“Well,” replied Byrne, “what you propose would certainly be called compounding a felony and might be called blackmail. Don’t you think it is rather dangerous?”
“I think it is rather dangerous for them,” said Stein with a snap, “and I want you to go and tell them so.”
“Oh, very well,” said Byrne standing up, with a halt humorous sigh. “It’s all in the day’s work; but if I get into trouble, I warn you I shall try to drag you into it.”
“You will try, boy,” said old Gallup with a hearty laugh.
For so much still lingers of that great dream of Jefferson and the thing that men have called Democracy, that in his country, while the rich rule like tyrants, the poor do not talk like slaves; but there is candour between the oppressor and the oppressed.
The meeting-place of the revolutionists was a queer, bare, whitewashed place, on the walls of which were one or two distorted uncouth sketches in black and white, in the style of something that was supposed to be Proletarian Art, of which not one proletarian in a million could have made head or tail. Perhaps the one point in common to the two council chambers was that both violated the American Constitution by the display of strong drink. Cocktails of various colours had stood before the three millionaires. Halket, the most violent of the Bolshevists, thought it only appropriate to drink vodka. He was a long, hulking fellow with a menacing stoop, and his very profile was aggressive like a dog’s, the nose and lips thrust out together, the latter carrying a ragged red moustache and the whole curling outwards with perpetual scorn. John Elias was a dark watchful man in spectacles, with a black pointed beard; and he had learnt in many European cafés a taste for absinthe. The journalist’s first and last feeling was how very like each other, after all, were John Elias and Jacob P. Stein. They were so like in face and mind and manner, that the millionaire might have disappeared down a trap-door in the Babylon Hotel and come up again in the stronghold of the Bolshevists.
The third man also had a curious taste in drinks, and his drink was symbolic of him. For what stood in front of the poet Horne was a glass of milk, and its very mildness seemed in that setting to have something sinister about it, as if its opaque and colourless colour were of some leprous paste more poisonous than the dead sick green of absinthe. Yet in truth the mildness was so far genuine enough; for Henry Horne came to the camp of revolution along a very different road and from very different origins from those of Jake, the common tub-thumper, and Elias, the cosmopolitan wire-puller. He had had what is called a careful upbringing, had gone to chapel in his childhood, and carried through life a teetotalism which he could not shake off when he cast away such trifles as Christianity and marriage. He had fair hair and a fine face that might have looked like Shelley, if he had not weakened the chin with a little foreign fringe of beard. Somehow the beard made him look more like a woman; it was as if those few golden hairs were all he could do.
When the journalist entered, the notorious Jake was talking, as he generally was. Horne had uttered some casual and conventional phrase about “Heaven forbid” something or other, and this was quite enough to set Jake off with a torrent of profanity.
“Heaven forbid!; and that’s about all it bally well does do,” he said. “Heaven never does anything but forbid this, that and the other; forbids us to strike, and forbids us to fight, and forbids us to shoot the damned usurers and bloodsuckers where they sit. Why doesn’t Heaven forbid them something for a bit? Why don’t your damned priests and parsons stand up and tell the truth about these brutes for a change? Why doesn’t their precious God—”
Elias allowed a gentle sigh, as of faint fatigue, to escape him.
“Priests,” he said, “belonged, as Marx has shown, to the feudal stage of economic development and are therefore no longer really any part of the problem. The part once played by the priest is now played by the capitalist expert and—”
“Yes,” interrupted the journalist, with his grim and ironic impartiality, “and it’s about time you knew that some of them are pretty expert in playing it.” And without moving his own eyes from the bright but dead eyes of Elias, he told him of the threat of Stein.
“I was prepared for something of that sort,” said the smiling Elias without moving, “I may say quite prepared.”
“Dirty dogs!” exploded Jake. “If a poor man said a thing like that he’d go to penal servitude. But I reckon they’ll go somewhere worse before they guess. If they don’t go to hell, I don’t know where the hell they’ll go to—”
Horne made a movement of protest, perhaps not so much at what the man was saying as at what he was going to say, and Elias cut the speech short with cold exactitude.
“It is quite unnecessary for us,” he said, looking at Byrne steadily through his spectacles, “to bandy threats with the other side. It is quite sufficient that their threats are quite ineffective so far as we are concerned. We also have made all our own arrangements, and some of them will not appear until they appear in action. So far as we are concerned, an immediate rupture and an extreme trial of strength will be quite according to plan.”
As he spoke in a quite quiet and dignified fashion, something in his motionless yellow face
