Before such a faith, autocracy and tyranny die. Under such a law every evil withers, every question is unravelled. There are no more problems of poverty and riches, none of greed and oppression.
The tyranny of convention, of observance, of taboo, of folkways, ends. And into the brain of all living beings will be born the perfect comprehension of their own indestructible divinity.
* * * * *
Part of this she ventured to say to Ilse Westgard one day, when they had met for luncheon in a modest tea-room on Forty-third Street.
But Ilse, always inclined toward militancy, did not entirely agree with Palla.
“To embody in one’s daily life the principles of one’s living faith is scarcely sufficient,” she said. “Good is a force, not an inert condition. So is evil. And we should not sit still while evil moves.”
“Example is not inertia,” protested Palla.
“Example, alone, is sterile, I think,” said the ex-girl-soldier of the Battalion of Death, buttering a crescent. She ate it with the delightful appetite of flawless health, and poured out more chocolate.
“For instance, dear,” she went on, “the forces of evil — of degeneration, ignorance, envy, ferocity, are gathering like a tornado in Russia. Virtuous example, sucking its thumbs and minding its own business, will be torn to fragments when the storm breaks.”
“The Bolsheviki?”
“The Reds. The Terrorists, I mean. You know as well as I do what they really are — merely looters skulking through the smoke of a world in flames — buzzards on the carcass of a civilisation dead. But, Palla, they do not sit still and suck their thumbs and say, ‘I am a Terrorist. Behold me and be converted.’ No, indeed! They are moving, always in motion, preoccupied by their hellish designs.”
“In Russia, yes,” admitted Palla.
“Everywhere, dearest. Here, also.”
“I believe there are scarcely any in America,” insisted Palla.
“The country crawls with them,” retorted Ilse. “They work like moles, but already if you look about you can see the earth stirring above their tunnels. They are here, everywhere, active, scheming, plotting, whispering treason, stirring discontent, inciting envy, teaching treason.
“They are the Russians — Christians and Jews — who have filtered in here to do the nation mischief. They are the Germans who blew up factories, set fires, scuttled ships. They are foreigners who came here poisoned with envy; who have acquired nothing; whose greed and ferocity are whetted and ready for a universal conflagration by which they alone could profit.
“They are the labour leaders who break faith and incite to violence; they are the I. W. W.; they are the Black Hand, the Camorra; they are the penniless who would slay and rob; the landless who would kill and seize; the ignorant, nursing suspicion; the shiftless, brooding crimes to bring them riches quickly.
“And, Palla, your Law of Love and Service is good. But not for these.”
“What law for them, then?”
“Education. Maybe with machine guns.”
Palla shook her head. “Is that the way to educate defectives?”
“When they come at you en masse, yes!”
Palla laughed. “Dear,” she said, “there is no nation-wide Terrorist plot. These mental defectives are not in mass anywhere in America.”
“They are in dangerous groups everywhere. And every group is devoting its cunning to turning the working masses into a vast mob of the Black Hundred! They did it in Russia. They are working for it all over the world. You do not believe it?”
“No, I don’t, Ilse.”
“Very well. You shall come with me this evening. Are you busy?”
The thought of Jim glimmered in her mind. He might feel aggrieved. But he ought to begin to realise that he couldn’t be with her every evening.
“No, I haven’t any plans, Ilse,” she said, “no definite engagement, I mean. Will you dine at home with me?”
“Early, then. Because there is a meeting which you and I shall attend. It is an education.”
“An anarchist meeting?”
“Yes, Reds. I think we should go — perhaps take part — —”
“What?”
“Why not? I shall not listen to lies and remain silent!” said Ilse, laughing. “The Revolution was good. But the Bolsheviki are nothing but greedy thieves and murderers. You and I know that. If anybody teaches people the contrary, I certainly shall have something to say.”
Palla desired to purchase silk for sofa pillows, having acquired a chaise-longue for her bedroom.
