AN HONEST MAN

The first time that Annette, Countess Chudenitz, met Andrew Radin was at a hectic “function” in her cousin’s (Mrs. Livingston Dollard’s) house. I hardly know how to describe the occasion, for it was of no social _genre_. Radin talked for an hour; New York’s _intelligentsia_ listened, rubbing shoulders with débutantes, bewildered matrons, and glib young women who were officially garment-workers (on strike), but who would have been more accurately labelled dynamite. In positions of vantage sat the clever creatures, male and female, who were running Mrs. Dollard’s newest publication--the third and by far the most important that she had yet financed. They were the ones who asked the proper questions at the proper time, and gave Radin a chance to make his points. The débutantes were as bewildered as the matrons, but their bewilderment did not--if you will pardon the paradox--bewilder them. They knew that this was the proper atmosphere for them to breathe--Mrs. Dollard said so--and they took their tea from the hands of the second footman without perceiving that it should, logically speaking, have choked them. Radin himself drank tea. So did the garment-workers. So did all the _intelligentsia_. So did every one except Annette Chudenitz, to whom the whole scene was at once incredibly familiar and alluringly strange.

Annette Davidge had married, in the ’nineties, Ishtvan, Count Chudenitz, ornament of embassies and wily Nestor of the Ballplatz. Now, a childless widow, by no means in love with her husband’s country, she spent the better part of her time in America. Bertha Dollard gathered in her garment-workers, her socialists (real ones), her Radins, knowing them for queer, priding herself on their queerness, but feeling them none the less sacred--as if they had been a new phenomenon, creatures half-fish, half-divine. She had never seen anything like them, but she believed that they, and they only, knew the truth. The Countess Chudenitz had seen thousands like them; their features took her back to the Styrian countryside, to the ghettos of Pest, to the streets of Vienna on the Kaiser’s birthday. But she had never sat next them on chairs before, and her Americanism thrilled within her. Radin held her from the first. She had read some of it before, but she had never been face to face with it--not without the police, in a firm wall, between. This was what her forefathers had done for her; something that Ishtvan’s forefathers could not have conceived, much less performed. She could meet Andrew Radin, could talk to him as one human being to another; they could agree or differ, in Bertha Dollard’s music-room, as if they were in naked space. It was not sex that made her ignore the garment-workers, push aside the brilliant young women who helped edit Mrs. Dollard’s subsidized but very independent review, and make, with assurance, for Radin himself--forgetting tea, forgetting the spectacle of the social salad before her, which at another time might have intrigued her. Something in her went fearlessly out to meet something in Radin; there was born in her that afternoon one of those bitter passions of the brain which often go farther than any physical infatuation to make love a disease. Sex never called to sex more imperiously than the quality of Radin’s intellect called to what she had of mind.

She was less than woman when she made her way to him and tacitly offered herself. What she offered was her brain, but she did it inwardly with as abandoned a gesture as though it had been her body. If you ask me whether such mental surrender is not one of the known approaches of what folk call love, I can only say that it has never struck me that way, though there is no road which love cannot take. Annette Davidge never had loved; so far as I know, never did love. If she could have loved any man, it would have been Peter Dollard, her cousin Bertha’s bachelor brother-in-law. It may be that Radin kept her, in the end, from Peter; but, if he did, it was only by shutting her off for a time from any human interest. Socialism, communism, internationalism, are not human interests--which is why they invoke the New Testament in vain. Not even by calling humanity an organism can you inject the human element into them. Annette Davidge did not know this, though Radin probably did, at the very moment he bent to her. It is no part of my purpose to discuss, even indirectly, any economic or “social” problem whatsoever; only to give you the true tale of Annette, Countess Chudenitz, for its own interest. Heaven and hell shall have become less than names when the irony of fate ceases to be perceived by human nature. Or, rather--let me not plagiarize--

Earth and ocean shall be shadows when Prometheus shall be dead.

All I wish to point out now is that Annette Davidge was, one might say, a discarnate being when she made her way through the crowd to Radin.

I have said that it is not my purpose to discuss theories. This is a story--a raw piece of human life--not, I take my oath, a fable. Nor is it my purpose to analyze Andrew Radin for such as may read. Equally, I can take my oath that about Radin I do not know. I do not, that is, know the whole of that personality--which, though it acted so simply, must have been, with his combined gifts, so complex. Annette Davidge I think I do know; but I trace Radin chiefly through his effect on her and certain outstanding visible acts of his own. I do not even pretend (though I have shrewd guesses) to be more accurately informed than you as to his origin and his heritage. He was ever a man of mystery and, I believe, chose to be. Otherwise, why doesn’t the world know, to this day, whether he was--is, I should say--pure Russian, Galician, Lithuanian, Pole, or German Jew? He was perfectly polyglot, and his blood may have been as mixed as his speech. I confess that it does not concern me much. He was Radin (and may be, again, though he is now as lost to the world as Enver Pasha) and an internationalist. To Annette Davidge he brought a whole new gospel. And yet one hates to call it a gospel, for reasons before stated. A whole new theory of life, let us say. Some of the catchwords she had heard before, and now and then an editorial in _The Life Everlasting_, Bertha Dollard’s review,[1] explained to her some side-issue that she had never understood. But Radin was the fountain-head, and she took her pitcher all the way to him. Radin encouraged _The Life Everlasting_ just as he encouraged a strike here, an incendiary lecture there, sabotage somewhere else, a bomb on the other side of the world. I doubt if he ever thought it of prime importance, though he must have chuckled to himself over the type of person who took it seriously. No; I take that back. Radin doubtless thought it quite proper, moderately useful, and not at all funny, that rich, well-educated Americans should lend their money and their patronage to anarchy; should give funds to the socialists and tea to the I. W. W. Radin and his like walk in a queer twilit world, never penetrated by the rays of mirth. Saturn is their sun. Under Saturn there is no such thing as a paradox--or a joke. As Annette Davidge had wit but no humor, she was able to breathe that air.

[1] I call it Mrs. Dollard’s review by courtesy and for convenience. Really, she had given it its head, and had about as much control over it as though she had paid for a tank and sent it into action with her blessing. Eventually, anyhow, it became self-supporting.

