CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The following Monday Anne went to the loft with Roger. Another niche was partitioned off for her and she began to take dictation.
Now that she had definitely come among them, joined her interest with Roger's, Anne tried to shake off the feeling that had held her in the past when she waited for Roger, and to get below the surface of this violent enthusiasm. But she could not do it.
So many orders were given during a day, so many plans made, so many contingencies prepared for that never arose. It was an exhausting game, the enthusiasm created by the players themselves. It was an insane May dance, Black Tom in the center holding the ribbons.
And such strange people danced at the end of the strings. Anne had never seen so many different nations and kinds of individuals in one spot, nor imagined they could so exist. Ministers who had given up the Gospel of Christ to preach this gospel of Man; teachers weary of the narrow round of instructing; a college professor who had discovered that the Social Revolution had really begun with creation, and written a pamphlet to prove it. A chemist who had discovered with equal suddenness that the social revolution was the newest and perhaps the last stage in man's evolution from the lower types.
There were men and women who saw some great change in the conduct of world affairs looming in huge, vague mass, but had no clear idea as to how this vague mass was to be shaped. Others who saw only the small, unimportant details and these groups argued for hours accusing each other of wrong methods that delayed progress. There was one young man with mild, kind eyes who forgave all bigotry and personal misunderstanding and wrote fierce, revolutionary songs, clarion calls to these people whom he forgave for not hearing. There was one plump little widow, raised in rigid Boston, who for the first time in her life had found an opportunity to berate car-conductors and minor officials in a loud voice. These she called publicly, in piercing tones—"the wage slaves of a rotten system"—and urged them to organize. She could always be relied upon at a moment's notice to picket, carry banners or distribute leaflets. The "rottenness of the system" excused her from contributing to any charity, but, until the arrival of the millennium, she invested her income with remarkable shrewdness in bonds.
Above this conglomerate of excitement Katya rose like a mountain in her belief and patience. Katya never attacked car-conductors nor urged telephone girls to strike, or bothered whether the social revolution had begun with creation, or whether it was the last stage of progress. Katya worked, often far into the night, and rarely spoke to any one but Tom or Roger. Anne she ignored, not with definite rudeness but with an unfathomable disregard of her existence. In her dark corner Katya was like a brown bear that had been taught to work. So incessant was the click of her machine that it was noticeable only in its rare intervals of silence, as one notices the momentary lull of the sea forever breaking on a rocky coast.
At first it was almost impossible for Anne to take Black Tom's dictation, to speak to him, or be near him. Merle was always there in her brilliant smock. Or the staring, embryonic eyes asking their eternal Why?
It was not until July, when a heavy cold forced Katya to stay home and Black Tom's personal dictation fell to Anne, that the faith of the man at last reached through her repulsion and she reluctantly conceded his sincerity. It was impossible to be admitted even so slightly into his confidence and not feel his faith. It was stark, like a granite headland, unornamented with scholastic theory. Its rough surface bore no intricate carving of historical or philosophic research. The man saw and believed. As the weeks passed, Anne came to feel that if he ever thought of Merle, he thought of her as a victim, neither of himself nor of her own nature, but of this colossal social injustice to which he referred all the ills of life.
But she never grew to like him, and months after she had come to take his dictation with no thought of Merle, any over-emphasized admiration of Roger's stripped her feeling back to her original disgust.
"The trouble is that you demand perfection in people you don't like," Roger said to her one day, when her annoyance at one of Black Tom's schemes for propaganda had driven her to biting criticism. "You measure every quality in them by their highest peak, and when they don't measure up to this standard all the way down, you reject them."
"Rather subtle, but not true," Anne said in the voice that always reminded Roger of a small, sharp gimlet. "I don't see anything for you to take offense at. Tom O'Connell is a monomaniac. Merle was right."
"Any one who believed utterly in an abstract principle would be a monomaniac to Merle."
"Any one who believes in only one aspect of a principle is a monomaniac."
"Tom does not believe in only one aspect; he is concerned with only one application of his principle. And no human being can be interested in more. If that's being a monomaniac then Tom's one, with all the other people in the world who have ever accomplished anything. You can't spatter your interest and energy all over the earth and make it count. A scientist is interested in science and an artist in art. Tom's medium is the present condition of the world. He doesn't want to win strikes for themselves, or stir up disorder, but only that greater order may come. His eyes aren't always fixed on the sores and confusions under his eyes, but on the perfect body society might be. If Jesus Christ had lived to-day and worked in a Pennsylvania coal mine when He was twelve, instead of two thousand years ago on the sandy plains of Syria—he would have been rather like Tom, I think."
