Chapter 57
He thumped his s.h.i.+rt-front with an impa.s.sioned and highly-coloured fist.
"What is art?" he cried, "if it be not pleasure? And pleasure ceases where effort begins. For me, I am all heart, all art, like there never was in all the history of the Renaissance. As expresses itself the little innocent bird in song, so in my pictures I express myself. It is no effort. It is in me. It is born. Behold! Art has given birth to Beauty!"
"And the result," added Skidder, "is a _ne plus ultra par excellence_ which gathers in the popular coin every time. And say, if we had a Broadway theatre to run our stuff, and Angelo Puma to soopervise the combine--oh boy!--" He smote Mr. Pawling upon his bony back and dug him in the ribs with his thumb.
Mr. Pawling's mouth sagged and his melancholy eyes s.h.i.+fted around him from Tessa Barclay--who was now attempting to balance a bon-bon on her nose and catch it between her lips--to Vanna Brown, teaching Miss West to turn cart-wheels on one hand.
Evidently Art had its consolations; and the single track genius who lived for art alone got a bonus, too. Also, what General Sherman once said about Art seemed to be only too obvious.
A detail, however, worried Mr. Pawling. Financially, he had always been afraid of Jews. And the nose of Angelo Puma made him uneasy every time he looked at it.
But an inch is a mile on a man's nose; and his own was bigger, yet entirely Yankee; so he had about concluded that there was no racial occasion for financial alarm.
What he should have known was that no Jew can compete with a Connecticut Yankee; but that any half-cast Armenian is master of both.
Especially when born in Mexico of a Levantine father.
Now, in spite of Angelo Puma's agile gaiety and exotic exuberances, his brain remained entirely occupied with two matters. One of these concerned the possibility of interesting Mr. Pawling in a plot of ground on Broadway, now defaced by several taxpayers.
The other matter which fitfully preoccupied him was his unpleasant and unintentional interview with Sondheim.
For it had come to a point, now, that the perpetual bullying of former a.s.sociates was worrying Mr. Puma a great deal in his steadily increasing prosperity.
The war was over. Besides, long ago he had prudently broken both his pledged word and his dangerous connections in Mexico, and had started what he believed to be a safe and legitimate career in New York, entirely free from perilous affiliations.
Government had investigated his activities; Government had found nothing for which to order his internment as an enemy alien.
It had been a close call. Puma realised that. But he had also realised that there was no law in Mexico ten miles outside of Mexico City;--no longer any German power there, either;--when he severed all connections with those who had sent him into the United States camouflaged as a cinema promoter, and under instruction to do all the damage he could to everything American.
But he had not counted on renewing his acquaintance with Karl Kastner and Max Sondheim in New York. Nor did they reveal themselves to him until he had become too prosperous to denounce them and risk investigation and internment under the counter-accusations with which they coolly threatened him.
So, from the early days of his prosperity in New York, it had been necessary for him to come to an agreement with Sondheim and Kastner.
And the more his prosperity increased the less he dared to resent their petty tyranny and blackmail, because, whether
So, although Puma ate and drank and danced with apparent abandon, and flashed his dazzling smile over everybody and everything, his mind, when not occupied by Alonzo D. Pawling, was bothered by surmises concerning Sondheim. And also, at intervals, he thought of Palla Dumont and the Combat Club, and he wondered uneasily whether Sondheim's agents had attempted to make any trouble at the meeting in his hall that evening.
There had been some trouble. The meeting being a public one, under munic.i.p.al permission, Kastner had sent a number of his Bolshevik followers there, instructed to make what mischief they could. They were recruited from all sects of the Reds, including the American Bolsheviki, known commonly as the I. W. W. Also, among them were scattered a few pacifists, hun-sympathisers, conscientious objectors and other birds of a.n.a.logous plumage, quite ready for interruptions and debate.
Palla presided, always a trifle frightened to find herself facing any audience, but ashamed to avoid the delegated responsibility.