It was during the winter of 1913-14 that she saw most of Radin. I do not know whether the man was ever known to like any one, but he was with her a good deal--just as if he did like her. She gave him a substantial amount of money for purposes that he seldom did more than sketch for her. She trusted him completely, and, I believe, with reason; in the sense, that is, that the money actually went, every penny of it, to the purposes he had sketched. There was certainly a Slavic vein in that extraordinary man, for he talked to her sometimes for hours on end, over countless cups of tea. (She had come to a samovar, all for Radin.) Nor was it merely master and neophyte, for Annette talked, too. Her altruism was as different from Radin’s as grape-juice from vodka, but they called the two by the same name as they tipped their glasses.... It was a curious relationship. She believed implicitly everything he said, though all along she found difficulty in co-ordinating his points. He cannot have been interested in her philosophy, for he was adamant, a finished product, not one inch of him left plastic--not even an Achilles tendon. He asked no more of her than to do what he advised. I cannot conceive that Annette could have furnished him with anything of value besides an occasional cheque. Yet he let her talk to him as glibly as he talked to her. Something in the quality of her mind appealed, too, to the quality of his. Flattery, comfort, money, blind devotion, personal passion even, he could find--did find, doubtless--elsewhere. What he got exclusively from Annette must have been something else. I give it as my theory that his feeling for her partook of the nature of hers for him, though certainly it did not go so far. Annette can never have filled the brain of this busy man as he filled hers. But that curious relationship was mental, and fed on talk of the most impersonal. It was--if you’ll pardon the phrase--as if two vocabularies met and interbred. Sex comes into it only by analogy; not by the slightest participation. Radin obviously appreciated these odd facts as well as, or better than, Annette Chudenitz.

We did not talk of Bolsheviki in the spring of 1914. Radin, of course, was a Bolshevik--a complete case. But the tag had not yet been invented; decent people over here had never heard of Lenin and Trotzky; and he passed, in Mrs. Dollard’s and Annette’s circle, rather vaguely as a socialist, or a communist, or some such thing. The world in which he spent most of his time, and where he was more completely understood and more intelligently sympathized with, was quite unknown to that circle. I doubt if he described those other groups much, even to Annette, except by way of statistics or rotund prophecy. Annette, that is, was permitted to know that the Social Revolution would come and would find millions ready. And since the Social Revolution seemed, in those days, no more imminent than Gabriel’s trumpet-call, many people alluded to it as easily as church members allude to Doomsday. It was scarcely more than a metaphor, though it had a thrill to it. For the next three years, of course, no one thought of anything but war.

In the spring of 1914, the Countess Chudenitz found it necessary to return to Austria--business of some sort, under her husband’s complicated will. She was living in his Styrian stronghold when the Archduke was murdered at Serajevo. The Countess Chudenitz had little sympathy for war; and though she had at Kirchberg no access to the facts, she had distrusted the Ballplatz for many years. It was all that Count Berchtold and his kind stood for, which had driven her back, with avid mouth, to America. Altruism was not their tipple. The mobilization left her well-nigh servantless and tenantless. She found herself surrounded by toothless males and weeping females. From the great terrace that looked down upon the Enns, she saw stretches of empty fields and forsaken vineyards. There was an unnatural number of children in the landscape.... All the women in the villages seemed to be pregnant.... It was a landscape given over to babes and tears.... Or so, in those first changed weeks, she saw it; and her conception of her duty shifted to match the physical change. This was too mediæval, by half, for her to deal with. I neither defend nor accuse her; but I think that if she had ever loved Ishtvan, her husband, flower of chancelleries though he was, she might have seen her duty differently. She might, that is, have adjusted herself to the feudal idea. Or if she had had children. But she was too detached. A European war seemed to her not only frightful, but decadent. She had never liked Berchtold, Aerenthal, any of them, though she admitted Berchtold’s charm. Radin had not taught her, certainly, to like Russia. Germany and France--yes, even England--had involved themselves in this uncivilized behavior. She installed a clever cousin of her husband--a cripple from childhood--to co-operate with the aged steward; and after a distasteful week in Vienna (where she was made to realize what she had forgotten, that she was not an American citizen, but an Austrian subject) she left for Rome.

Let us pass over, as briefly as may be, her Roman sojourn. Physically, it might be summed up in a single sentence: months upon months of Red Cross work that led eventually to a breakdown and a rest cure. I think she would have tried to get back to America, but that her American letters were so discouraging. Her ancestral world had, apparently, lost its head over the war. You were hardly safe in New York unless you were pro-Ally. That made New York--to Annette, who was not pro-anything--as unthinkable as Vienna. Even Bertha Dollard did nothing but work for France. The President might recommend neutrality, but the fact was that in America if you were neutral, you were called pro-German; if you were a pacifist, you were called pro-German. Poor Annette felt homeless indeed, and even her belated copies of _The Life Everlasting_ did not comfort her. They lacked something. No, it was a world where, if you were not mad, you were suspect.... Even her New York had gone back on her. When Italy went in with the Allies, she, metaphorically speaking, turned her face to the wall. Sonnino and Giolitti were equally bad. No wonder that her nerves weakened, along with her body, and that she took to a lonely little villa in the high hills.

Even in her lonely villa she found much to do, for misery stalked everywhere. But being unorganized, the work was more fitful, less gruelling. She could snatch quiet hours.... And in those hours she had leisure to remember Radin. Sentence after sentence of his, page after page, you might say, though it had all been talk, rang through her solitude. Her subconsciousness flung up whole arguments, speeches, perorations of Radin’s. It seemed to her that she had not really forgotten anything he had ever said. She was enabled gradually to forget the interval, to gaze over the bloody battle-field of Europe to a millennial horizon. In her villa she became, as far as she had it in her, what Radin was. There was nothing to distract her from his logic, nothing in the squalid misery about her to contradict his premises. She wondered where he was; but it was two years since she had so much as heard his name mentioned. Mrs. Dollard and her kind had forgotten him; he had been merely one sensation like another. If some of his teaching stuck, that was all he could have hoped for.

When the Russian revolution came, Annette wondered yet more. Had he been sucked into that maelstrom, and would he yet rise on the very crest of some unforeseen and mighty wave? Her memory was solid Radin; she had only in solitude to open it like a huge volume, a thick-printed _magnum opus_. She distrusted Miliukoff, Kerensky, from the start. Annette, without knowing it, was a Bolshevik before Bolshevism entered into the Western vocabulary. She was internationalist, proletarian, all the rest of it, before Kerensky requested the British to let Trotzky through the blockade. She had never heard of Trotzky, but her heart prophesied him. She held her tongue among her hills for lack of any one to talk to. The peasants knew her only as a fitful ministrant to their woes--a silent, handsome _forestiera_ with burning eyes, who helped when and where she could and then withdrew herself from the scene. The eyes, as they did not know, were burning for Radin; with hope that somewhere he was in a position to make his philosophy tell, to redeem this war-mad world. Annette Davidge hardly read the newspapers. The Italian press was not sympathetic to her. Her magnificent, right-minded Russia was there treated with contumely and contempt. Meanwhile, her American birth and accent and atmosphere saved her from the natural consequences of being an Austrian subject. She was watched, but there was nothing to report. Official Americans in Rome held her to be pure American, bar that old accident of her marriage. She got, of course, no mail from Austria, and her American letters were all that was most praiseworthy from a censor’s point of view.

