The Council of Justice | Page 4

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