Visionaries Part 18

And saying this she vanished in the gloom, instantly followed by her agitated mother.

Hubert turned toward the wall, and upon it he recognized the stepfather of Berenice. After staring at each other like two moon-struck wights, the American spoke:--

"I swear that I, alone, am to blame for this--" The other wore the grin of a malevolent satyr. His voice was thick.

"Why apologize, Hubert? You know that it has been my devoted wish that you marry Berenice." He swayed on his perch. Hubert's brain was in a fog.

"Berenice!" said he.

"Yes--Berenice. Why not? She loves you."

"Then--you--Madame Mineur--" stammered Hubert. The Frenchman placed his finger on his nose and slyly whispered:--

"Don't be afraid! I'll not tell my wife that I caught Berenice with you alone in the park--you Don Juan! Now to the portrait--I must see that masterpiece of yours. Berenice wrote me about it." He nodded his head sleepily.

"Berenice wrote you about it!" was the mechanical reply.

"I'll join you and we'll go to the house." He tried to step down, but rolled over at Hubert's feet.

"What a joke is this champagne," he growled as he was lifted to his tottering legs. "We had a glorious time this afternoon before I left Paris. Hurrah! You're to be my son-in-law. And, my boy, I don't envy you--that's the truth. With such a little demon for a wife--I pity you, pity you--hurrah!"

"I am more to be despised," muttered Hubert Falcroft, as they moved away from the peaceful moonlit wall.

XIII

A SENTIMENTAL REBELLION

I came not to send peace, but a sword.... I am come to send fire on the earth.

I

Her living room was a material projection of Yetta Silverman's soul. The apartment on the north side of Tompkins Square, was small, sunny, and comfortable. From its windows in spring and summer she could see the boys and girls playing around the big, bare park, and when her eyes grew tired of the street she rested them on her beloved books and pictures.

On one wall hung the portraits of Herzen, Bakounine and Kropotkin--the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost of the anarchistic movement, as she piously called them. Other images of the propaganda were scattered over the walls: Netschajew--the St. Paul of the Nihilists--Ravachol, Octave Mirbeau, Jean Grave, Reclus, Spies, Parsons, Engels, and Lingg--the last four victims of the Haymarket affair, and the Fenians, Allen, Larkin, and O'Brien, the Manchester martyrs. Among the philosophers, poets, and artists were Schopenhauer, Tolstoy, Max Stirner--a rare drawing--Ibsen, Th.o.r.eau, Emerson--the great American individualists--Beethoven, Zola, Richard Strauss, Carlyle, Nietzsche, Gorky, Walt Whitman, Dostoiewsky, Mazzini, Rodin, Constantin Meunier, Sh.e.l.ley, Turgenieff, Bernard Shaw, and finally the kindly face and intellectual head of the lawyer who so zealously defended the Chicago anarchists. This diversified group, together with much revolutionary literature, poems, pamphlets, the works of Proudhon, Songs Before Sunrise, by Swinburne, and a beautiful etching of Makart's proletarian Christ, completed, with an old square pianoforte, the ensemble of an individual room, a room that expressed, as her admirers said, the strong, suffering soul of Yetta Silverman, Russian anarchist, agitator, and exile.

"Come in," she cried out in her sharp, though not unpleasant, voice. A thin young man entered. She clapped her hands.

"Oh, so you changed your mind!" He looked at her over his gla.s.ses with his weak, blue eyes, the white of which predominated. Simply dressed, he nevertheless gave the impression of superior social station. He was of the New England theological-seminary type--narrow-chested, gaunt as to visage, by temperament drawn to theology, or, in default of religious belief, an ardent enthusiast in sociology. The contracted temples, uncertain gaze, and absence of fulness beneath the eyes betrayed the unimaginative man. Art was a sealed book to him, though taxation fairly fired his suspicious soul. He was nervous because he was dyspeptic, and at one time of his career he mistook stomach trouble for a call to the pulpit. And he was a millionnaire more times than he took the trouble to count.

"Yes," he timidly replied, "I _did_ change my wavering mind--as you call that deficient organ of mine--and so I returned. I hope I don't disturb you!"

"No, not yet. I am sitting with my hands folded in my lap, like the women of your cla.s.s--_ladies_, you call them." She accented the t.i.tle, without bitterness. A cursory estimate of her appearance would have placed her in the profession of a trained nurse, or perhaps in the remotest a.n.a.lysis, a sewing woman of superior tastes. She was small, wiry, her head too large for her body; but the abounding nervous vitality, the harsh fire that burned in her large brown eyes, and the firm mouth would have attracted the attention of the most careless. Her mask, with its high Slavic cheek-bones and sharp Jewish nose, proclaimed her a magnetic woman. In her quarter on the far East Side the children called her "Aunt Yetta." She was a sister of charity in the guise of a revolutionist.

"You sit but you think, and _my_ ladies never think," he answered, in his boyish voice. He seemed proud to be so near this distinguished creature. Had she not been sent to Siberia, driven out of France and Germany, and arrested in New York for her incendiary speeches? She possessed the most extraordinary power over an audience. Once, at Cooper Union, Arthur had seen her control a crazy mob bent on destroying the building because a few stupid police had interfered with the meeting.