No one of American birth was more miserable, in April, 1917, than the Countess Chudenitz. America, too--and all her friends at home triumphant over the sorry fact! Even _The Life Everlasting_--which came very irregularly--seemed to bow down in the house of Rimmon. Yes, the world was mad. She ministered less and less to her people. They offended her with their chauvinism, their lust of vengeance, their tales of Austrian atrocities. Propaganda and counter-propaganda alike made her sick. So much passion spent on the wrong issues! As if it mattered whether the Kaiser or King Victor Emmanuel were victorious! She fixed her eyes more rigidly than ever on the millennial horizon. If she could only be in Russia--the one nation in the world that was concerning itself with fundamentals! A thick veil of censorship and silence hung between her and Russian events, but behind that veil she felt saints and sages to be moving; baffled, opposed, stricken, yet imperturbably bent on saving mankind--not Russia only, but the world. Brotherhood, equality, the rights of man--and in no corrupt or mincing Anglo-French version. After Brest-Litovsk she would not even touch the newspapers. She was convinced that they lied. She withdrew herself into absolute seclusion, walking in her wilderness of a garden with the spirit of Radin. From every point of the compass his words came back to her. They fell into alluring sequences; his formulæ had never been so clear. Small wonder; for this time there was no context to challenge him or distract her mind. She wished she knew where he was, that she might send him money for his great task of reformation. If she only knew, she would find ways. Countess Chudenitz would stoop to any illegality or evasion to save the world. Almost without realizing why, she lessened her gifts to the _Croce Rossa_. An ailing child, a destitute family, could always wring something from her; but she became niggardly with all official funds. No one wondered: times were hard, taxes unbelievable, her status and her fortune not quite clear in men’s minds. Who could have suspected that she was hoarding as best she could, in the hope of some day lavishing her hoard on the brothers of Andrew Radin?

There--just there--Annette Davidge, Countess Chudenitz, stood when the armistice was signed.

* * * * *

The rest is narrative of the crudest. We need not dwell on the means she employed, after the armistice, to get back to her husband’s country, or the incidents of her progress thither. It was conscience that took her, partly--the sense that she would find duties there which she could not hope to find in America. War paralyzed Annette: in a world at peace she could work as hard as any woman. True, there would still be hatred, but with the war at an end, it was no crime not to hate. It was characteristic of her neutrality, her pacifism, that she felt happier once over the Austrian border; happier, that is, in a defeated than in a victorious land. Besides, was not the emperor in hiding; was not there hope for the empire--hope of revolution, of popular rule, of the sudden end of a loathed régime? She would stand by her husband’s “people”; would be their champion in their demands--play Joan of Arc, if need be, to a peasantry on whom the millennial light was dawning. A red republican should lead them; they should find an earnest proletarian in the frowning stronghold. Perhaps she even saw herself presiding over the local soviet.... At all events, she blessed the idealism that had made her withdraw herself, season after season, from her guests, to study and practise the local patois. Annette Davidge was not given to self-praise; but now, for the first time in her life, she felt herself really important. She had never before been powerful where she was right, right where she was powerful. Happy Annette!

She found Nicholas Chudenitz still in charge at Kirchberg, and dismissed him. His tales of hardship, of famine, of vain sacrifice and heart-rending impotence, left her, I fear, cold. Nicholas was a Chudenitz, an aristocrat, unfit for the new times. No doubt he had done his best to feed and doctor the people--as though the Chudenitz estates were the Chudenitz kennels--but the root of the matter was not in him. She was even impatient with his gloom. If you had the right point of view, if you burned with the holy emotions, would not bread be added unto you? She was uneasy until Nicholas--a poor wraith of a man--got off.

Upon the Countess Chudenitz’s immediate labors we need not dwell. Every step she took was clogged with the mire of suspicion. Food the people would take at her hands--but nothing else. There was no soviet for her to talk to. All talk stopped when she appeared, except the sullen or whining complaints. Now and then soldiers returned to their villages, and drunken figures would caper all night round bonfires. She could see the fitful lights, far below, from her lonely, stately, grass-and-weed-grown terrace. She came soon to Nicholas Chudenitz’s theory--that food was the best thing, for the time being, she could offer them. But her negotiations for food went slowly. Letters were lost, and telegrams seldom delivered. After a month or two of vain, disorganized struggle, she went to Vienna to fight it out on the spot.

But Vienna was, if anything, more discouraging than Kirchberg. It was a city of wild rumors, of occasional riots, of suffering and hatred and menace in every form; a city where the facts of one day were the fictions of the next; a city that changed over-night, yet always went by some means or other from bad to worse. And--the last straw on the breaking back of Annette Davidge--never had Vienna been so gay: with the hectic gayety of those, alike, who have everything, and those who have nothing, to lose. Its gloom was as if it mourned for centuries, not years, of death; yet its frivolity had never been so brainless and abandoned. The official folk of Ishtvan Chudenitz’s connection were, for the most part, absent or in fateful retirement; she could not have gone to them had she wished. Even with the new officials it was difficult to deal, for they changed constantly. On Wednesday you won promises from a black beard and a pair of spectacles; and on Thursday you faced a jaunty blond youth who had never heard of those promises and would by no means keep them. She resorted to cablegrams, but got few replies, and those discouraging. The affairs of the world and all the individuals therein, apparently, were to be settled in Paris; and out of Paris came only misleading head-lines of newspapers that altered their “policy” weekly, and went out of business even oftener. Annette Davidge, in her dusty, dismantled sitting-room, knew not what to do. But she had learned enough of conditions to know that Nicholas Chudenitz, whose address she possessed, would be of no use to her, and she did not send for or seek him. She sat waiting for the turbid tide to turn.

Then, one day, the heavens opened. It is impossible to exaggerate the effect on Annette Davidge of the news that Radin was in Buda-Pest. When she learned that fact, she turned, on the spot, to a fanatic. The Light of her World was in Pest. Radin figured to her as that; also, as the measure of all things, and as a positive solution for every difficulty, major or minor. He would tell her what to do; he would guide her on the path of infallible truth; he would show her how to get food, or else prove to her that her duty was other than food-getting. Annette had been sorely beaten down from her pedestal of importance and beneficence; she did not hope to be the leader of the Revolution; but to work with Radin, under him, within the sphere of his influence, would be to live to the glory of God. Her perplexities were over if she could only get to Pest. She would carry banners, she would work in an office, she would strip herself of every available penny--she would do anything, however conspicuous or however humble, so long as it had Radin’s sanction. She did not even ask now to be allowed to save the world; it would be enough if she could be allowed, under Radin, to help save Hungary--to help save even Pest. Pride faded in the immanence of the master. She asked only to be one of the crowd of chosen, a little implement for a mighty hand. She had at the same time a shrewd notion that she could help best with such beastly capitalistic weapons as she did, or could, possess.

