The Daily Worker Newspaper, January 2, 1927, Page 6

A Portrait of a Comrade T° was the day of the great victory. The people had won. On every face wag radiance and quiet. Far down the street I heard the sound of men sing- ing together. The great leader sat quietly in his own room. The praise that had made him happiest had not been his own, But all day long a Hne of people had heaped roses and laurel upon his father’s grave, murmur- jr~ “Von died end the Great Cause seemed to die with you but The Day of the Dawn of Justice has come.” The leader himself sat in the great quietness of fulfillment and watched the fire on hts own hearth. A shaggy man he was with eyes that burned and Wesw cradle ‘Gt one might know all of the graves that should have roses today,” he said, at last, “the graves of those that served us all well, who laid their lives on the altar day by day as Fate sent the days. For all of us to see this dawn is enough. But those who did not live to see it—Yet I think the very earth thrills around them as they rest and makes them dream of Peace and Brotherhood. You have not fkeard me speak of my mother.” For a long time he was-silent. “Tt is hard to put 9@ quiet a life into words. A river flowing steadily to the sea, how shall one talk ebout it?. And she used so few words herself. I remember her mainly going quietly about her house, her hair plaited closely about her serene face. She went to market every morning buying very shrewd- ly. Then she cooked our dinner. We were always poor and she had very little help. Often our meal was bread and cabbage soup. She made very good eabbage soup. In the intervals of housekeeping she taught me my letters and my multiplication tables. We were compelled to move about so much that I should have had little learning otherwise. She impressed it on me firmly that I must grow up to be a learned man like my father. She had no sense of humor at all and took my father’s jokes as she would have taken his dropping into a foreign language. She her- self never laughed. No, I remember once. One of my first recollections is a lovely April morning when I was playing around her feet in a snow of apple blossoms failing. Suddenly my fath- er coming wp, made all her lovely fair hair come down, over her neck and shoulders, falling down to her waist. She looked up at him and laughed a little low laugh. My baby mind was much amazed at this result and I felt it a great disorderliness in ~het ordérly world. Then she saw me and was quiet, putting her hair up again and reassuring me that all was well. I think perhaps she had as little sense of humor as anyone I ever saw. It was like her absolute lack of music. My father’s whimsical smile at her at times seemed quite lost upon her, but not his music. She was very proud of that tho she her- self could not tell one tune from another. Altho she laughed little there was a pleasant se- renity about her not easily disturbed. The house- bold affairs were entirely in her hands, and my fath- er trusted her judgment entirely whenever she gave her judgment. She never offered it except in affairs which she considered her province, the house, my food and so on. In fact, I was almost entirely in her hands. That came perhaps partly from my fath- er’s many absences from home. He never denied me anything. Therefore my mother never allowed me to ask for anything in his presence. She was very firm with me about a few things. My father believed in very little restraint for children and his Deliefs were my mother’s religion. devoteés of many other Yet, like the faiths, she trimmed its Se nea Chicherin and Turkish representative meeting at | Odessa to cement friendly relations between two | nations, Ayeic4 abont the edges a bit to make them fit into everyday life. In some things I was very obedient. Long ‘before I can remember, I knew that to dis- turb my father at his work comprised the Seven tenots Deadly Sins all rolled into one. The laws of the Medes and the Persians were as water to that. J might have resented this later except that he was himself so entirely innocent of any plot to put him on a pedestal. I knew that that had been my mother’s work entirely. When he was busy he could go into abstraction 80 profound that he forgot us as one forgets the sha- dows on the wall. j When I was eleven or twelve perhaps, at the age when children knock at the very portals of the gods to ask “why?” I tried to get into his study one day past my mother. “He said that. be» would-hear «his, history Jesson when I was ready,’ Lurged, for he was @ wonder- ful teacher when he had time to teach me. “He would do it, if he promised you,” she agreed, “but you will manage not to be ready until he is finished with his work.” “Why must I always wait for his work?” I sulk- ed, “he is my father.” “Your father,” she said with cold scorn, “what talk to me! Your father’s work is not with one child alone. It is the care of many children, little and helpless, for all the world of those who suffer and who often cry for bread. Some of them are children, too, smaller than you, helpless. If you could push in to take-his time from them it would be better for me and mine not to have been born.” I was ewed at her cold anger and I never forgot. We lived in one place and another. Sometimes my father was with us, sometimes he was away months at a time. I did not understand. But one time when he