A Sentimental Rebellion

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Title:     A Sentimental Rebellion
Author: James Huneker [More Titles by Huneker]

I came not to send peace, but a sword.... I am come to send fire on the earth.

I

Her living room was a material projection of Yetta Silverman's soul. The apartment on the north side of Tompkins Square, was small, sunny, and comfortable. From its windows in spring and summer she could see the boys and girls playing around the big, bare park, and when her eyes grew tired of the street she rested them on her beloved books and pictures. On one wall hung the portraits of Herzen, Bakounine and Kropotkin--the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost of the anarchistic movement, as she piously called them. Other images of the propaganda were scattered over the walls: Netschajew--the St. Paul of the Nihilists--Ravachol, Octave Mirbeau, Jean Grave, Reclus, Spies, Parsons, Engels, and Lingg--the last four victims of the Haymarket affair, and the Fenians, Allen, Larkin, and O'Brien, the Manchester martyrs. Among the philosophers, poets, and artists were Schopenhauer, Tolstoy, Max Stirner--a rare drawing--Ibsen, Thoreau, Emerson--the great American individualists--Beethoven, Zola, Richard Strauss, Carlyle, Nietzsche, Gorky, Walt Whitman, Dostoiewsky, Mazzini, Rodin, Constantin Meunier, Shelley, Turgenieff, Bernard Shaw, and finally the kindly face and intellectual head of the lawyer who so zealously defended the Chicago anarchists. This diversified group, together with much revolutionary literature, poems, pamphlets, the works of Proudhon, Songs Before Sunrise, by Swinburne, and a beautiful etching of Makart's proletarian Christ, completed, with an old square pianoforte, the ensemble of an individual room, a room that expressed, as her admirers said, the strong, suffering soul of Yetta Silverman, Russian anarchist, agitator, and exile.

"Come in," she cried out in her sharp, though not unpleasant, voice. A thin young man entered. She clapped her hands.

"Oh, so you changed your mind!" He looked at her over his glasses with his weak, blue eyes, the white of which predominated. Simply dressed, he nevertheless gave the impression of superior social station. He was of the New England theological-seminary type--narrow-chested, gaunt as to visage, by temperament drawn to theology, or, in default of religious belief, an ardent enthusiast in sociology. The contracted temples, uncertain gaze, and absence of fulness beneath the eyes betrayed the unimaginative man. Art was a sealed book to him, though taxation fairly fired his suspicious soul. He was nervous because he was dyspeptic, and at one time of his career he mistook stomach trouble for a call to the pulpit. And he was a millionnaire more times than he took the trouble to count.

"Yes," he timidly replied, "I did change my wavering mind--as you call that deficient organ of mine--and so I returned. I hope I don't disturb you!"

"No, not yet. I am sitting with my hands folded in my lap, like the women of your class--ladies, you call them." She accented the title, without bitterness. A cursory estimate of her appearance would have placed her in the profession of a trained nurse, or perhaps in the remotest analysis, a sewing woman of superior tastes. She was small, wiry, her head too large for her body; but the abounding nervous vitality, the harsh fire that burned in her large brown eyes, and the firm mouth would have attracted the attention of the most careless. Her mask, with its high Slavic cheek-bones and sharp Jewish nose, proclaimed her a magnetic woman. In her quarter on the far East Side the children called her "Aunt Yetta." She was a sister of charity in the guise of a revolutionist.

"You sit but you think, and my ladies never think," he answered, in his boyish voice. He seemed proud to be so near this distinguished creature. Had she not been sent to Siberia, driven out of France and Germany, and arrested in New York for her incendiary speeches? She possessed the most extraordinary power over an audience. Once, at Cooper Union, Arthur had seen her control a crazy mob bent on destroying the building because a few stupid police had interfered with the meeting. Among her brethren Yetta Silverman was classed with Louise Michel, Sophia Perowskaia, and Vera Zassoulitch, those valiant women, true guardian angels, veritable martyrs to the cause. He thought of them as he watched the delicate-looking young woman before him.

