The Daily Worker Newspaper, January 30, 1926, Page 11

to go back. And, Raviloff, I say again that you’re a scab and traitor if you go back now,” Raviloff flushed purple with wrath, and rushed upon the tall Pole as if to devour him. ut Kurelovitch did not lift his stern, calm gaze rom the other’s face, and a light like that of -| bwords came and went in his blue eyes. The ‘| Russian surged up and touched him, chest to chest, and then Kurelovitch intrigued the other -l into a sensible discussion that served to keep 1} the Russian on the firing line. . . '| And thus it went. So Kurelovitch passed his day, moving from the swooning brink of .| one crisis to another. He sat with the strike .| committee for many hours in a smoky room :|and agonized over ways and means. He ad- dressed another large meeting at headquarters in the afternoon. He went out on the picket line and was singled out for threats and taunts again by the gunmen, so that he felt murder boiling in his deeps and left. Then he had to ‘| return later to the picket line because word was rushed to him that five of the pickets had i| been arrested in a fight finally precipitated by , | the gunmen. Kurelovitch spent the rest of the BS ternoon scurrying about and finding bail for e five. ] Toward night he had a supper of ham sand- | wiches and coffee, and then he and three of . | the strike committee went to a meeting of sym- pathizers about fifteen miles away. Kurelovitch >| made his third passioned address of the day, and stirred up a large collection. The long, dull, wrenching ride home followed. He got off the trolley car near his house about midnight, his brain whirling and hot, his heart acrid and despairing. The urgency of the fight was passed, and nothing was left~to buoy him against his weariness. He walked in a stupor; the day had sucked every atom of his valor arfd strength. He wished dumbly for death; he was the cold ashes of the flaming Kurelovitch of the day. Had gunmen come now and threatened him he would have cringed and then wept. There was a feeble light waning and waver- ing in the window of his little-three-room flat, and when he had fumbled with the lock and opened the dilapidated door he found some one brooding with folded arms near the stove. It ood up. awfully and turned on him with bale- pored like ‘a ‘wild beast’ in its cave. “You rotten dog!” his wife screamed at Ku- relovitch in the vast quiet of the night. “You mean and dirty pig!” “Annie, dear—” “To go away in the morning and leave us to starve! To send food to other’s families and then to forget us! Oh, you'd be glad if we all died of starvation! You’d laugh to see us all dead, you murderer!” Kurelovitch was too sorrowful to attempt an answer. He went to the bedroom where he and two of the children slept and shut the door ehind him. His wife took this for a gesture contempt, and her frenzy mounted to a lood-curdling crescendo that ran up and down e neighborhood like a ravaging blight. Heads popped out of windows and bawled to her to stop for Christ’s sake. And, finally she broke down of sheer exhaustion and Kurelovitch heard her shuffling into bed. There was anguished silence, and then Ku- relovitch heard his poor, overburdened drudge ‘lof a wife weeping terribly, with gulping sobs that hurt him like knives . .. . And now he could not sleep at all, even after her sobbing had merged into ugly snoring. He tossed as in a fever, as he had on so many other nights of the seven frantic weeks of the strike. He went blindly for relief to the window, - | beyond which reigned the cold, inimical night. The shabby slum street dwindled to an ob- bette Se eS a ee OS er ee. Oe. ae. >. + es we. &*. CO. 8 ee ee OE = - © s&s © - ing cold be seen dominating over the ragged uses. No being was abroad in the desolate k; he saw a chain of weak lanterns casting rbid shadows, and the vicious wind whip- . | ping up the litter of the streets. The stars ;| were white and high overhead, as distant as beauty from the place where Kurelovitch burned with sleeplessness. He heard the rattling gurgling snore of his wife. | - | Kurelovitch ached with his great need of * | forgetfulness. As he twitched on his humid bed the days that had gone and the darker 1} days to come ranged about and tauned him "| like fiends. The feeling that he held the fate of the strike in his hand rested on him mon- strously, and his starving children made him gasp and cry like one drowning. . . In dumb anguish he prayed unconsciously to >| the power of the righteousness, to God or Twa aS cr s see scure horizon, and the mass of the mill build-: The Beyond — TRANSLATED BY LYDIA GIBSON (Synopsis of previous instalments) The scene is the Riviera, a luxurious resort where the idle rich spend their winter on the south- ern coast of France. There we find Hubert Alien, a young aviator, and Carla, a beautiful girl whom he intends to marry. There also is the Baron de Ghest, an enormously wealthy financier and industrial cap- italist_ whose factories are nearby. In the baron’s factories are many workers who live in misery and poverty. Mark, a very shrewd chemist, is employed in the baron’s laboratory in experiments with a ter- rible new