So she and Ilse went out into the sunshine and multi-coloured crowd; and all the afternoon they shopped very blissfully — which meant, also, lingering before store windows, drifting into picture-galleries, taking tea at Sherry’s, and finally setting out for home through a beflagged avenue jammed with traffic.
Dusk fell early but the drooping, orange-tinted globes which had replaced the white ones on the Fifth Avenue lamps were not yet lighted; and there still remained a touch of sunset in the sky when they left the bus.
At the corner of Palla’s street, there seemed to be an unusual congestion, and now, above the noise of traffic, they caught the sound of a band; and turned at the curb to see, supposing it to be a military music.
The band was a full one, not military, wearing a slatternly sort of uniform but playing well enough as they came up through the thickening dusk, marching close to the eastern curb of the avenue.
They were playing The Marseillaise. Four abreast, behind them, marched a dingy column of men and women, mostly of foreign aspect and squatty build, carrying a flag which seemed to be entirely red.
Palla, perplexed, incredulous, yet almost instantly suspecting the truth, stared at the rusty ranks, at the knots of red ribbon on every breast.
Other people were staring, too, as the unexpected procession came shuffling along — late shoppers, business men returning home, soldiers — all paused to gaze at this sullen visaged battalion clumping up the avenue.
“Surely,” said Palla to Ilse, “these people can’t be Reds!”
“Surely they are!” returned the tall, fair girl calmly. Her face had become flushed, and she stepped to the edge of the curb, her blue, wrathful eyes darkening like sapphires.
A soldier came up beside her. Others, sailors and soldiers, stopped to look. There was a red flag passing. Suddenly Ilse stepped from the sidewalk, wrenched the flag from the burly Jew who carried it, and, with the same movement, shattered the staff across her knee.
Men and women in the ranks closed in on her; a shrill roar rose from them, but the soldiers and sailors, cheering and laughing, broke into the enraged ranks, tearing off red rosettes, cuffing and kicking the infuriated Terrorists, seizing every seditious banner, flag, emblem and placard in sight.
Female Reds, shrieking with rage, clawed, kicked and bit at soldier, sailor and civilian. A gaunt man, with a greasy bunch of hair under a bowler, waved dirty hands above the mêlée and shouted that he had the Mayor’s permission to parade.
Everywhere automobiles were stopping, crowds of people hurrying up, policemen running. The electric lights snapped alight, revealed a mob struggling there in the yellowish glare.
Ilse had calmly stepped to the sidewalk, the fragments of flag and staff in her white-gloved hands; and, as she saw the irresponsible soldiers and blue-jackets wading lustily into the Reds — saw the lively riot which her own action had started — an irresistible desire to laugh seized her.
Clear and gay above the yelling of Bolsheviki and the “Yip — yip!” of the soldiers, peeled her infectious laughter. But Palla, more gentle, stood with dark eyes dilated, fearful of real bloodshed in the furious scene raging in the avenue before her.
A little shrimp of a Terrorist, a huge red rosette streaming from his buttonhole, suddenly ran at Ilse and seized the broken staff and the rags of the red flag. And Palla, alarmed, caught him by the coat-collar and dragged him screeching and cursing away from her friend, rebuking him in
a firm but excited voice.
Ilse came over, shouldering her superb figure through the crowd; looked at the human shrimp a moment; then her laughter pealed anew.
“That’s the man who abused me in Denmark!” she said. “Oh, Palla, look at him! Do you really believe you could educate a thing like that!”
The man had wriggled free, and now he turned a flat, whiskered visage on Palla, menaced her with both soiled fists, inarticulate in his fury.
But police were everywhere, now, sweeping this miniature riot from the avenue, hustling the Reds uptown, checking the skylarking soldiery, sending amused or indignant citizens about their business.
A burly policeman said to Ilse with a grin: “I’ll take what’s left of that red flag, Miss;” and the girl handed it to him still laughing.
Soldiers wearing overseas caps cheered her and Palla. Everybody on the turbulent sidewalk was now laughing.