"That's ridiculous, Roger. You're getting to be a monomaniac too."
"It's not ridiculous. And if that's what you call being a monomaniac, I'd just as soon be one. In fact, I hope I am."
"Well, I don't. I've always been sorry for Christ's family. I think He must have been dreadfully annoying to live with. Didn't He tell His mother to go home and mind her business while He went and lectured to men old enough to be His grandfather?"
"Nice, old conservatives, gripping their traditions like crabs hanging to their rocks."
"Making their application of their principle."
"No. Not making it at all. Just hanging on to its corpse long after it had ceased to have a spark of life. Once the Syrians had needed their philosophy, but they were petrifying in a social system that human life had really outgrown. They had lived so long in a barren land, fighting for their means of living, fighting against their sand wastes and rocks and neighboring tribes, that the whole of life had become a kind of arena. Their Jehovah was only another brigand of the Syrian hills. Those old men you sympathize with were like the militarists of to-day. They can't think except in terms of gunpowder. 'War always has been' and so it's always going to be. Then Christ happened along and saw that Life was wider than the barren wastes of Syria and that they were at the wrong end of the solution. Those old Syrian War-lords had applied the principle of physical conquest to all kinds of spiritual problems and Christ saw that it wasn't getting them anywhere. He was really telling them how to get the things they had started out after and lost the way of finding. When I was a kid He used to annoy me awfully—an anemic young Jew with a silly beard and girl eyes—but I've gotten to like Him."
"You'll get to like any other monomaniac who's been dead long enough."
"Are we quarreling?" Roger asked impatiently, exasperated by this eternal twisting of a general path back to the personal point. "I thought we were discussing that measure Tom's going to try and put through the convention."
"We are—as far as I am concerned. You dragged in Christ."
"I didn't drag Christ in except to try and make you see why Tom wants to get this particular measure across. I don't understand you, Anne. You say sometimes that you believe the man's sincere and yet you're always trying to measure him up with some little yardstick of inherited social convention. Tom's like the great central wheel of some high-powered machine, and you pick flaws because he's not the spring of some jeweled and useless little watch."
Anne shrugged and began to gather up the dinner things. What did it matter? If she and Roger talked half the night they would only branch from one difference to another. In the exhausting day behind her there was not one still spot wherein they could meet in perfect accord. To her, the day had been filled with whirling, human particles that obstructed her vision and stimulated Roger. All day Anne had felt choked by these particles; the mannerisms, the shop-worn jargon, the unrestrained enthusiasm, had gotten into her ears and eyes and down her throat like sand. She had meant to keep the dinner hour free from this sand, but it had filtered in. It always did. Anne was coming to feel that these people with whom she passed the day followed her home at night.
As Roger watched her moving, slight and graceful, about the room, putting it in evening order, he wondered why Anne had ever offered to come to the loft. She did the work well, as she had done John Lowell's, but with no more personal joy in it. And yet Anne had once felt a larger world calling for more than perfection of mechanical detail or conscientious accomplishment of the day's stint. At what point in their lives had that Anne slipped away into the fog in which he groped now without finding her? Behind his book Roger grappled with this problem, growing larger week by week.
Two years before they had started from the same point to walk along a road together. At no spot had they left the way. No emotional side-path had lured Roger from his faithfulness to Anne; no other way of life had tempted her. Their hope had been the same—to live beautifully a beautiful life. They were not living it beautifully. It was growing ugly, full of impatience on his side, suppressions on hers. Sometimes, for a few days, even a week, they managed to step from stone to stone of personal agreement, and then, on some little hidden rock, they stood and grew bitter toward each other.
In the kitchen Anne stacked the dishes for Mrs. Horton's coming in the morning, clicked off the light, and came back. She, too, took a book and curled up in her favorite spot on the couch to read.
Was she reading? Didn't she feel this fog closing in about them? What would happen if he asked her why she had wished to work with him, or suggested that she leave it? Would Anne be honest and tell him? Did she know herself?
But Roger did not ask. At ten he stopped reading. A few moments later Anne finished her chapter. They went to bed. From habit, Anne lay close for a little, with his arm about her. Then he kissed her and turned over on his side. Once more the harmony of sleep covered the tangled knots and broken threads of the day behind.