Behold, then, Annette Davidge, Countess Chudenitz, in the heart of revolutionary Pest. Her life there is indescribable. Radin--she got through to him at once--used her in many ways. He expected her to take a furnished house in a good street--and she took it. He expected her to have servants, and food and wine, telephone and limousine, for the use of himself and his various committees--and, by superhuman effort, she got them. She was too much a woman of the world not to realize that the leaders must be served, must have their time and energy saved. She gave her drawing-rooms over cheerfully to the muddy boots and muddier manners of Radin’s chief henchmen. A villa in the country that Count Chudenitz had owned she turned over to him also. Meanwhile, as she could, she drank in enough of Radin’s eloquence to keep her in a glow. Not speaking Magyar, she could not understand most of the talk that went on in her house; but she would have trusted Radin, though he only mopped and mowed, to be serving the ends of righteousness. She was expected, she found, to be only a landlady and a purse--not to plan or to counsel. But again, her shrewd sense told her that it was eminently necessary that the saviors of the proletariat should have shelter and money. You didn’t make even a revolution with bare hands--not in these days. In return, she was protected; furnished with grubby papers that permitted her to go about the city--papers so dirty with much countersigning that the dirtiest Red patrolman bowed down to them, recognizing the signs of his own régime. When she used her car, it passed the most truculent sentinels as being Radin’s. The masters of Pest recognized her for a good proletarian; for some one in the counsels of Radin himself, possibly even known to the distant godhead of Lenin. That the hunted remnant of Pest, cowering behind its palace shutters, fitfully raided and fitfully ignored, called her Radin’s mistress and somehow (between appeals to Mr. Hoover) blamed America and President Wilson for her unspeakable renegadeship, she did not, of course, know. Nor would it have concerned her if she had, since never once had she looked upon Radin as a man. Their scandal would have been, for her, only another nail in the coffin of the late Count Chudenitz.

Meanwhile the Reds were making their new laws for Hungary--laws that most citizens might have found unintelligible except for the death penalty. Being uncertain as to what you might do and keep your life, you went further than you conceived it necessary; you did a little more than your damnedest. But in early 1919 Annette was privileged. Her car, her house, her personal belongings, went untouched. She was never raided or summoned, or stripped of anything that was hers. It did not go with Annette’s sense of fitness to wear jewelry in these times, but when she saw women handing over their pearls to the appointed officials, she remembered that she had pearls of her own in her unmolested jewel-box, and assumed that the afflicted ladies had been convicted of conspiracy, or hoarding, or smuggling gold to Vienna or Switzerland.

Even in Buda-Pest the Countess Chudenitz was not notorious. Radin was too clever--or perhaps too single-minded--for that. If he drew more freely on Annette’s resources than on others’, it was because she had more resources than his other allies. She was allowed to realize that there were other houses, other rendezvous, other hospitalities, for him and his innumerable committees, other loyal women besides herself. She knew little of, and cared little for, those other women. It stood to reason that she could not be the only internationalist of her sex. Perhaps her cognizance of other handmaidens to the Cause served to keep her away from meetings. Perhaps, that is, brotherhood was more to her mind, as a slogan, than sisterhood. But let it be put down to Annette Davidge’s credit that she was content to satisfy Radin’s demands upon her without complacence or jealousy. Her fervor was impersonal; and when the soviet elections drew on, she refused to write herself down housekeeper or stenographer in order to be allowed to vote. Annette Davidge was honest up to the limits of her logic.

Even revolutions do not always have an easy time of it. The Reds had their own troubles, and Radin had need, indeed, to be a clever man. Trolley-cars were running in Pest; shops were open; restaurants, also, that served you next to nothing. All bourgeois were barred from voting; and no one had respect or protection who did not work with his hands. Bela Kun was great in the land. Yet, with all these advantages, Hungary was not happy. These folk did not at once find all things added unto them. Rumania bothered them; the unguessable decisions in Paris bothered them; Czecho-Slovakia and Jugoslavia drove them to frenzy. In other words, the sovereign people was irritable and illogical as folk are only when the little money they possess has no purchasing power. Soviet rule did not bring bread; still less, luxuries, which, as every one knows, are an integral part of any millennium. The bourgeois were suffering even more than the populace; but the populace, which from childhood had been accustomed to envy the bourgeois with reason, could not, all at once, see that. And because they were not getting what they wanted, they threatened to take it by force, even if it was not there. At such a time, Red leaders have to make quick decisions. A great many quick decisions were made in 1919.... But Radin took the way of his great compeers, Trotzky and Lenin. No one can say, I believe, what his real policy was; how far he directed and how far he was dragged. Even the staff of _The Life Everlasting_ cannot really have known. He may have thought that it was better to lead a mob than to leave the mob unled, or led by those without a philosophy. Or he may have believed the things he told the wild torch-bearing thousands in the Freiheits-Platz: that if their peaceful government had not succeeded, because of corrupt remnants and the natural depravity of all but the Reddest, it was time for something more extreme still--time for the utmost humanitarian violence. Certain it is that when Pest became a Bolshevik hell, Radin played Sathanas.

Annette Davidge, Countess Chudenitz, endured that hell for three days. Her faith in Radin--whom she had not seen for a week--did not waver. Her house stood empty, she its sole inhabitant, for those three days. The last night she spent crouched in a corner of the cellar. As a matter of curious fact, her house was not molested. They passed, reeling, screaming, shooting, but they neither fired through her windows, nor applied the torch. Too many of them had seen Radin go in and out of the great door; they were not sure. Some said (for the people were no nicer-minded than the aristocracy) there was a woman of Radin’s in there--better let the place alone. There were plenty of other houses to loot. But the noise and the lurid uncertainty were the same; and on the third day Annette decided that she could bear it no longer. Possibly, she said to herself, the worst element had got out of hand, and Radin was helpless in another quarter. She did not dare trust her passports. It might be that a new party, which would not honor them, had come into power. As she crept up from her cellar in the comparative quiet of early dawn, she saw the light of many fires in the city, and débris unspeakable in the heart of her own street--furniture, empty wine-bottles, a wrecked machine-gun, bodies.... It came over Annette, crouching behind her window-curtain, that in the present situation she was quite useless to the Cause. I believe that even then, if she could have felt sure of serving Radin’s revolution, she would have crept out into the ruined, smoking street. But to be both useless and in danger revolted her common-sense. If no obvious duty called her, then she would at least try for safety.