Among her brethren Yetta Silverman was cla.s.sed with Louise Michel, Sophia Perowskaia, and Vera Za.s.soulitch, those valiant women, true guardian angels, veritable martyrs to the cause. He thought of them as he watched the delicate-looking young woman before him.

Arthur was too chilly of blood to fall in love with her; his admiration was purely cerebral. He was unlucky enough to have had for a father a shrewd, visionary man, that curious combination of merchant and dreamer once to be found in New England. A follower of Fourier, a friend of Emerson, the elder Wyartz had gone to Brook Farm and had left it in a few months. Dollars, not dreams, was his true ambition. But he registered his dissatisfaction with this futile attempt by christening his only son, Arthur Schopenhauer; it was old Wyartz's way of getting even with the ideal. Obsessed from the age of spelling by his pessimistic middle name, the boy had grown up in a cloudy compromise of rebellion and the church. For a few years he vacillated; he went to Harvard, studied the Higher Criticism, made a trip abroad, wrote a little book recording the contending impulses of his pale, hara.s.sed soul--Oscillations was the t.i.tle--and returned to Boston a mild anarch.

Emerson the mystic, transposed to the key of France, sometimes makes bizarre music.

She arose and, walking over to him, put her hand nonchalantly on his shoulder.

"Arthur, comrade, what do you mean to do with yourself--come, what will all this enthusiasm bring forth?" He fumbled his gla.s.ses with his thumb and index finger--a characteristic gesture--and nervously regarded her before answering. Then he smiled at his idea.

"We might marry and fight the great fight together like the Jenkins crowd."

"Marry!" she exclaimed--her guttural Russian accent manifested itself when she became excited--"marry! You are only a baby, Arthur Schopenhauer Wyartz--_Herrgott_, this child bears _such_ a name!--and while I am sure the thin Yankee blood of the Jenkins family needed a Jewish wife, and a Slav, I am not that way of thinking for myself. I am married to the revolution." Her eyes dwelt with reverence on her new Christian saints, those Christs of the gutter, who had sacrificed their lives in the modern arena for the idea of liberty, who were thrown to the wild beasts and slaughtered by the latter-day pagans of wealth, and barbarians in purple. He followed her glance. It lashed him to jerky enthusiasm.

"I am not joking," he earnestly a.s.serted, "so pardon my rashness. Only believe in my sincerity. I am no anarch on paper. I am devoted to your cause and to you, Yetta, to my last heart's blood. Do you need my wealth? It is yours. You can work miracles with millions in America.

Take it all."

"It's not money we need, but men," she answered darkly. "Your millions, which came to you innocently enough, represent the misery of--how many?

Let the multi-millionnaires give away their money to found theological colleges and libraries--_my_ party will have none of it. Its men are armed by the ideas that we prefer. I don't blame the rich or the political tyrants--the mob has to be educated, the unhappy proletarians, who have so long submitted to the crack of the whip that they wouldn't know what to do with their freedom if they had it. All mobs believe alike in filth and fire, whether antique slaves free for their day's Saturnalia, or the Paris crowds of '93. Their ideas of happiness are pillage, bloodshed, drunkenness, revenge. Every popular uprising sinks the _people_ deeper in their misery. Every bomb thrown discredits the cause of liberty."

Astonished by this concession, Arthur wondered how she had ever earned her reputation as the Russian "Red Virgin," as an unequivocal terrorist.

Thus he had heard her hailed at all the meetings which she addressed.

But she did not notice his perturbation, she was following another train.

"You Americans do not love money as much as the Europeans--who h.o.a.rd it away, who worship it on their naked knees; but you do something worse--you love it for the sake of the sport, a cruel sport for the poor. You go into speculation as the English go after big game. It is a sport. This sport involves food--and you gamble with wheat and meat for counters, while starving men and women pay for the game. America is yet rich enough to afford this sport, but some day it will become crowded like Europe, and then, beware! Wasn't it James Hinton who said that 'Overthrowing society means an inverted pyramid getting straight'?

"And America," she continued, "bribes us with the gilded sentimental phrases of Rousseau, Mirabeau, and Thomas Paine woven into your national const.i.tution, with its presumptuous declaration that all men are born free and equal--shades of Darwin and Nietzsche!--and that universal suffrage is a panacea for all evils. In no country boasting itself Christian is there a system so artfully devised for keeping the _poor_ free and unequal, no country where so-called public opinion, as expressed in the press, is used to club the majority into submission.

And you are all proud of this liberty--a liberty at which the despised serf in Russia or the man of the street in London sneers--there is to-day more _individual_ liberty in England and Germany than in the United States. Don't smile! I can prove it. As for France or Italy--they are a hundred years ahead of you in munic.i.p.al government. But I shan't talk blue-books at you, Arthur!"

"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 pa.s.sionately.

"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 a.s.sociation!"

"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 h.e.l.l! 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 m.u.f.fled 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 hoa.r.s.e with emotion, his pulse painfully irregular.