still have secured the services of his three policemen and commissionaire.
To this worthy, a neat, cleanly gentleman in uniform, wearing on his breast the medals for the relief of Chitral and the Soudan Campaigns, the two men delivered the perforated halves of their tickets and passed through the outer lobby into a small room. By a door at the other end stood a thin man with a straggling beard. His eyes were red-rimmed and weak, he wore long narrow buttoned boots, and he had a trick of pecking his head forwards and sideways like an inquisitive hen.
‘You have the word, brothers?’ he asked, speaking German like one unaccustomed to the language.
The taller of the two strangers shot a swift glance at the sentinel that absorbed the questioner from his cracked patent leather boots to his flamboyant watch-chain. Then he answered in Italian:
‘Nothing!’
The face of the guardian flushed with pleasure at the familiar tongue.
‘Pass, brother; it is very good to hear that language.’
The air of the crowded hall struck the two men in the face like the blast from a destructor. It was unclean; unhealthy — the scent of an early-morning doss-house.
The hall was packed, the windows were closed and curtained, and as a precautionary measure, little Peter had placed thick blankets before the ventilators.
At one end of the hall was a platform on which stood a semicircle of chairs and in the centre was a table draped with red. On the wall behind the chairs — every one of which was occupied — was a huge red flag bearing in the centre a great white ‘C’. It had been tacked to the wall, but one corner had broken away revealing a part of the painted scroll of the mission workers:
‘…are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.’
The two intruders pushed their way through a group that were gathered at the door. Three aisles ran the length of the building, and they made their way along the central gangway and found seats near the platform.
A brother was speaking. He was a good and zealous worker but a bad orator. He spoke in German and enunciated commonplaces with hoarse emphasis. He said all the things that other men had said and forgotten. ‘This is the time to strike’ was his most notable sentence, and notable only because it evoked a faint buzz of applause.
The audience stirred impatiently. The good Bentvitch had spoken beyond his allotted time; and there were other people to speak — and prosy at that. And it would be ten o’clock before the Woman of Gratz would rise.
The babble was greatest in the corner of the hall, where little Peter, all eyes and startled eyebrows, was talking to an audience of his own.
‘It is impossible, it is absurd, it is most foolish!’ his thin voice rose almost to a scream. ‘I should laugh at it — we should all laugh, but the Woman of Gratz has taken the matter seriously, and she is afraid!’
‘Afraid!’
‘Nonsense!’
‘Oh, Peter, the fool!’
There were other things said because everybody in the vicinity expressed an opinion. Peter was distressed, but not by the epithets. He was crushed, humiliated, beaten by his tremendous tidings. He was nearly crying at the horrible thought. The Woman of Gratz was afraid! The Woman of Gratz who…It was unthinkable.
He turned his eyes toward the platform, but she was not there.
‘Tell us about it, Peter,’ pleaded a dozen voices; but the little man with the tears twinkling on his fair eyelashes waved them off.
So far from his incoherent outburst they had learnt only this — that the Woman of Gratz was afraid.
And that was bad enough.
For this woman — she was a girl really, a slip of a child who should have been finishing her education somewhere in Germany — this same woman had once risen and electrified the world.
There had been a meeting in a small Hungarian town to discuss ways and means. And when the men had finished their denunciation of Austria, she rose and talked. A short-skirted little girl with two long flaxen braids of hair, thin-legged, flat-chested, angular, hipless — that is what the men of Gratz noticed as they smiled behind their hands and wondered why her father had brought her to the meeting.
But her speech…two hours she spoke and no man stirred. A little flat-chested girl full of sonorous phrases — mostly she had collected them from the talk in Old Joseph’s kitchen. But with some power of her own, she had spun them together, these inconsiderable truisms, and had endowed them with a wondrous vitality.
They were old, old platitudes, if the truth be told, but at some time in the history of revolution, some long dead genius had coined them, and newly fashioned in the furnace of his soul they had shaped men’s minds and directed their great and dreadful deeds.
So the Woman of Gratz arrived, and they talked about her and circulated her speeches in every language. And she grew. The hollow face of this lank girl filled, and the flat bosom rounded and there came softer lines and curves to her angular figure, and, almost before they realized the fact, she was beautiful.
So her fame had grown until her father died and she went to Russia. Then came a series of outrages which may be categorically and briefly set forth: —
1: General Maloff shot dead by an unknown woman in his private room at the Police Bureau, Moscow.
2: Prince Hazallarkoff shot dead by an unknown woman in the streets of Petrograd.
3: Colonel Kaverdavskov killed by a bomb thrown by a woman who made her escape.
And the Woman of Gratz leapt to a greater fame. She had been arrested half a dozen times, and whipped twice, but they could prove nothing against her and elicit nothing from her — and she was very beautiful.
Now to the thundering applause of the waiting delegates, she stepped upon the platform and took the last speaker’s place by the side of the red-covered table.
She raised her hand and absolute and complete silence fell on the hall, so much so that her first words sounded strident and shrill, for she had attuned her voice to the din. She recovered her pitch and dropped her voice to a conversational tone.
She stood easily with her hands clasped behind her and made no gesture. The emotion that was within her she conveyed through her wonderful voice. Indeed, the power of the speech lay rather in its delivery than in its substance, for only now and then did she depart from the unwritten text of Anarchism: the right of the oppressed to overthrow the oppressor; the divinity of violence; the sacredness of sacrifice and martyrdom in the cause of enlightenment. One phrase alone stood apart from the commonplace of her oratory. She was speaking of the Theorists who counsel reform and condemn violence, ‘These Christs who deputize their Calvaries,’ she called them with fine scorn, and the hall roared its approval of the imagery.
It was the fury of the applause that disconcerted her; the taller of the two men who sat watching her realized that much. For when the shouting had died down and she strove to resume, she faltered and stammered and then was silent. Then abruptly and with surprising vehemence she began again. But she had changed the direction of her oratory, and it was upon another subject that she now spoke. A subject nearer to her at that moment than any other, for her pale cheeks flushed and a feverish light came to her eyes as she spoke.
‘…and now, with all our perfect organization, with the world almost within our grasp — there comes somebody who says “Stop!” — and we who by our acts have terrorized kings and dominated the councils of empires, are ourselves threatened!’
The audience grew deadly silent. They were silent before, but now the silence was painful.
The two men who watched her stirred a little uneasily, as though something in her speech had jarred. Indeed, the suggestion of braggadocio in her assertion of the Red Hundred’s power had struck a discordant note.