Arthur was too chilly of blood to fall in love with her; his admiration was purely cerebral. He was unlucky enough to have had for a father a shrewd, visionary man, that curious combination of merchant and dreamer once to be found in New England. A follower of Fourier, a friend of Emerson, the elder Wyartz had gone to Brook Farm and had left it in a few months. Dollars, not dreams, was his true ambition. But he registered his dissatisfaction with this futile attempt by christening his only son, Arthur Schopenhauer; it was old Wyartz's way 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 they had it. All mobs believe alike in filth and fire, whether antique slaves free for their day's Saturnalia, or the Paris crowds of '93. Their ideas of happiness are pillage, bloodshed, drunkenness, revenge. Every popular uprising sinks the people deeper in their misery. Every bomb thrown discredits the cause of liberty."

Astonished by this concession, Arthur wondered how she had ever earned her reputation as the Russian "Red Virgin," as an unequivocal terrorist. Thus he had heard her hailed at all the meetings which she addressed. But she did not notice his perturbation, she was following another train.

"You Americans do not love money as much as the Europeans--who hoard it away, who worship it on their naked knees; but you do something worse--you love it for the sake of the sport, a cruel sport for the poor. You go into speculation as the English go after big game. It is a sport. This sport involves food--and you gamble with wheat and meat for counters, while starving men and women pay for the game. America is yet rich enough to afford this sport, but some day it will become crowded like Europe, and then, beware! Wasn't it James Hinton who said that 'Overthrowing society means an inverted pyramid getting straight'?

"And America," she continued, "bribes us with the gilded sentimental phrases of Rousseau, Mirabeau, and Thomas Paine woven into your national constitution, with its presumptuous declaration that all men are born free and equal--shades of Darwin and Nietzsche!--and that universal suffrage is a panacea for all evils. In no country boasting itself Christian is there a system so artfully devised for keeping the poor free and unequal, no country where so-called public opinion, as expressed in the press, is used to club the majority into submission. And you are all proud of this liberty--a liberty at which the despised serf in Russia or the man of the street in London sneers--there is to-day more individual liberty in England and Germany than in the United States. Don't smile! I can prove it. As for France or Italy--they are a hundred years ahead of you in municipal government. But I shan't talk blue-books at you, Arthur!"

"Why not, why not?" he quickly interposed. "You always impress me by your easy handling of facts. And why won't my money be of use to the social revolution?" Scornfully she started up again and began walking.

"Why? Because convictions can't be bought with cash! Why! Because philanthropy is the most selfish of vices. You may do good here and there--but you do more harm. You create more paupers, you fine gentlemen, with your Mission houses and your Settlement workers! You are trying to cover the ugly sores with a plaster of greenbacks. It won't heal the sickness--it won't heal it, I tell you." Her eyes were flaming and she stamped the floor passionately.

"We workers on the East Side have a name for you millionnaires. We call you the White Mice. You have pretty words and white lies, pretty ways and false smiles. Lies! lies! lies! You are only giving back, with the aid of your superficial fine ladies, the money stolen from the true money earners. You have discovered the Ghetto--you and the impertinent newspaper men. And like the reporters you come down to use us for 'copy.' You live here in comfort among us and then go away, write a book about our wretchedness and pose as altruistic heroes in your own silly set. How I loathe that word--altruism! As if the sacrifice of your personality does not always lead to self-deception, to hypocrisy! It is an excuse for the busybody-rich to advertise their charities. If they were as many armed as Briareus or the octopus, their charity would be known to each and every hand on their arms. These sentimental anarchs! They even marry our girls and carry them off to coddle their conscience with gilded gingerbread. Yet they would turn their backs on Christ if he came to Hester Street--Christ, the first modern anarch, a destructionist, a proletarian who preached fire and sword for the evil rich of his times. Nowadays he would be sent to Blackwell's Island for six months as a disturber of the peace or for healing without a license from the County Medical Association!"

