The Crimson Tide: A Novel

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.

“Mr. Brisson!” exclaimed Palla, giving him her hand in unfeigned pleasure.

Brisson shook hands, also, with Ilse, cordially, and then was introduced to Jim.

“What are you doing here?” he inquired humorously of Palla. “And, by the way,”–dropping his voice–“these Reds don’t exactly love me, so don’t use my name.”

Palla nodded and whispered to Jim: “He secured all that damning evidence at the Smolny for our Government.”

Brisson and Ilse were engaged in low-voiced conversation: Palla ventured to look about her.

The character of the gathering was foreign. There were few American features among the faces, but those few were immeasurably superior in type–here and there the intellectual, spectacled visage of some educated visionary, lured into the red tide and left there drifting;–here and there some pale girl, carelessly dressed, seated with folded hands, and intense gaze fixed on space.

But the majority of these people, men and women, were foreign in aspect–round, bushy heads with no backs to them were everywhere; muddy skins, unhealthy skins, loose mouths, shifty eyes!–everywhere around her Palla saw the stigma of degeneracy.

She said in a low voice to Jim: “These poor things need to be properly housed and fed before they’re taught. Education doesn’t interest empty stomachs. And when they’re given only poison to stop the pangs–what does civilisation expect?”

He said: “They’re a lot of bums. The only education they require is with a night-stick.”

“That’s cruel, Jim.”

“It’s law.”

“One of your laws which does not appeal to me,” she remarked, turning to Brisson, who was leaning over to speak to her.

“There are half a dozen plain-clothes men in the audience,” he said. “There are Government detectives here, too. I rather expect they’ll stop the proceedings before the programme calls for it.”

Jim turned to look back. A file of policemen entered and carelessly took up posts in the rear of the hall. Hundreds of flat-backed heads turned, too; hundreds of faces darkened; a low muttering arose from the benches.

Then the man at the table on the rostrum got up abruptly, and pulled out his red handkerchief as though to wipe his face.

At the sudden flourish of the red fabric, a burst of applause came from the benches. Orator and audience were en rapport; the former continued to wave the handkerchief, under pretence of swabbing his features, but the intention was so evident and the applause so enlightening that a police officer came part way down the aisle and held up a gilded sleeve.

“Hey!” he called in a bored voice, “Cut that out! See!”

“That man on the platform is Max Sondheim,” whispered Brisson. “He’ll skate on thin ice before he’s through.”

Sondheim had already begun to speak, ignoring the interruption from the police:

“The Mayor has got cold feet,” he said with a sneer. “He gave us a permit to parade, but when the soldiers attacked us his police clubbed us. That’s the kind of government we got.”

“Shame!” cried a white-faced girl in the audience.

“Shame?” repeated Sondheim ironically. “What’s shame to a cop? They got theirs all the same–”

“That’s enough!” shouted the police captain sharply. “Any more of that and I’ll run you in!”

Sondheim’s red-rimmed eyes measured the officer in silence for a moment.

“I have the privilege,” he said to his audience, “of introducing to you our comrade, Professor Le Vey.”

“Le Vey,” whispered Brisson in Palla’s ear. “He’s a crack-brained chemist, and they ought to nab him.”

The professor rose from one of the benches on the rostrum and came forward–a tall, black-bearded man, deathly pale, whose protruding, bluish eyes seemed almost stupid in their fixity.

“Words are by-products,” he said, “and of minor importance. Deeds educate. T. N. T., also, is a byproduct, and of no use in conversation unless employed as an argument–” A roar of applause drowned his voice: he gazed at the audience out of his stupid pop-eyes.

“Tyranny has kicked you into the gutter,” he went on. “Capital makes laws to keep you there and hires police and soldiers to enforce those laws. This is called civilisation. Is there anything for you to do except to pick yourselves out of the gutter and destroy what kicked you into it and what keeps you there?”

“No!” roared the audience.

“Only a clean sweep will do it,” said Le Vey. “If you have a single germ of plague in the world, it will multiply. If you leave a single trace of what is called civilisation in the world, it will hatch out more tyrants, more capitalists, more laws. So there is only one remedy. Destruction. Total annihilation. Nothing less can purify this rotten hell they call the world!”

Amid storms of applause he unrolled a manuscript and read without emphasis:

“Therefore, the Workers of the World, in council assembled, hereby proclaim at midnight to-night, throughout the entire world:

“1. That all debts, public and private, are cancelled.

“2. That all leases, contracts, indentures and similar instruments, products of capitalism, are null and void.

“3. All statutes, ordinances and other enactments of capitalist government are repealed.

“4. All public offices are declared vacant.