poison gas and new explosives for warfare. Baron De Gest engages Allen, the young aviator, to make a mysterious air-raid on China. Allen goes to see his-old aunt who is harmiessiy insane in an asylum. She warns him mysteriously of the “race to death’ and of “Moloch, the man of steel and gold.” Before the time for his intended flight to China, Allen enters into an altitude contest to win the Zenith Cup. If he can win the cup, Allen ex- pects to marry Carla before leaving France. The contest starts. Allen is the first to go up. The other contestants capsize. Allen is the only sur- vivor. Bringing his plane back to earth, Allen dis- covers the hangar and factories in ruins and the grandstand of the flying-field in flames. But the strangest of sights meets his eye—all the people in the grandstand and on the fiying-field are sitting or standing about, apparently undisturbed in the strange postures of wax dummies. Every human being in sight has been struck dead, so suddenly that they stand or sit in attitudes exactly as tho they were alive. The poisoned gas has been turned fose by an explosion in the factory and everyone has been instantaneously killed. Allen, alone, was too high above the explosion to be killed. The Ghastly sight strikes terror into his heart. In an effort to find Carla, Allen rushes into the great fashionable hotel where the same living-death confronts him. He enters into the private rooms— there ne sees the secrets of their lives disclosed. A young couple whom he had known and who had mysteriously disappeared were found enlaced in death by a suicide pact before the lethal gases were unleashed; Mark the chemist—apparently gay in life was weeping in desolation when death struck him; two old “respectables” of royalty stricken dead in a domestic row; another “respectable” has in his hand a stolen ring; a maniacial old general plays with toy soldiers—he had been responsible for the slaughter of many real soldiers; an American finan- cier—he symbolizes the “golden calf.” Ajlen’s dis- coveries are innumerable—one after the other the vile realities of the “upper classes” are unveiled— the playthings of their passions, wallowing in wealth and debauchery. Allen goes to the tenement district. A young soldier, dying in a cellar in which the only orna- ment was his war medal, had been hastened to death only a little by the explosion; drunkards, starving wives, bewildered children; in the face of these sights Allen recalled an old lady in the hotel noted for charity built on the flesh of these living sacrifices. A Child plays soldier in the street— leering at the workers he dreams of the day when he will be pre to suppress them. Where is Carla? How far into the heart of the universe has this living-death penetrated? >. 2.8 «© AM tired out. I sink down anywhere... My eyelids close, hypnotized by a theater poster. “Revue—Apotheosis—500 in the Cast.” A low, wide-humming assailg MY ¢aF8, yoy) ogy |" I sleep. I see people and things move again in time and space. Recompense, joy! Illumination and color, I am in the midst of a crowded theater, warm, shimmering, stifling with the bad perfum- ed smell of the elegant public. On the stage is a martial scene: the handsome, victorious officer makes an eloquent, fiery speech to the soldiers, who are panting to be at the Ger- mans, thru shell-fire. Suddenly a man stands up in the audience, in the first row of the balcony. A poor, shabby man, but the whole audience see him, thin as Don Quixote, his face pitted with death itself, dressed in dangling blue rags dragged from the bloody mud; a soldier from the war. He speaks; no, he coughs. He fumbles in his knapsack which makes a round bulge on his thin shoulders. He throws into the audience a hand grenade which bursts. I see the diamonded hands of the ferocious women and the effeminate young men who had been applauding the butchery of the soldiers, fly up in fear. The thunder of the sudden explosion in my head and in my breast wakens me... The dream that cried in the silence is gone, Life has not returned. The physical cessation of every- thing, everything; surrounds me still, ° I think of the theater, reminded of it by that night- mare. I go to the Casino to see, even tho empty, the hall where my dream whirled on its fiery pivot. The noise of my feet on the sidewalk is queer. ; The hall is not empty.as I supposed. People are grouped on the stage, others massed in the first rows of seats, which are covered with shadows. It is the ghost of a rehearsal. What were they re- hearsing this morning at the moment of the catas- trophe? The famous Revue, so long heralded: the grand finale which they were just running thru! “At the Summit, Victory.” A scaffold is built up to. make different levels on the stage; it is unfinished, and the ‘whatever fate it was that had brought him in- to the world. But no relief came that way, and, finally, after a struggle, he groped with all his pangs to a little dresser in the room, where he searched out a brandy bottle. This he took to bed with him, and drank and drank and drank again, till the past and the more ter- rible future were blurred in kindly night, and the great dark wings of peace