"Like Johann Most," he ventured. She blazed at the name.

"No jokes, please. Most, too, has suffered. But I am no worshipper of bombs--and beer." This made him laugh, but as the laugh was not echoed he stared about him.

"But Yetta,--we must begin somewhere. I wish to become--to become--something like you.--"

She interrupted him roughly:

"To become--you an anarch! You are a sentimental rebel because your stomach is not strong enough for the gourmands who waste their time at your clubs. If your nerves were sound you might make a speech. But the New England conscience of your forefathers--they were nearly all clergymen, weren't they?--has ruined your strength. The best thing you can do, my boy, is to enter a seminary and later go to China as a missionary; else turn literary and edit an American edition of Who's Who in Hell! But leave our East Side alone. Do you know what New York reminds me of? Its centre is a strip of green and gold between two smouldering red rivers of fire--the East and West Sides. If they ever spill over the banks, all the little parasites of greater parasites, the lawyers, brokers, bankers, journalists, ecclesiastics, and middle men, will be devoured. Oh, what a glorious day! And oh, that terrible night when we marched behind the black flag and muffled drums down Broadway, that night in 1887 when the four martyrs were murdered, the hero Lingg having killed himself. What would you have done in those awful times?"

"Try me," he muttered, as he pulled down his cuffs, "try me!"

"Very well, I'll try you. Like Carlo Cafiero, the rich Italian anarch, you must give your money to us--every cent of it. Come with me to-night. I address a meeting of the brethren at Schwab's place--you know, the saloon across the street, off the square. We can eat our supper there, and then--"

"Try me," he reiterated, and his voice was hoarse with emotion, his pulse painfully irregular.

II

Notwithstanding his vows of heroism, Arthur could not force himself to like the establishment of Schwab, where the meeting was to take place. It was a beer-saloon, not one of those mock-mediaeval uptown palaces, but a long room with a low ceiling, gaslit and shabby. The tables and chairs of hard, coarse wood were greasy--napkins and table-cloths were not to be mentioned, else would the brethren suspect the presence of an aristocrat. At the upper end, beyond the little black bar, there was a platform, upon it a table, a pianoforte, and a stool. Still he managed to conceal his repugnance to all these uninviting things and he sipped his diluted Rhine wine, ate his sandwich--an unpalatable one--under the watchful eyes of his companion. By eight o'clock the room was jammed with working-people, all talking and in a half dozen tongues. Occasionally Yetta left him to join a group, and where she went silence fell. She was the oracle of the crowd. At nine o'clock Arthur's head ached. He had smoked all his Turkish cigarettes, the odour of which caused some surprise--there was a capitalist present and they knew him. Only Yetta prevented disagreeable comment. The men, who belonged to the proletarian class, were poorly dressed and intelligent; the women wore shawls on their heads and smoked bad cigarettes. The saloon did not smell nice, Arthur thought. He had offered Yetta one of his imported cigarettes, but she lighted a horrible weed and blew the smoke in his face.

At ten o'clock he wished himself away. But a short, stout man with a lopsided face showing through his tangled beard, stood up and said in German:--

"All who are not our friends, please leave the house."

No one stirred. The patron went from group to group saluting his customers and eying those who were not. Whether any password or signal was given Arthur could not say. When the blond, good-natured Schwab reached him, Yetta whispered in his ear. The host beamed on the young American and gave him a friendly poke in the back; Arthur felt as if he had been knighted. He said this to Yetta, but her attention was elsewhere. The doors and windows were quickly shut and bolted. She nudged his elbow--for they were sitting six at the table, much to his disgust; the other four drank noisily--and he followed her to the top of the room. A babble broke out as they moved along.

