleep. The air was fresher than down in the malarial valley, where stood the shining towers of Balak; he could see them pinked by the morning sun and low on the horizon. All together he was glad....

Hello, this must be Kerb! A moment later Pobloff bellowed for the guard; he had shattered the electric annunciator by his violence. Then, not waiting to be served, he ran into the vestibule, and soon was on the station platform, inhaling huge drafts of air into his big chest. Ah! It was glorious up there. What surprised him was the number of human beings clambering over the steps, running and gabbling like a lot of animals let loose from their cages. The engineer beside his quivering machine enjoyed his morning coffee. And there were many turbaned pagans and some veiled women mixed with the crowd.