folded over him and he sank into the maternal arms of ob- livion. m.. By Henri Barbusse trestles, wall-board, and glue show thru here and there. The groups of actors are some of them in costume, and others in ordinary clothes. Some half-costumed; men in sack suits wear sabers. Victory is the leading lady, whose beautiful breasts are only half hidden by the tricolor scarf. This little woman, called Rosette of the Legion of Honor—brand- ishes a flag, and at the top of the pyramid, like a hoisted divinity, she opens her mouth. I-can guess what she is crying—‘‘Long Live France!” Homage and consecration are lifted to her; the symmetrical gestures of the hands and bare arms of a troop of chorus-girls whose skirts, shortened to the top of the thighs, make a great wheel. Standing with their hand lifted to take the oath, are statesmen, sena- tors, plumed and helmeted generals; the great indus- trialist who works so hard to enrich France and civilization, and the good colonial with his adoring lit- tle flock of all colors, and the good schoolmaster, (the angel-making education); and the writer-thinker with his green embroideries who recites an ode of Victory; and the.artist who presents her an offering of the first- fruits of the national genius, the statue of Progress— a sort of big vulture of plaster. And lower, the good workingmen, dressed up and docile, do homage to her with their tools: one holds out his shovel, another his pick, and the peasant in his nice clean blue shirt offers ‘his sickle, and the house- wife offers a plump woolen stocking, and the old offers his sons, 5 , The terrible immobility of this big parade shows'the “unbelievable baseness of the public ideal, All these bright lights, the tumult of music, the excitement, spurred on by nudity, is for the purpose of forcing this base ideal into the collective mind. For it is this that really leads, in the manner so clearly shown here, the whole human mass. I leave the place. I go before myself, like Lazarus. I think, all of a sudden, of the master of masters, the richest of the rich, of the Baron de Ghest. 1 osere one is very tired, one becomes dull and one sees nothing more; I know it well. I am harrassed and I am already calm. Alas, already I do not shud- der with horror when I say to myself: “You are sur- rounded by a cemetery in human forms. “I shoulder my way now like an ordinary passer-by among the numberless images of men and. women flayed out of life and set up in the mould of the world. And already their drama is no more striking to me than before, when we were alike. Our malady is in losing so quickly the sense of what we touch. Man is not made to understand, ta ‘It moments, when I get back some-of my, elastic: | ity, or when I see my face reflected in a mirror, I stop, and bits of ideas come to me. This one ... “When the pestilence comes ...” My neck sinks down between my shoulders, I drive away that idea. Then: “No, the catastrophe certainly hasn’t hit the whole earth, it must have been too small— and however it is, there must be other survivors beside myself.” But @ voice answers: “Look, listen: nothing. Nothing more here.” I am overwhelmed with the sil- ence and the beyond. And this idea also, with a start ~ of surprise: “I have millions at hand , ..” My head is spinning. All the worse, all the bet- ter... to know. With bared breast, queerly armed with my hammer in my hand like a cave-man, my pockets stuffed with boxes of matches (my insane prudence makes me think of evening and I stocked up—with matches in a store.) I arrive at the splendid Florentine villa where the golden ball was in full swing night before last, No need here to break down doors, They all yield to the hand, docilely, beside a flunkey turned to stone. He... ‘ That man shines, the center of all this splendér, | He is seated, half lying down, on crimsor velvet in his Arabian Nights studio. He smiles. A girl-is em-! bracing him: the delicate bent shoulder, the scattered hair, the half-naked young body beside him, and one arm around his neck, I peer closer at this tangle Ah, the caress of the bare arm! ,,, ! The woman! I leap toward her. I lift her with both hands in spite of the rigidity of death; I turn her face to mine—and Carla gives me the sweet smile she always gave me, v Happily I have a level head ... But I recoil to the .furtherest corner, screaming like a tiger maimed by hunters. ere ae I am astonished that my head remains so cool. Yes- terday nothing in the world would have prevented me from raining blows upon this man and woman if I had discovered them so. I should have beaten them even if they had been dead, even for nothing. But I leave them alone now. i (Continued on next page, page 6) | On the morrow he would wake and find thé ring of problems haunting him again, and hé would grapple them again in his big, tragic fashion till his soul bled with many fresh wounds as he stumbled home in the night. And thus he would go on and on till he was broken or dead, for Kurelovitch had dared to spit into the face of the beast that reigns mankind, and never for this sin would he be permitted to know sweetness or rest under the wide shin- ing range of the heavens, ”