“D’yeh see that blond nab the red flag outer that big kike’s fists?” shouted one soldier to his sweating bunkie. “Some skirt!”
“God love the Bolsheviki she grabs by the slack o’ the pants!” cried a blue-jacket who had lost his cap. A roar followed.
“Only one flag in this little old town!” yelled a citizen nursing a cut cheek with reddened handkerchief.
“G’wan, now!” grumbled a policeman, trying to look severe; “it’s all over; they’s nothing to see. Av ye got homes — —”
“Yip! Where do we go from here?” demanded a marine.
“Home!” repeated the policeman; “ — that’s the answer. G’wan, now, peaceable — lave these ladies pass! — —”
Ilse and Palla, still walled in by a grinning, admiring soldiery, took advantage of the opening and fled, followed by cheers as far as Palla’s door.
“Good heavens, Ilse,” she exclaimed in fresh dismay, as she began to realise the rather violent rôles they both had played, “ — is that your idea of education for the masses?”
A servant answered the bell and they entered the house. And presently, seated on the chaise-longue in Palla’s bedroom, Ilse Westgard alternately gazed upon her ruined white gloves and leaned against the cane back, weak with laughter.
“How funny! How degrading! But how funny!” she kept repeating. “That large and enraged Jew with the red flag! — the wretched little Christian shrimp you carried wriggling away by the collar! Oh, Palla! Palla! Never shall I forget the expression on your face — like a bored housewife, who, between thumb and forefinger, carries a dead mouse by the tail — —”
“He was trying to kick you, my dear,” explained Palla, beginning to remove the hairpins from her hair.
Ilse touched her eyes with her handkerchief.
“They might have thrown bombs,” she said. “It’s all very well to laugh, darling, but sometimes such affairs are not funny.”
Palla, seated at her dresser, shook down a mass of thick, bright-brown hair, and picked up her comb.
“I am wondering,” she said, turning partly toward Ilse, “what Jim Shotwell would think of me.”
“Fighting on the street!” — her laughter rang out uncontrolled. And Palla, too, was laughing rather uncertainly, for, as her recollection of the affair became more vivid, her doubts concerning the entire procedure increased.
“Of course,” she said, “that red flag was outrageous, and you were quite right in destroying it. One could hardly buttonhole such a procession and try to educate it.”
Ilse said: “One can usually educate a wild animal, but never a rabid one. You’ll see, to-night.”
“Where are we going, dear?”
“We are going to a place just west of Seventh Avenue, called the Red Flag Club.”
“Is it a club?”
“No. The Reds hire it several times a week and try to fill it with people. There is the menace to this city and to the nation, Palla — for these cunning fomenters of disorder deluge the poorer quarters of the town with their literature. That’s where they get their audiences. And that is where are being born the seeds of murder and destruction.”
Palla, combing out her hair, gazed absently into the mirror.
“Why should not we do the same thing?” she asked.
“Form a club, rent a room, and talk to people?”
“Yes; why not?” asked Palla.
“That is exactly why I wish you to come with me to-night — to realise how we should combat these criminal and insane agents of all that is most terrible in Europe.
“And you are right, Palla; that is the way to fight them. That is the way to neutralise the poison they are spreading. That is the way to educate the masses to that sane socialism in which we both believe. It can be done by education. It can be done by matching them with club for club, meeting for meeting, speech for speech. And when, in some local instances, it can not be done that way, then, if there be disorder, force!”
“It can be done entirely by education,” said Palla. “But remember! — Marx gave the forces of disorder their slogan— ‘Unite!’ Only a rigid organisation of sane civilisation can meet that menace.”
“You are very right, darling, and a club to combat the Bolsheviki already exists. Vanya and Marya already have joined; there are workmen and working women, college professors and college graduates among its members. Some, no doubt, will be among the audience at the Red Flag Club to-night.
“I shall join this club. I think you, also, will wish to enroll. It is called only ‘Number One.’ Other clubs are to be organised and numbered.
“And now you see that, in America, the fight against organised rascality and exploited insanity has really begun.”
