The Council of Justice | Page 4

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