Among others on the platform around her were Ilse and Marya and Questa Terrett and the birth-control lady--Miss Thane--neat and placid and precise as usual, and wearing long-distance spectacles for a more minute inspection of the audience.
Palla opened the proceedings in a voice which was clear, and always became steadier under heckling.
Her favourite proposition--the Law of Love and Service--she offered with such winning candour that the interruption of derisive laughter, prepared by several of Kastner's friends, was postponed; and Terry Hogan, I. W. W., said to Jerry Smith, I. W. W.:
"G.o.d love her, she's but a baby. Lave her chatter."
However, a conscientious objector got up and asked her whether she considered that the American army abroad had conformed to her Law of Love and Service, and when she answered emphatically that every soldier in the United States army was fulfilling to the highest degree his obligations to that law, both pacifists and conscientious objectors dissented noisily, and a student from Columbia College got up and began to harangue the audience.
Order was finally obtained: Palla added a word or two and retired; and Ilse Westgard came forward.
Somebody in the audience called out: "Say, just because you're a good-looker it don't mean you got a brain!"
Ilse threw back her golden head and her healthy laughter rang uncontrolled.
"Comrade," she said, "we all have to do the best we can with what brain we have, don't we?"
"Sure!" came from her grinning heckler, who seemed quite won over by her good humour.
So, an armistice established, Ilse plunged vigorously into her theme:
"Let me tell you something which you all know in your hearts: any cla.s.s revolution based on violence and terrorism is doomed to failure."
"Don't be too sure of that!" shouted a man.
"I am sure of it. And you will never see any reign of terror in America."
"But you may see Bolshevism here--Bolshevist propaganda--Bolshevist ideas penetrating. You may see these ideas accepted by Labor. You may see strikes--the most senseless and obsolete weapon ever wielded by thinking men; you may see panics, tie-ups, stagnation, misery. But you never shall see Bolshevism triumphant here, or permanently triumphant anywhere.
"Because Bolshevism is autocracy!"
"The h.e.l.l it is!" yelled an I. W. W.
"Yes," said Ilse cheerfully, "as you have said it is h.e.l.l. And h.e.l.l is an end, not a means, not a remedy.
"Because it is the negation of all socialism; the death of civilisation.
And civilisation has an immortal destiny; and that destiny is socialism!"
A man interrupted, but she asked him so sweetly for a few moments more that he reseated himself.
"Comrades," she said, "I know something about Bolshevism and revolution. I was a soldier of Russia. I carried a rifle and full pack. I was part of what is history. And I learned to be tolerant in the trenches; and I learned to love this unhappy human race of ours.
And I learned what is Bolshevism.
"It is one of many protests against the exploitation of men by men. It is one of the many reactions against intolerable wrong. It is not a policy; it is an outburst against injustice; against the stupidity of present conditions, where the few monopolise the wealth created by the many; and the many remain poor.
"And Bolshevism is the remedy proposed--the violent superimposition of a brand new autocracy upon the ruins of the old!
"It does not work. It never can work, because it imposes the will of one cla.s.s upon all other cla.s.ses. It excludes all parties excepting its own from government. It is, therefore, not democratic. It is a tyranny, imposing upon capital and labour alike its will.
"And I tell you that Labour has just won the greatest of all wars. Do you suppose Labour will endure the autocracy of the Bolsheviki? The time is here when a more decent division is going to be made between the employer and the labourer.
"I don't care what sort of production it may be, the producer is going to receive a much larger share; the employer a much smaller. And the producer is going to enjoy a better standard of living, opportunities for leisure and self-cultivation; and the three spectres that haunt him from childhood to grave--lack of money to make a beginning; fear for a family left on its own resources by his death; terror of poverty in old age--shall vanish.
"Against these three evil ghosts that haunt his bedside when the long day is done, there are going to be guarantees. Because those who won for us this righteous war, whether abroad or at home, are going to have something to say about it.
"And it will be they, not the Bolsheviki--it will be labourer and employer, not incendiary and a.s.sa.s.sin, who shall determine what is to be the policy of this Republic toward those to whom it owes its salvation!"