Page images
PDF
EPUB

Again he was surprised that she accepted so readily, believed so pitifully. They went out, crossed the veranda, and set foot on the lawn. "May I see it?" she entreated. "No," he said. He himself had forgotten that not one word was written; he felt that the thing existed, and was beyond measure valuable to him. "Why not?" she asked. "Oh, why not?"

He continued walking, never looking at her.

"Am I lovely-to you?" she asked. He could not ignore that.

"Lovelier than any dream. More beautiful and glamourous than I could ever find words for. There was never a face like yours before. Never! And your hand, like a little carved thing, done by witchcraft, set with jewels-"

"This hand?" she asked, touching his sleeve.

He covered it with his own.
"It's perfect," he said. "Every-

"Because you 've gone away from thing about you is perfect, but there's me," he said.

She was not able to keep up with him; she had stopped some paces behind, and her voice followed him, clear and mournful.

"I-gone away from you?" "Yes," he said obstinately. "This fellow-this Decker-that clownhe 'll be the end of your story, won't he?"

She had reached his side again, and they went on more slowly now, along the road and up the broad path to the wood. He thought it a fitting thing that the moon should be up, flooding all the earth with light; he knew how she must look, although he would not glance at her.

"I'm going to marry him," she said. They had come to the rock, her rock, and he expected her to sit down; but she did not.

no heart inside you."

His own heart was in so great a tumult that he felt half stifled. That pale-gold head was so close to him, her hand resting immobile in his. He took her suddenly in his arms and kissed her again and again.

"Is there?" he demanded. "Is there? Come alive! Speak to me!"

She made no slightest motion of resistance, and for a little time he was in ecstasy, holding her close, touching that hair like a silk veil, feeling her soft breath against his cheek. But without warning, a sort of horror came over him. She was so still and silent, the wood was still and silent, the sky blank-this was no human love or joy; this motionless creature in his arms was not a woman; there was a spell on him; he was lost

"There's not!" he cried violently.

"Well, why should n't you?" he "There's nothing-to answer me-' asked.

Strange that he should know he had hurt her though she made no protest, did not stir.

"You don't care," he went on, quite reckless now. "You don't feel, you don't think. You 're lovelier to look at than any other thing in the world, but there's no heart inside you; no-'

He released her quickly and turned. away, blinded by pain and a terrible sense of his loss and grief.

"Good-by, Marionette!" he called over his shoulder, with a break in his voice.

Half-way down the path he stopped, because he thought he heard her weeping there alone.

"Not tears," he thought. "She'll weep pearls and diamonds alone in the woods by moonlight. And she's so lovely, the moon will cry with her, and the trees; and when the sun comes up, she 'll be lying there dead, covered with gems."

84

This was an indestructible idol, though, still there the next day, unmarred. He saw her in her corner of the veranda. A fine, arrowy rain was falling, like a curtain before her face; all other things on earth were dark, mournful, sodden, and only she had luster. A dark jersey clung to her slender shoulders, her bright hair was parted in a childish fashion, yet it was her misfortune that though she was so young, delicate, forlorn, she was always splendid and never piteous.

She was talking to Decker; her voice was audible to Gallard, clear and frangible, but not her words, and her downcast, smiling face offered no clue. He went toward her. He fancied that his step was unusually heavy, shaking the boards he trod, creating a brutal sort of disturbance; but she did not stir.

Decker had an air dejected and irresolute; he had never shown hostility toward the magnificent Gallard, but a politeness uneasy, almost plaintive. He wished very much to be let alone in his own orbit, and not be disturbed by fiery comets.

"Filthy weather," said Gallard.

"It's going to clear," Decker assured him, as if in apology. "Be fine for the barbecue this evening. Are you going?"

Gallard said no.

This was an improvisation; but directly he had said it, he meant it. He would go; and he must go.

"Of course," he reflected, when he had left them, "I could stay and take her away from that poor lout; but what's the point in that? If I love her, I believe I do, but it 's an unholy enchantment, a sort of curse,-it would be like owning one of those horrible diamonds that bring nothing but misfortune. Her cheek was so cold when I kissed her, even her silk hair was cold! And if she came alive, the spell would be broken, and I'd love her no more."

He grew impatient with these subtile perversities; he remembered with great good-will other girls he knew, and he wished to leave this place at once.

After dinner he saw them set out for their barbecue, Simone and her mother and Decker. He looked after her for a long time, for it was to be his last look. A great satin cloak of violent blue hung from her shoulders; in the distance she looked like a moth with a neat human head. He was glad that she had gone, and that he would not see her again.

But only a few moments later she was back; he watched her crossing the lawn. She stood for a time looking up at his unlighted window, and then she went by, so close to his dark corner that her flying cloak brushed his knee. He knew very well she was looking for him, and it gave him a bitter delight. Through the doorway he saw her in the lounge, turning her little head furtively; saw her begin to mount the stairs, slowly as if weary. And now against his will, almost in anger, he felt obliged to follow her. He thought

"I'm leaving, you know," he added. that if they were to say good-by, the "To-morrow morning."

echo of the words would last forever.

She had opened the door of his room and gone in; suddenly the transom was a bar of light.

"What the devil is she doing there?" he thought, astounded, and it was necessary to know. It was the book she wanted, her book-with nothing in it; she held it under her arm when he opened the door. "Please!" she cried. He shook his head.

"Oh, please!" she cried again. "Only let me see! I want to know-what I am."

"You sha'n't see," he answered. "That's my story about you, and you've chosen to live another one."