had been living peacefully with us for many months, I woke to find my mother sitting up very late looking into the fire. Her face was very white and still and recollection of other times that _I had seen her sitting so, stirred sick terror in me. ‘Back, at intervals of years, in my childhood, came memories of her sitting all night in front of the fire, “her face white and the terrible quiet in her eyes. At dawn my father came, and with the sound of his step at the door she was her composed self again. Neither Knew that I was awake. “They have me,” said my father, “they are wait- ing outside the door. Goodbye, my love.” She lifted her face to him. “What will become of you and the litile one, here in a strange country?” he asked, “I. will send for help for you when I can. But it will not be soon.” “Send for nothing!” she said, “and let. nothing fret you. I am a woman of the people. I am not so helpless that I cannot take care of myself and one child.” “This is not home.” He still looked anxious. “That is not for you to think of,” she said. “Bet- ter that I and mine were dead than to be a stone around the neck of one who has heard the wail of the helpless. It is for you to bring light to those who long ago lost hope.” My father looked at her. “Still the little girl I saw in the prison,” he said, and bent to kiss her. Then he used the word which so many years after re-echoed for me. “Goodbye, Comrade!” It was many months before we saw him again, but his words echoed strangely in my ears, The next day my curiosity drove me to the ques- tion, “Were you ever in prison, mother?’ For a moment my mothcr looked at me, a little startled. Then she anowered quite simply. “For two daya only. There was a revolt. The police put many of us in prison for a little while. My people came and got me out on the second day "By Gertrude Nafe By Gertrude but your father was kept a long time with the other leaders. That was the first time he had seen me tho, of course, I had seen him often. When he came out, he married me.” She spoke Semele-like ag tho she herself had had nothing to do with it. The god had descended. That was all. Still I wonder if Semele had to make the cabbage soup, day after day— “Great men have odd notions, at times,” she went on. « She must have forgotten that she was speaking to me, I have tried all my life to decide what she meant. Surely she was not referring to herself as the odd notion of a great man. , When my father next came from prison we went back to our own country, and life went along very quietly for us until I was nearly fifteen. I studied very hard and was ready to enter college. Then hard times came, much hunger, rioting om the streets. One day I saw a woman in the bread- line get into a dispute with a soldier on riot duty. Like a young fool, I attacked him and was locked up over night for my folly. In the morning my father came and got me out. I shall never forget my father’s talk to me on the road home. For the first time in his life he really set himself to show me that I had been wrong. My mother had often blamed me, my father never. “They who wish to make a great and vital change, must take a long and weary road,” he said, “and they must gather strength and wisdom for a long journey before ever they set out. Control your- self, know what you are fighting and what you are fighting for. Know what is the best way and how you will begin and how end. It is the greatest work in the world. Do not throw yourself into it unpre- pared and so ruin the service you wish to give. Know, that is the great word, know.” I was silent. I felt very young and much ashamed. “Your mother,” he added, quietly, “had sat all night watching the fire.” I looked up at him, astonished. Had he never seen her so, before? Then 1 remembered. It was always when he was away, when he was in trouble. Many as were the times I could remember, he knew nothing of any of them. Then a strange little pride began to creep into my heart. For me, for me too, she would do that. As we reached home my mother stood in the door- way. As I looked in her face I thot, “What has happened to my father?” Then I remembered. It Was not my father.~ The terrible quiet in her eyes was for me and again with My sorréw came that astonished little pride. : : My father felt that I had been blamed enough and said, before either of us could speak. “I have told him, dear child, that there are wiser ways of going about such things, and that he should have thot of you, and not begun so young and so hotly.” My mother looked up at him questioningly inter- rupting herself so that she failed to greet me at all until we were in the sitting room. Then she Stood before us. “You told him that he should think of me!” ghe repeated. “What should he think of me?” She folded her hands in front of her and her very garments spoke authority. “You told him that my night was anxious. of that? I have watched the fire before this.” She looked back grimly into her life. “I have~ been anxious many times ané shall be again, for two now. Have I ever begrudged it? ‘ “There was 2 woman, you say, Standing in the bread line? It was not of-me that he should have thot then. You told him that he was young? But not too young to have seen brutal injustice. If he had so ycung been ripe with all the wisdom of old (Continued on Page 8.) What FAT, the boss, and SLUM, the slave, praying to game god.