The city, having gone to rest well after midnight, waked late; and she had some clear time before her. She made up a parcel of food, a parcel of valuables, and stowed money inside her dress. She clad herself completely, to the very skin, in clothing left behind by her maid, who had grown panicky and fled, the week before, to Vienna. She did not forget the bundle of passports, which might or might not serve her. Then she crept furtively, like an animal wriggling through cover, to the garage. The limousine would have been worse than useless, but a battered Ford had been housed there, and she blessed the chance that had made her learn in Italy to take such a car over rough hill roads. There was enough petrol to start it, and she knew personally a Jew on the city outskirts who would sell her more. Even Radin’s limousine had sometimes chosen out-of-the-way places to stop for petrol, and the Jew in question would, beyond the shadow of a doubt, recognize her. Of how many people in Pest, after all, could she say that, she asked herself.

Again, of Annette Davidge’s progress to the villa (property of the late Count Chudenitz) we do not need the detail. She skirted many dangers, but, thanks to the early, listless hour, she escaped them. Her passports served, the only times she was challenged--amazingly few, until you realize that, in the very nature of things, early morning is revolution’s slack hour. By eight she was at the villa, where she waked the surly caretakers. The place was shrouded and dismantled, for it had seldom been used, though she had opened it up a few months before for Radin’s occasional use. Now and then there were interviews which were better held outside the city. Dust lay thick everywhere, and some of the furniture was stained and broken; larder and cellar were nearly bare; but the garage was water-tight, and the telephone in working order. A cheerless habitation; yet it was peace beyond peace to be removed from the tumult of the last days. She sank into that peace as though wrapped in the innermost fold of a cloud.

But revolutions have their own logic, and the soviet omelette takes a notorious amount of egg-breaking. Annette had found sullenness at Kirchberg on the Enns; here she was to see the fire when it had passed the smouldering stage. The two caretakers (male and female) were creatures of Radin’s, not hers--and that had always been sufficient. Now she realized that in a world of strange faces, theirs were almost the strangest. She trusted them for Radin, but she hardly trusted them for herself, though they must know that the villa was hers. Certainly she had never been so insolently served.

The villa was on the outskirts of the little town, removed from it only by the extent of its own small park. Late that night she sat, fully dressed, by the window of her bedroom, wondering if she had done well. Perhaps, if she had stayed on, that day, in Pest, Radin would have come to her, would have explained. Here, she was more uncertain than ever. The wilderness of shrubbery and trees was darkly alive. There was no light by which she could discern, or count, the forms that crouched, that wriggled, that shook the boughs stealthily and made darker blots upon the herbage. There might be only half a dozen inquisitive marauders--peasantry come up to spy upon the villa. Or, for all her senses could tell her, the people might be investing the grounds in force, furtively but inimically intending--what? Annette was so used now to the strange, scarce-human régime of revolution as to tell herself, without humor, almost without irony, that this invasion, which might mean arson and murder, might equally well be a mere gathering for shrill talk. All the same, it shook her nerves.

She slept, the next day, by snatches. She did not dare--she, the friend and helper of Radin--to set foot in the streets. Towards night she heard a methodical succession of shots. She was used enough to chaotic firing, yet she noticed this ... even to her innocent ears it had the rhythm of--execution. At nightfall, she descended and addressed the man, who could speak, with an impossible accent, a little German. His manner, always insolent, was oddly reflective, she thought. Annette, who understood nothing of what was going on around her, who had only metaphors and analogies to define her context with--who could not say “this is,” but only “it is as if”--felt that he regarded her for once less as an enemy than as an enemy disarmed; as (why not say it at once?) a prisoner. His insolence had told her that he hated her; now leisure and calm seemed to have entered into his hatred. He was at ease about her; she no longer irked him; she was caught, and could be regarded almost with tolerance. The sense of this made her, for the first time in her life, personally afraid. In her cellar she had known terror, but only as one fears the lightning, which may strike but may not. There was all the difference in the world between happening to be in a dangerous situation and being directly, deliberately threatened. His contemplative manner frightened her as nothing else ever had done; therefore she held her head very high--not from bravado, but just in order to keep herself going.

For ten minutes they talked in broken, monosyllabic German; she standing, he seated, with a mug of beer beside him. Now and then he drank, and set the mug down to spill over on a gilded table. He wiped his ragged beard from time to time with a bit of Venice point torn from a cushion cover. And it was a world in which Countess Chudenitz could not reprove him. These, she told herself, were the inevitable initial excesses. You cannot have capitalism at night, and smooth-running communism before the day breaks. Even Radin could not put his formulæ through all at once, with no hitches. She thought of Radin’s programme--but that way lay abstract terms. Annette passed a hand over her aching forehead--spurred herself to her last dreaded questions--got her guttural, illiterate answers--turned on her heel and left the man. For the first time in her life, she was feeling a sex fear.

Because her mind told her to, she dragged herself on tired feet to the garage. Not an ounce of petrol left. The tank had been scrupulously emptied, and the car was a mere useless heap of machinery; as cunning a device, as logical an invention, as perfect in plan, as ever, but deprived of all that gave it purpose and direction. Some such reflection crossed her mind, but she bit off the analogy. She had fed on too many, these latter days. Then she locked herself into a room on the lower floor, to think. She was afraid to go up-stairs. Up-stairs was too traplike.

The orgies in Pest continued, she had learned--though her uncouth interlocutor had not called them orgies. This little town, virtuously inspired by the example, had determined to do itself proud in another way. The local soviet had been meeting almost continuously, and had decided on a programme that had no blemish on its Red purity. Hungary must not be slower than Russia; and if the larger towns would not show the way, the small ones must. The municipality--which meant the soviet--was, of course, self-governing and accountable to none. The man’s gibberish had not been elaborate, but she had grasped the gist of the programme. The “workmen’s and soldiers’ council” had, as usual, done the planning. Within their local limits, it was to be thorough and complete. They were very pleased with themselves, she gathered from the intonations of her informant.

