of getting
even with the ideal. Obsessed from the age of spelling by his
pessimistic middle name, the boy had grown up in a cloudy compromise of
rebellion and the church. For a few years he vacillated; he went to
Harvard, studied the Higher Criticism, made a trip abroad, wrote a
little book recording the contending impulses of his pale, harassed
soul--Oscillations was the title--and returned to Boston a mild anarch.
Emerson the mystic, transposed to the key of France, sometimes makes
bizarre music.
She arose and, walking over to him, put her hand nonchalantly on his
shoulder.
"Arthur, comrade, what do you mean to do with yourself--come, what will
all this enthusiasm bring forth?" He fumbled his glasses with his thumb
and index finger--a characteristic gesture--and nervously regarded her
before answering. Then he smiled at his idea.
"We might marry and fight the great fight together like the Jenkins
crowd."
"Marry!" she exclaimed--her guttural Russian accent manifested itself
when she became excited--"marry! You are only a baby, Arthur
Schopenhauer Wyartz--_Herrgott_, this child bears _such_ a name!--and
while I am sure the thin Yankee blood of the Jenkins family needed a
Jewish wife, and a Slav, I am not that way of thinking for myself. I am
married to the revolution." Her eyes dwelt with reverence on her new
Christian saints, those Christs of the gutter, who had sacrificed their
lives in the modern arena for the idea of liberty, who were thrown to
the wild beasts and slaughtered by the latter-day pagans of wealth, and
barbarians in purple. He followed her glance. It lashed him to jerky
enthusiasm.
"I am not joking," he earnestly asserted, "so pardon my rashness. Only
believe in my sincerity. I am no anarch on paper. I am devoted to your
cause and to you, Yetta, to my last heart's blood. Do you need my
wealth? It is yours. You can work miracles with millions in America.
Take it all."
"It's not money we need, but men," she answered darkly. "Your millions,
which came to you innocently enough, represent the misery of--how many?
Let the multi-millionnaires give away their money to found theological
colleges and libraries--_my_ party will have none of it. Its men are
armed by the ideas that we prefer. I don't blame the rich or the
political tyrants--the mob has to be educated, the unhappy proletarians,
who have so long submitted to the crack of the whip that they wouldn't
know what to do with their freedom if
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