"It's Yetta's new catch. Yetta's rich fellow. Wait until she gets through with him--poor devil." These broken phrases made him shiver, especially as Yetta's expression, at first enigmatic, was now openly sardonic. What did she mean? Was she only tormenting him? Was this to be his test, his trial? His head was almost splitting, for the heat was great and the air bad. Again he wished himself home.

They reached the platform. "Jump up, Arthur, and help me," she commanded. He did so. But his discomfiture only grew apace with the increased heat--the dingy ceiling crushed him--and the rows in front, the entire floor seemed transformed to eyes, malicious eyes. She told him to sit down at the piano and play the Marseillaise. Then standing before the table she drew from her bosom a scarlet flag, and accompanied by the enthusiastic shoutings she led the singing. Arthur at the keyboard felt exalted. Forgotten the pains of a moment before. He hammered the keys vigorously, extorting from the battered instrument a series of curious croakings. Some of the keys did not "speak," some gave forth a brazen clangour from the rusty wires. No one cared. The singing stopped with the last verse.

"Now La Ravachole for our French brethren." This combination of revolutionary lyrics--Ca Ira and Carmagnole--was chanted fervidly. Then came for the benefit of the German the stirring measures from the Scotch-German John Henry Mackay's Sturm:--

Das ist der Kampf, den allnaechtlich
Bevor das Dunkel zerrinnt,
Einsam und gramvoll auskaempt
Des Jahrhunderts verlorenes Kind.

Yetta waved her long and beautifully shaped hands--they were her solitary vanity. The audience became still. She addressed them at first in deliberate tones, and Arthur noted that the interest was genuine--he wondered how long his fat-witted club friends could endure or appreciate the easy manner in which Yetta Silverman quoted from great thinkers, and sprinkled these quotations with her own biting observations.

"Richard Wagner--who loved humanity when he wrote Siegfried and regretted that love in Parsifal!

"Richard Wagner--who loved ice-cream more than Dresden's freedom--Wagner: the Swiss family bell-ringer of '48!

"To Max Stirner, Ibsen, and Richard Strauss belongs the twentieth century!

"Nietzsche--the anarch of aristocrats!

"Karl Marx--or the selfish Jew socialist!

"Lassalle--the Jew comedian of liberty!

"Bernard Shaw--the clever Celt who would sacrifice socialism for an epigram.

"Curse all socialists!" she suddenly screamed.

Arthur, entranced by the playful manner with which she disposed of friend and foe, was aghast at this outbreak. He saw another Yetta. Her face was ugly and revengeful. She sawed the air with her thin arms.

"Repeat after me," she adjured her hearers, "the Catechism of Sergei Netschajew, but begin with Herzen's noble motto: 'Long live chaos and destruction!'"

"Long live chaos and destruction!" was heartily roared.

The terrific catechism of the apostle Netschajew made Arthur shake with alternate woe and wrath. It was bloody-minded beyond description. Like a diabolic litany boomed the questions and answers:--

"Day and night we must have but one thought--inexorable destruction." And Arthur recalled how this pupil of Bakounine had with the assistance of Pryow and Nicolajew beguiled a certain suspected friend, Ivanow, into a lonely garden and killed him, throwing the body into a lake. After that Netschajew disappeared, though occasionally showing himself in Switzerland and England. Finally, in 1872, he was nabbed by the Russian government, sent to Siberia, and--!

Ugh! thought Arthur, what a people, what an ending! And Yetta--why did she now so openly proclaim destruction as the only palliative for social crime when she had so eloquently disclaimed earlier in the day the propaganda by force, by dagger, and dynamite?--He had hardly asked himself the question when there came a fierce rapping of wooden clubs at door and window. Instantly a brooding hush like that which precedes a hurricane fell upon the gathering. But Yetta did not long remain silent.