For the first time since she had known Radin, Annette Chudenitz translated a “programme,” completely and without expurgation, into concrete terms; dealt with revolution in plain English. Everything that could be conceived of as property was to be seized and pooled, then redistributed as seemed best to the council, provided always that no one outside the working-classes was to share in the distribution. In order not to be the dupes of capitalistic devices, they had created a kind of “grandfather” clause: no one was to be haloed as a “worker” who had employed labor in any way before the Revolution. That provision took care of those folk who might have been driven to manual labor by the Revolution itself, but had been originally tainted with bourgeoisie. All things were to be held in common, for the good of the community itself, allotted only temporarily to worthy individuals, and resumable at will by the council, should the individual take too individualistic an attitude towards his new possessions. That, on the other hand, would dispose of the capitalistically inclined of their own class. Children, though they might or might not be left to the care of parents, were the wards of the municipality, and might be transferred to whatever custody the council thought best. Women, of course, were to be nationalized--municipalized, in this case. Works of art, jewelry, objects of luxury, were to be sent to the melting-pot; whatever of their substance, mineral or vegetable, could be removed for useful purposes would be saved, the rest burned in the market-place. Animals, like children, were wards of the council, and their custody was a matter for determination.

The awkward sentences of the caretaker had made all this plain to her. Her perfect familiarity with the theories of Bolshevism had enabled her to fill in the grinning gaps. When he had sputtered lazily over his beer, “All property in common: cattle--children--women,” she knew the programme; knew, moreover, who would be eligible to committees and who would not. She knew every twist and turn. Her sole surprise had been to learn at the end that since she had once possessed the villa, she was personally involved in the reforms--a subject of the local council, to be officially despoiled. She had withheld her tongue from mentioning that her legal residence was elsewhere. She could not deny that, in their logic, the villa created for her a legal residence within reach of their tentacles.

The villa! It was nothing to her. But the few belongings she had with her; jewels of her girlhood, her wedding-ring.... They took wedding-rings always, she realized; on principle, as much as for patriotic cupidity. She fought with herself a long time before she consented to face the essential fact, the one thing that mattered. But face it she did, and the vision grayed her cheek and brow, her very lips, so that she looked like a ghost in the twilight as she questioned him.

Annette Davidge was in many ways a strong woman. When she found that there was no petrol for her in the garage, she turned herself aside from hysteria by sheer pluck and main force. She was sure the petrol was merely hidden, and she would have tried to bribe the man to give it to her, save that her common sense told her he would gain more by keeping her there than by aiding her to escape--and that, inevitably, he knew it. There was only one thing in the world to do, and that she must accomplish without delay. She must get through by telephone to Radin. She unlocked her door and sought her keeper. He should stand beside her and hear every word. Therefore she would have to speak German. It might be that Radin was lost to her; but she trusted still in the magic of his name.

Indeed, if Annette Davidge had tried to reach by telephone any place in Pest except Radin’s headquarters, she would have been defeated. It took two hours as it was. But she got through to him at last. Her arm ached to numbness by the time his voice answered her. The caretaker was half asleep in his chair, but whenever she raised her voice he shook himself awake to listen. In few words--words she had decided on and learned by heart in her two hours’ waiting--she told him where she was, and her necessity for seeing him; she described the independent action of the municipality, and the danger of her being caught in this backwater, when she belonged with the larger movement outside. She repressed, even in her tone, every hint of her self-pity, her sense of injustice. As a practical matter, would he come and see her, as she could not go to him? It would also, of course, be a great compliment to the soviet.... Reluctance, wonder, annoyance, seemed to be mingled in Radin’s voice, speaking English at the other end. Yes, he would come, in the first hours after dawn--for an hour. Annette realized, in mid-gust of her relief, that unless it had been otherwise convenient to him, he could not and would not have consented; that she had virtually appealed to a commanding general in the thick of the hour of battle. She was proportionately grateful; but even so, it seemed natural that he should have made an effort--with the thousands upon thousands he had had from her. Natural--of course. Yet she turned upon the caretaker, who had listened greedily, and ordered--as she would not have dared to do an hour earlier--coffee for herself, in her own room. It was brought.

I have said that there was no hint of sex in the comradeship of Annette Chudenitz and Radin. Yet even Radin cannot have helped noticing that he faced, physically speaking, a woman he had never seen. In her shabby maid’s dress, with her eyes hollowed out by sleeplessness, her face paled by vigil, confinement, and fear, her very voice shaken by the strangeness of her world, their contact lost through the events of their separation, she must have seemed to him different indeed. They breakfasted together in the dirty dining-room. Annette had not been so well fed in many days. She had Radin’s presence to thank for that, she knew. Yet her jailers were scarcely more than civil, even to him. She remarked on this to Radin, when the meal was finished. Radin, with the utmost frankness, at once explained....

It was then, after the incredible explanation, that Annette began really to readjust herself. All along, she had known her danger, but she had still thought of Radin, at least, as all-powerful, and all her fear had departed when she saw him enter the hall. Now from his own lips she learned that he was not omnipotent--or, in any case, that he declined to take advantage of his omnipotence. Either he feared to interfere with the local soviet, or--he did not wish to. Either alternative was terrible to her, but she chose the first, and tried persuasion.

“Surely they would not touch me if you took me back in your car?”

“Perhaps--probably--not,” he agreed.

“Then--why?”

He spoke very soberly. “It would discredit me.”

“Is it possible for you to be discredited?”

“Quite possible. And I am too important at the moment to do anything foolish. It would be a crime. I am very much needed yonder.” He jerked his thumb Pestwards.

“Of course you are. But, after all, I, too, have been loyal. Can’t you explain that to the committee?”

Radin sat down heavily. Then he looked at his watch. He leaned forward and tapped her knee. “I am very sorry.” Nothing had ever been more metallic, more perfunctory than his tone. “It was a mistake for you to come here. For your own sake, you should have stayed in Pest. As things stand--I cannot possibly interfere with the local council. They are within their rights. They are only doing what all communes will presently do. They are naturally proud of their readiness, their thoroughness. If I interfered, it would throw the gravest doubts on my own good faith, and my work would be seriously impeded. If it were a personal matter--but it is not. In fact, there are no personal matters, as far as I am concerned. There is only the Revolution.”

Even then, she could not believe it. “I am not asking you to make it a personal matter.”

“Pardon me, _tovarischa_” (was it deliberately, or by mere instinct, that he used the reeking Russian word?), “that is just what you are doing. They would say--”

“I do not care what these creatures say about me!” she cried.

“Nor I. I was about to tell you that if I asked for immunity for you, they would say that I demanded privileges, that my programme was good enough for others, but not good enough for me and my friends; that I do not really believe what I teach; that I prefer, in my heart, the old bourgeois régime.” He looked her straight in the eyes. “Comrade Annetta, I do not make a revolution only to go back on it. When I tell them in the Freiheits-Platz that there is to be no privileged class, no private property, that they are right to confiscate, to communize, I cannot afford to have some one in the crowd fling exceptions in my face.”

“Do I understand you to mean that you yourself are willing, for yourself, to submit to this sort of thing? To be ruled, in every detail of your life, by a soviet?”