Palla, her hair under discipline once more, donned a fresh but severe black gown. Ilse unpinned her hat, made a vigorous toilet, then lighted a cigarette and sauntered into the living room where the telephone was ringing persistently.
“Please answer,” said Palla, fastening her gown before the pier glass.
Presently Ilse called her: “It’s Mr. Shotwell, dear.”
Palla came into the room and picked up the receiver:
“Yes? Oh, good evening, Jim! Yes.... Yes, I am going out with Ilse.... Why, no, I had no engagement with you, Jim! I’m sorry, but I didn’t understand — No; I had no idea that you expected to see me — wait a moment, please!” — she put one hand over the transmitter, turned to Ilse with flushed cheeks and a shyly interrogative smile: “Shall I ask him to dine with us and go with us?”
“If you choose,” called Ilse, faintly amused.
Then Palla called him: “ — Jim! Come to dinner at once. And wear your business clothes.... What?... Yes, your every day clothes.... What?... Why, because I ask you, Jim. Isn’t that a reason?... Thank you.... Yes, come immediately.... Good-bye, de — —”
She coloured crimson, hung up the receiver, and picked up the evening paper, not daring to glance at Ilse.
CHAPTER XI
When Shotwell arrived, dinner had already been announced, and Palla and Ilse Westgard were in the unfurnished drawing-room, the former on a step-ladder, the latter holding that collapsible machine with one hand and Palla’s ankle with the other.
Palla waved a tape-measure in airy salute: “I’m trying to find out how many yards it takes for my curtains,” she explained. But she climbed down and gave him her hand; and they went immediately into the dining-room.
“What’s all this nonsense about the Red Flag Club?” he inquired, when they were seated. “Do you and Ilse really propose going to that dirty anarchist joint?”
“How do you know it’s dirty?” demanded Palla, “ — or do you mean it’s only morally dingy?”
Both she and Ilse appeared to be in unusually lively spirits, and they poked fun at him when he objected to their attending the meeting in question.
“Very well,” he said, “but there may be a free fight. There was a row on Fifth Avenue this evening, where some of those rats were parading with red flags.”
Palla laughed and cast a demure glance at Ilse.
The sea-blue eyes of Ilse were full of mischief. He was aware of Palla’s subtle exhilaration, too.
“Why hunt for a free fight?” he asked.
“Why avoid one if it’s free?” retorted Ilse, gaily.
They all laughed.
“Is that your idea of liberty?” he asked Palla.
“What is all human progress but a free fight?” she retorted. “Of course,” she added, “Ilse means an intellectual battle. If they misbehave otherwise, I shall flee.”
“I don’t see why you want to go to hear a lot of Reds talk bosh,” he remarked. “It isn’t like you, Palla.”
“It is like me. You see you don’t really know me, Jim,” she added with smiling malice.
“The main thing,” said Ilse, “is for one to be one’s self. Palla and I are social revolutionists. Revolutionists revolt. A revolt is a row. There can be no row unless people fight.”
He smiled at their irresponsible gaiety, a little puzzled by it and a little uneasy.
“All right,” he said, as coffee was served; “but it’s just as well that I’m going with you.”
The ex-girl-soldier gave him an amused glance, lighted a cigarette, glanced at her wrist-watch, then rose lightly to her graceful, athletic height, saying that they ought to start.
So they went away to pin on their hats, and Jim called a taxi.
* * * * *
The hall was well filled when they arrived. There was a rostrum, on which two wooden benches faced a table and a chair in the centre. On the table stood a pitcher of drinking water, a soiled glass, and a jug full of red carnations.
A dozen men and women occupied the two benches. At the table a man sat writing. He held a lighted cigar in one hand; a red silk handkerchief trailed from his coat pocket.
* * * * *
As Ilse and Palla seated themselves on an empty bench and Shotwell found a place beside them, somebody on the next bench beyond leaned over and bade them good evening in a low voice.
Works of Robert W Chambers Page 931