"I did not choose," she said half aloud. "I never chose-never anything."

that her passionate efforts could not carry her an inch beyond him. She left the grounds of the hotel, and passed through a broken fence into a wide field without trees, and he kept beside her all the time.

"You'll have to give it back," he said. "You can't see what's there."

"Go away!" she cried. "It's mine. Go away!"

She had reached the fence at the other end of the field, and climbed it like a cat, and, with a billowy flutter of her great cloak, jumped down on the other side.

"There!" she said.

For an instant he had a strange feeling that the fence was insurmountable, a magic barrier between his

And before he had answered, she country and hers; now he could not flitted by him, out of the room.

"Where are you going?" he demanded, ready to laugh; but she said nothing, and he kept easily at her side, out of the hotel. She was hurrying; the patter of her feet was like tears falling.

"Where are you going?" he asked again. "You can't rob me like this, you know. Where are you taking my book?"

follow, and she would go to some incredible domain, and read in those blank pages words sprung from his thoughts-words intolerable to her and to him.

She had taken a path up a wooded hill; her pace was no great thing, but her hurrying little feet, which sent the pebbles flying, her floating cloak, made her seem swift, unattainable, as if she were half-way along the road to

"You said it was for me! You said her special paradise. But suddenly that!"

"What are you going to do with it?" "Just keep it," she said. "I was afraid you would take it away with you, and then everything would be gone. Only let me have this! You said it was for me!"

"I'm sorry," he answered quite gently, "but it can't be. Not now. Later, perhaps."

Then she tried to run away from him with her book, and he could not bear to stop her flight; it seemed cruel

she stopped, at the summit of the hill, all the wild and fluttering motion stilled.

What did she see to stop her? He leaped over the fence and followed her, disquiet and reluctant, and when he reached her side he was as still as she. But not startled; the scene before him was to his dazed brain as familiar as his own reflection in a mirror. It was the fitting, the inevitable thing; a hundred thousand times he had stood upon a hilltop be

side this golden goddess, looking down at the sacrificial fire. A lake in a glen, black water and black trees clinging to the rocks, a soft and sorrowful sky with dim stars, and all this patient beauty affronted by the wild red light of a monster fire blazing on the shore. There were the silhouettes of people there, but no one turned to look at them on the hilltop.

Thought had stopped in Gallard, and all feeling; he had come to the end, but it was the end of a circle, and also the beginning. This was what had always been; he had been here, seeing this forever, and he would never move again.

Then, with a frightful violence, his drowned spirit came up from the abyss; he saw nothing on earth but the heavy figure of Decker, like a helpless penguin, pushing ears of corn about in the embers with his foot.

He began to laugh.

"Give me the book, Simone!" he said. "And go down to the barbecue -and Decker."

said. "Please give it to me, and let me go."

She moved aside, but he stopped her with a hand on her shoulder; she tried to free herself; the cloak slipped down to the ground, and she clasped the book in her slight arms.

"No!" she cried. "No! no! You sha'n't have it!"

At the sound of that clear, wailing voice every head below was turned toward them; the faithful Decker began to advance. Gallard unclasped her clinging fingers, and took away the book. She seized his arm in mute despair, and he looked down for an instant into her face. But Decker was half-way up the slope now. Gallard sent the book flying through the air into the fire.

"Oh! My heart!" she said, faint as a sigh.

Her arms fell to her side, her head bent.

There was nothing more to say; the words that had never been written would never be read. As Decker

"No," she said faintly. "Mine reached her side, Gallard walked it's mine!"

This angered him.

away. And all the way he thought of only one thing that her clinging

"There's been enough of this," he fingers had been warm, not cold.

T

The Peter Pans of Communism

A Study of Bolshevism in America, 1919–25

BY BENJAMIN STOLBERG

HE Bolshevik Revolution dazed

the world in November, 1917. During 1918 we in America never really sensed what the November Revolution was about and wherein it differed from its Kerensky prelude. Few were equipped to find their way through the revolutionary mazes which form the background of Bolshevism since the beginning of this century, and the rest merely rolled the strange and ominous word on their tongues until it finally inflamed their minds.

The first clear reaction against Red Russia came very naturally from the German Social Democracy, in whose womb Bolshevism had been fertilized by Russia's long and desperate revolution against czardom. During the armistice negotiations the new German Socialist Government suppressed communist uprisings with iron cruelty, but also with the lucidity that comes of mortal danger. The Eberts and the Scheidemanns appreciated the philosophy and tactics of the new Russian masters, who had been their comrades in the dim past. They knew that to Lenine the whole Western economy, from the international banker to the international socialist, was but one vast counter-revolutionary front in which the socialists were the most immediate, sophisticated, and, ac

cordingly, the most dangerous opponents. German "reformist" socialism communicated its fear to the whole of industrial society. And as this fear spread toward the "right," it turned into bigotry and panic. Early in 1919 this Bolshephobia reached America. Here it was a genuine hallucination, for American social politics is quite immune to revolutionary socialism. And from then on until now we have been suffering from this delusion, marked in its earlier phases by fits of terrorism which shook our civil liberties to their foundations.

What frightened us was the mirage which Bolshevism refracted upon the American scene across the space of a hemisphere, the difference of half a century in industrial civilization, and the complete disparity of national cultures. This fright, in turn, distorted the mirage. Bolshevism in America became a spectrum seen through a freak mirror. The politicians immediately began to exploit this phantom. Thirty-three States passed "criminal-syndicalist" laws; under Attorney-Generals Palmer and Daugherty the Bureau of Investigation in the Department of Justice was turned into a provocative agency of revolutionary tragi-comedies. Now this Bolshephobia is subsiding. And

« PreviousContinue »