"Quick, Arthur, play the Star-Spangled Banner! It's the police. I want to save these poor souls--" she added, with a gulp in her throat; "quick, you idiot, the Star-Spangled Banner." But Arthur was almost fainting. His ringers fell listlessly on the keys, and they were too weak to make a sound. The police! he moaned, as the knocking deepened into banging and shouting. What a scandal! What a disgrace! He could never face his own world after this! To be caught with a lot of crazy anarchists in a den like this!--Smash, went the outside door! And the newspapers! They would laugh him out of town. He, Arthur Schopenhauer Wyartz, the Amateur Anarch! He saw the hideous headlines. Why, the very daily in which some of his fortune was invested would be the first to mock him most!

The assault outside increased. He leaped to the floor, where Yetta was surrounded by an excited crowd. He plucked her sleeve. She gazed at him disdainfully.

"For God's sake, Yetta, get me out of this--this awful scrape. My mother, my sisters--the disgrace!" She laughed bitterly.

"You poor chicken among hawks! But I'll help you--follow me." He reached the cellar stairs, and she showed him a way by which he could walk safely into the alley, thence to the street back of their building. He shook her hand with the intensity of a man in the clutches of the ague.

"But you--why don't you go with me?" he asked, his teeth chattering.

The brittle sound of glass breaking was heard. She answered, as she took his feverish hand:--

"Because, you brave revolutionist, I must stick to my colours. Farewell!" And remounting the stairs, she saw the bluecoats awaiting her.

"I hope the police will catch him anyhow," she said. It was her one relapse into femininity, and as she quietly surrendered she did not regret it.

III

Old Koschinsky's store on the avenue was the joy of the neighbourhood. For hours, their smeary faces flattened against the glass, the children watched the tireless antics of the revolving squirrels; the pouter pigeons expand their breasts into feathered balloons; the goldfish, as they stolidly swam, their little mouths open, their eyes following the queer human animals imprisoned on the other side of the plate-glass window. Canary birds by the hundreds made the shop a trying one for sensitive ears. There were no monkeys. Koschinsky, whose heart was as soft as butter, though he was a formidable revolutionist--so he swore over at Schwab's--declared that monkeys were made in the image of tyrannical humans. He would have none of them. Parrots? There were enough of the breed around him, he told the gossiping women, who, with their scheitels, curved noses, and shining eyes, lent to the quarter its Oriental quality.

It was in Koschinsky's place that Arthur first encountered Yetta. He was always prowling about the East Side in search of sociological prey, and the modest little woman with her intelligent and determined face attracted him strongly. They fell into easy conversation near a cage of canaries, and the acquaintance soon bloomed into a friendship. A week after the raid on Schwab's, Arthur, very haggard and nervous, wandered into Koschinsky's. The old man greeted him:--

"Hu! So you've just come down from the Island! Well--how did you like it up there? Plenty water--eh?" The sarcasm was too plain, and the young man, mumbling some sort of an answer, turned to go.

"Hold on there!" said Koschinsky. "I expect a very fine bird soon. You'd better wait. It was here only last night; and the bird asked whether you had been in." Arthur started.

"For me? Miss Silverman?"

"I said a bird," was the dogged reply. And then Yetta walked up to Arthur and asked:--

"Where have you been? Why haven't you called?" He blushed.

"I was ashamed."

"Because you were so, so--frightened, that night?"

"Yes."

"But nothing came of the affair. The police could get no evidence. We had no flags--"

"That scarlet one I saw you with--what of it?" She smiled.

"Did you look in your pockets when you got home? I stuffed the flag in one of them while we were downstairs." He burst into genteel laughter.

"No, I threw off my clothes in such disgust that night that I vowed I would never get into them again. I gave the suit to my valet."

"Your valet," she gravely returned; "he may become one of us."

"Fancy, when I reached the house--I went up in a hansom, for I was bareheaded--my mother was giving the biggest kind of a ball. I had no end of trouble trying to sneak in unobserved."