“Absolutely, yes. What do you take me for? A charlatan?”

“But you,” she replied, sarcastically, “are going back to Pest, unmolested, in your automobile. Do you mean that if some mob in the city decides to-morrow to take your car and your freedom away, and to set you to work with your hands, or make you one of a thousand Red guards, you will submit?”

“Theoretically, yes. Why not? But they will not do that,” he went on, gravely, “I hope. They need me in another capacity for a time. They need me to direct; to counsel. The people are not yet in the saddle. They need me to set them there, and they know it. Even a revolution must have some one to think for it.”

“And you intend always to occupy that superior position!”

“As long as may be. Because”--he spoke with great emphasis, but with no emotion--“the Revolution needs me. Who do you think has brought the Revolution about in Hungary? Bela Kun? Lenin, over there in Russia? By no means. I, Radin.” There was not a trace of self-praise in his tone; he might have been teaching her statistics from a book. “Show me any man who can do my work better, and I gladly give my place to him. But the man has not arrived yet.”

“I believe you.” For that matter, she did. “And”--she worked carefully for logic--“your services are rewarded by immunity.”

“If so you choose to put it. But that is a mere matter of practical politics. If I serve the Revolution best by being free to plan my days and my work, that is right. If my immunity ceases to serve the Revolution--away with it!” He flicked the ash off his cigar.

“You are very sure of yourself.”

“I have spent my life in training,” he replied, simply.

“I am not questioning your fitness, your value--your supremacy, even,” she went on. This was, after all, the presence she had walked with among the Italian hills. “Should I have left Vienna, given all I had, if I had not been heart and soul with the cause and believed you to be the mouthpiece of humanity?”

Radin scanned her carefully. “I think not. I think, as far as you understood, you agreed. But perhaps you could not understand much. Daughter of the American bourgeoisie and widow of Count Chudenitz!”

“You took my money, my houses, my servants, my food ...” she cried.

“Again, why not? Would I have taken them so simply if I had not thought it right? You offered the people nothing that did not belong, morally speaking, to the people. Did I ever insult you, or myself, or the Revolution, by thanking you?”

“You never thanked me.”

“Exactly. Because I should have considered it quite legitimate for us to take by force, had it been physically necessary, everything that you freely gave. That you gave freely proved you a friend of the Revolution, merely.”

“And now that I can do nothing more for you--that my consent is not necessary--I am not to be treated as a friend! No immunity comes _my_ way.”

Radin rose and stood above her. “Have I ever told you that you were to be immune from the régime you were working to bring about? Did you not believe what you said you believed? You told me you were a proletarian; you gave, I thought, evidences of your sincerity. Did you all the time expect to bring about a rule for others and not for yourself? To be a sort of republican queen? If you wanted to be a bourgeoise, you should have stayed out of the movement to abolish the bourgeoisie. The smallest logic would have taught you that. Ours, as you well knew, is not a local but a world programme.”

“I might at least have been treated as a friend, not as an enemy.”

“But who is treating you like an enemy?” He spoke as to a child who cannot reason, yet with no show of irritation. “Is any one proposing to imprison you?”

“What they propose is worse than imprisonment, as you well know.” Her voice trembled with anger.

“_Tchk!_” He flung out his arms. “All I can say is that I thought better of your intellect. Your sincerity I still do not question. The people are proposing to treat you as they treat themselves. You are, as far as may be, a citizen of the state you professed yourself a passionate believer in. I give you nothing you did not profess to think desirable for your own country, for all mankind. And now you want to play the old game of exceptions! Once a bourgeoise, always a bourgeoise!... You are not inexorable, Comrade Annetta.”

“Certainly, for myself, I do not go as far as they go.”

“That is no one’s fault but your own.”

“Did you ever tell me--in New York when you first instructed me--that I might look forward to having all my belongings stolen, myself ... ‘nationalized’....” The word came with difficulty, but she brought it out.

“Did I ever tell you”--he looked at his watch again, not impatiently, but as if forced to calculate--“that I contemplated anything else? Did I ever hint to you that I believed in one law for the masses, another for the privileged? Did I not explicitly say that the abolition of privilege was the root of the social revolution?”

“Yes. But I assumed that these plans were to be worked slowly--as far as might be without injustice to the individual....”

“A revolution that comes slowly is not a revolution. And there is no question of injustice. The injustice would be in making an exception for the individual who objected to the policy of the government.”

“You call that orgy in Pest a government?”

“It is on its way to become so.”

“Therefore you excuse the excesses.”

“If there are excesses, I excuse them on the score of inevitability. But I do not call the plans of your local soviet excesses. They are doing nothing that you did not subscribe to, in theory, some years ago.”

“About women ... I never subscribed.”

“Perhaps that was a detail that we did not discuss. But the least logic would have enabled you to see that the old-fashioned marriage is, in the last analysis, insistence on a property right. In twenty years, every one will take it all quite naturally. The first moment of change is bound to seem violent to some people. When they take your pearls, you will probably consider them thieves. I should not have expected it, but I see that you will. In spite of all your fine talk, you do not see that the council which takes your pearls and sells them for the common good is not a thief.”

“Pearls are--only pearls,” she protested.

“True; a commodity. And if you proceed logically, you will see that what you would call your ‘virtue’ is also a commodity. Anything necessary, or even universally desired, is a commodity.”

“But”--she reverted to the less distasteful instance--“some one will eventually wear the pearls. How can one individual have more right to them than another?”

“Eventually, no individual will wear pearls--so long as their money value is what it is. Only when they become valueless as sea-shells will they be innocent. At present, I do not think any one in revolutionary Hungary will be allowed to wear them. We can sell them to the foreigner for money to spend on necessities.”

“I am likeliest to see them on the neck of whatever woman in the commune has the lightest morals,” she threw in bitterly.

“Not for long, I think. And the morals of all women will be controlled by the committee.”

“We are getting into by-paths. I ask you, once for all, Radin, are you going to turn me over to be the victim of any peasant who chooses to pay?”

He frowned as if in sheer weariness. “You speak over-dramatically. These things will be arranged more calmly than that. You will be disposed of in accordance with the best judgment of the committee. But you will find, I think, that there is more freedom under the Revolution than there was under the old régime.”

“Under the old régime I was free not to take a husband or a lover.”

“You will find, I believe, that most women prefer the freedom to take one. Assuming that, we say that no woman shall take one without the sanction of the authorities. The production of children is not a private matter. It is of the gravest import to the state. To look upon it as a matter of personal pleasure is obscurantism pure and simple. Because it is fraught with such vital consequences, we must limit and control the sexual relation as we limit and control the money-making power of the individual.... But if I failed to make myself clear in New York, when we had time, I cannot make myself clear now when we are all in a hurry.”

