IV
Matters came to a climax. A letter for Bunny, bearing a French stamp, but in a familiar handwriting that made his pulses jump. He tore it open and read: “Dear Son, I am in town for a few days and would you like to meet me? Yours for old times, Paul Watkins.”
Bunny was twenty-four years old now, but it was just the way it had been eleven years ago, there in Mrs. Groarty’s back yard, when he had left his father and run shouting, “Paul! Paul! Where are you? Please don’t go way!” Bunny had a date with Vee, but he got out of it—his sister would invite her to one of those diplomatic tea-parties where you met the Prince de This and the Duchesse de That. Then Bunny hurried off to the obscure hotel where his friend was staying.
Paul was haggard; one does not take a trip to Moscow to get fat. But his sober face was shining with a light of fanaticism—the same thing which his brother Eli called the glory of the Lord! Dad would have said there were two of them, equally crazy; but it didn’t seem that way to Bunny, who mocked at Eli’s god, but believed in Paul’s—at least enough to tremble in his presence. Paul had been living under a workers’ government again—and this time not as a wage-slave, a strike-breaker in army uniform, but as a free man, and master of the future. So now in this dingy hotel room Bunny was sitting opposite an apostle; Paul, with his sombre, determined features and toil-accustomed figure, the very incarnation of the militant working-class!
And the miracles of which he had to tell were real. First of all a spiritual miracle—a hundred million people proclaiming their own sovereignty, and the downfall of masters and exploiters, kings, priests, capitalists, the whole rabble of parasites. It was a physical miracle, too, because these hundred million people controlled one-sixth of the earth’s surface, and were building a new civilization, a model for the future. They were poor, of course; they had started with a country in wreck. But what were a few years, and a little hunger, compared with the ages of torment they had survived?
Paul described the sights of Moscow. First of all, the youth movement; a whole new generation being taught to be clear-eyed and free, to face the facts of nature, and to serve the working-class, instead of climbing out upon its face and founding a line of parasites! You saw those young Communists in class-rooms, on athletic fields, in the streets—marching, singing, listening to speeches—Paul himself had talked to tens of thousands, in his little bit of Russian, and nothing had ever meant so much to him. He had but one interest for the rest of his life, to tell the young workers of America about the young workers of Russia. He began by telling Bunny!
He talked about the councils he had attended, the international gatherings where the future of the parties all over the world was charted out. Bunny of course made his protest against this. Did Paul really think it was possible for an American political party to have its course determined in a foreign country? Paul smiled and said it was hard enough—the Russian leaders couldn’t understand how far back in history America stood. But what else could you do? Either you meant to have world order, or you didn’t? If you left the party in each country to determine its own course, you were right back where you were before the war, with men calling themselves Socialists, and holding power in the name of Socialism, who were in reality patriots, ready to back the exploiters of their own land in wars against the exploiters of other lands.
That was the thing which threatened to destroy the human race; and the only way to end it was to do what the Third International was doing—have a world government and enforce its orders. The workers’ world government was located in Moscow, because elsewhere the delegates would be thrown into prison, or assassinated, as in Geneva. But before many years the Third International would hold a Congress in Berlin, and then in Paris and London, and in the end in New York. The workers of the world would send their representatives, and that Congress would give its orders, and the nations would stop their fighting, just you bet! Thus Paul: and Bunny, as usual, was swept along upon a wave of enthusiasm.