She regarded him steadily. "Isn't it strange," she went on, "how the bull-dog police of this town persecute us--and they should be sympathetic. They had to leave their own island because of tyranny. Yet as soon as they step on this soil they feel themselves self-constituted tyrants. Something of the sort happened with your own ancestors--" she looked at him archly--"the Pilgrim Fathers were not very tolerant to the Quakers, the Jews, Catholics, or any sect not their own. Now you do not seem to have inherited that ear-slicing temperament--"

"Oh, stop, Yetta! Don't make any more fun of me. I confess I am cowardly--I hate rows and scandals--"

"'What shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his liberty?'"

"Yes, I know. But this was such a nasty little affair. The newspapers would have driven me crazy."

"But suppose, for the sake of argument," she said, "that the row would not have appeared in the newspapers--what then?"

"What do you mean? By Jove, there was nothing in the papers, now that I come to think of it. I went the next morning out to Tuxedo and forgot--what do you mean by this mystery, Yetta?"

"I mean this--suppose, for the sake of further argument, I should tell you that there was no row, no police, no arrests!" He gasped.

"O-h, what an ass I made of myself. So that was your trial! And I failed. Oh, Yetta, Yetta--what shall I say?" The girl softened. She took both his hands in her shapely ones and murmured:--

"Dear little boy, I treated you roughly. Forgive me! There was a real descent by the police--it was no deception. That's why I asked you to play the Star-Spangled Banner--"

"Excuse me, Yetta; but why did you do that? Why didn't you meet the police defiantly chanting the Marseillaise? That would have been braver--more like the true anarchist." She held down her head.

"Because--because--those poor folks--I wanted to spare them as much trouble with the police as possible," she said in her lowest tones.

"And why," he pursued triumphantly, "why did you preach bombs after assuring me that reform must come through the spiritual propaganda?" She quickly replied:--

"Because our most dangerous foe was in the audience. You know. The man with the beard who first spoke. He has often denounced me as lukewarm; and then you know words are not as potent as deeds with the proletarians. One assassination is of more value than all the philosophy of Tolstoy. And that old wind-bag sat near us and watched us--watched me. That's why I let myself go--" she was blushing now, and old Koschinsky nearly dropped a bird-cage in his astonishment.

"Yetta, Yetta!" Arthur insisted, "wind-bag, you call your comrade? Were you not, just for a few minutes, in the same category? Again she was silent.

"I feel now," he ejaculated, as he came very close to her, "that we must get outside of these verbal entanglements. I want you to become my wife." His heart sank as he thought of his mother's impassive, high-bred air--with such a figure for a Fifth Avenue bride! The girl looked into his weak blue eyes with their area of saucer-like whiteness. She shook her stubborn head.

"I shall never marry. I do not believe in such an institution. It degrades women, makes tyrants of men. No, Arthur--I am fond of you, perhaps--" she paused,--"so fond that I might enter into any relation but marriage,--that never!"

"And I tell you, Yetta, anarchy or no anarchy, I could never respect the woman if she were not mine legally. In America we do these things differently--" he was not allowed to finish.

She glared at him, then she strode to the shop door and opened it.

"Farewell to you, Mr. Arthur Schopenhauer Wyartz, amateur anarchist. Better go back to your mother and sisters! Mein Gott, Schopenhauer, too!" He put his Alpine hat on his bewildered head and without a word went out. She did not look after him, but walked over to the old bird-fancier and sat on his leather-topped stool. Presently she rested her elbows on her knees and propped her chin with her gloveless hands. Her eyes were red. Koschinsky peeped at her and shook his head.

"Yetta--you know what I think!--Yetta, the boy was right! You shouldn't have asked him for the Star-Spangled Banner! The Marseillaise would have been better."

"I don't care," she viciously retorted.

"I know, I know. But a nice boy--so well fixed."

"I don't care," she insisted. "I'm married to the revolution."

"Yah, yah! the revolution, Yetta--" he pushed his lean, brown forefinger into the cage of an enraged canary--"the revolution! Yes, Yetta Silverman, the revolution!" She sighed.

[The end]
James Huneker's short story: Sentimental Rebellion

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