Radin rose again, and called to the man. Annette rose, too.

“Then you will do nothing for me?” she asked, in a shaking voice.

“I will tell the local committee that you are a benevolent friend of the Revolution and to be treated with the respect due to any good citizen. Can I do more?”

“You throw me into that?” She could hardly shape the words.

Radin turned on her then with the first flicker of irritation that he had shown. “I? I throw you into nothing. You hung on my words in America, and I told you nothing but truth--nothing that I have ever had to deny. If you were amusing yourself, that was your lookout. I thought you sincere. Especially when you came to Pest to help us, did I think you sincere. Many of those men and women in New York, I knew well, had not the brains to see what revolution meant. But I really believed you had thought it out. I talked to you with the utmost freedom. And when you came to Pest to join us, I was sure. I believe in the Revolution; I care only for the Revolution. I would kill only obstructionists. Them I would kill because the people must not be hindered. But I am exactly what I was when we sat over your samovar in Sixty-second Street. I have been perfectly honest from the beginning. If you were not honest, how was I to know?”

He would not even ask her to bear witness to his honesty. As far as he was concerned--this mongrel incorruptible--it stood proved. But had she wished, she could not have denied it. She had been, at some stage or other of the game, a fool; but, even now, she could not say where or when. How could she have been expected _not_ to misunderstand?

Radin held out his hand for farewell. “I will recommend you as a good proletarian down yonder--on my way back. If I did that and also tried to smuggle you out of the country, I should not be honest. I am sorry if you have mistaken yourself. But you, and none other, did it. The revolution is not a box of toys. Never once have I spoken to you as if it were. I repeat, I am sorry if you have misapprehended. But I could not suffer you to be so much as a pinch of dust to clog the wheels. The fault”--he tapped his forehead--“was apparently with the brain. You adhered emotionally, not with your intellect. I did not realize that.”

“And if you had realized”--she poured forth the bitterness of her defeat--“you would still have done the same. You would have used me.”

“I would have used you just so much as you were fool enough to let yourself be used, _without my lying to you_. I would not have lied to you for the sake of no matter how many millions of dollars. But if you persisted in thinking I did not mean what I said, I could not have helped that. I told you over and over again that I had no god except the will of the sovereign masses; that your silly democracy meant nothing to me; that I cared only for the Revolution. I stand where I stood then. Good-bye--madame.”

“You may pay, too ...” she flung out.

“I dare say. Human nature is not perfect. But if I do, it will not be because I have misunderstood myself.” He passed out of the door, honest as ever.

Annette, Countess Chudenitz, “Comrade Annetta,” daughter of John Davidge and cousin of Bertha Dollard, went slowly up to her bedroom. She had decided to make them mount the stairs to find her; not to lessen their journey by one step. It was a pity she had no pistol. Perhaps Radin would have given her one if she had asked. Her torture, like her safety, was nothing he had set his cold heart on. But it was too late now.

Through the afternoon she mediated on the technique of non-resistance. Finally, too worn out for even fear to keep her awake, she fell asleep. When she woke, it was nearly dusk. She was stronger after her sleep, and that she resented. She hated her own alertness, and would infinitely have preferred the anaesthesia of exhaustion. A ray of sunlight struck the dressing-table. She arranged her jewels for the public view. They should not say that she kept anything back. Only her wedding-ring she stowed away inside her clothing, thinking almost with tenderness of Ishtvan. Then she began to hate Ishtvan for bringing her here.... But the truth was that Radin, not Ishtvan, had brought her now; and if she had not returned to her own country, she would never have known Radin. Only once did her fear make her ignoble--when she stretched out her hand to her vanity-case. But she drew her hand back; she would make no bid for desire. As she strained her eyes towards the twilit mirror, she saw herself stripped of beauty as of a garment. Better so. For every reason--pride, expediency, what not--better so.

She sat down at the window then to watch the night come on. And with the paling of the west, the brightening of the stars, the darkening of the air, she found things to notice. Again the great evergreens were stirred and peopled. A little later the shrubs, too, came alive. When the moon rose clear, the shadows ceased to be stealthy. They formed in groups. In the end it was the ordered march of confident folk. Lights flared out from the drawing-rooms below, making a broad, yellow path upon the grass. Along that path, several abreast, they approached. She heard the low, staccato hum of their talk. She could better have borne guns and torches, the loose fabric of riot that would offer interstices for escape. This was soberness itself; evidently a meeting of the local soviet to be held in the great rooms of the villa that had been hers. To this had it come; that not even in the midst of red revolution last week had she so sensed her doom as now. Annette Davidge’s humor had been a weakling that perished in Annette’s own childhood. Her irony had grown up with her, but it, too--a weak thing--had passed away long since in Pest. Not with mirth, but with prostrating fear, she noted those ordered ranks. Annette Davidge was to meet her fate at a committee-meeting--in a drawing-room--precisely as, long ago, she had met Radin. The two settings were extraordinarily alike. Only this time, if she listened, she would not understand the words; and this time it meant something. Perhaps some of Bertha Dollard’s guests, besides Radin, had meant something before; but the tea, the debutantes, and the footmen had been there to prove that Bertha Dollard meant nothing. Annette wished--still without humor--that this had been anything but a meeting.

An immense distaste came to her for being summoned by the chairman. She dragged herself up from her post by the window, took her jewels and money in her hand, and went down-stairs to the assembly in which she had no vote. As she entered the room, her eyes dazzled; but she laid her treasures on the table in front of the bearded man who presided. The woman who sat beside him snatched at the gems, but the president laid a heavy hand on the woman’s arm and pushed them to the front of the table where all could see. Then Annette sat quietly down in a corner; she felt very shabby in her frayed black. The scarves and shawls and petticoats of the peasant women over-powered her. Their eyes raked her--all the eyes present, focussing themselves into one stare, which she felt like a burning-glass. But presently the chairman spoke again, and the heads turned back to him. His hand played with the gold before him. Annette fixed her gaze upon the glinting pile. The strange sounds the man uttered probably concerned her; but she left those strange sounds over there, as she had left her money and her jewels. She refused to have anything to do with it--with any of it. There was something austere in the bearded man’s guarding of her valuables. But she was tired of honest men.

Before, in Bertha Dollard’s house she had been unaware of her crisis, because she had misunderstood. Now, in spite of her ignorance of their speech, she understood better. Yet she had the luck, a second time, to be unaware of her crisis when it came. For presently, as if really hypnotized by the glint of her own gold, she fainted--so quietly, however, that no one noticed it.