The noise of the world

by Adriana Spadoni

The following Monday Anne went to the loft with Roger. Another niche was partitioned off for her and she began to take dictation.

Now that she had definitely come among them, joined her interest with Roger's, Anne tried to shake off the feeling that had held her in the past when she waited for Roger, and to get below the surface of this violent enthusiasm. But she could not do it.

So many orders were given during a day, so many plans made, so many contingencies prepared for that never arose. It was an exhausting game, the enthusiasm created by the players themselves. It was an insane May dance, Black Tom in the center holding the ribbons.

And such strange people danced at the end of the strings. Anne had never seen so many different nations and kinds of individuals in one spot, nor imagined they could so exist. Ministers who had given up the Gospel of Christ to preach this gospel of Man; teachers weary of the narrow round of instructing; a college professor who had discovered that the Social Revolution had really begun with creation, and written a pamphlet to prove it. A chemist who had discovered with equal suddenness that the social revolution was the newest and perhaps the last stage in man's evolution from the lower types.

There were men and women who saw some great change in the conduct of world affairs looming in huge, vague mass, but had no clear idea as to how this vague mass was to be shaped. Others who saw only the small, unimportant details and these groups argued for hours accusing each other of wrong methods that delayed progress. There was one young man with mild, kind eyes who forgave all bigotry and personal misunderstanding and wrote fierce, revolutionary songs, clarion calls to these people whom he forgave for not hearing. There was one plump little widow, raised in rigid Boston, who for the first time in her life had found an opportunity to berate car-conductors and minor officials in a loud voice. These she called publicly, in piercing tones—"the wage slaves of a rotten system"—and urged them to organize. She could always be relied upon at a moment's notice to picket, carry banners or distribute leaflets. The "rottenness of the system" excused her from contributing to any charity, but, until the arrival of the millennium, she invested her income with remarkable shrewdness in bonds.

Above this conglomerate of excitement Katya rose like a mountain in her belief and patience. Katya never attacked car-conductors nor urged telephone girls to strike, or bothered whether the social revolution had begun with creation, or whether it was the last stage of progress. Katya worked, often far into the night, and rarely spoke to any one but Tom or Roger. Anne she ignored, not with definite rudeness but with an unfathomable disregard of her existence. In her dark corner Katya was like a brown bear that had been taught to work. So incessant was the click of her machine that it was noticeable only in its rare intervals of silence, as one notices the momentary lull of the sea forever breaking on a rocky coast.

At first it was almost impossible for Anne to take Black Tom's dictation, to speak to him, or be near him. Merle was always there in her brilliant smock. Or the staring, embryonic eyes asking their eternal Why?

It was not until July, when a heavy cold forced Katya to stay home and Black Tom's personal dictation fell to Anne, that the faith of the man at last reached through her repulsion and she reluctantly conceded his sincerity. It was impossible to be admitted even so slightly into his confidence and not feel his faith. It was stark, like a granite headland, unornamented with scholastic theory. Its rough surface bore no intricate carving of historical or philosophic research. The man saw and believed. As the weeks passed, Anne came to feel that if he ever thought of Merle, he thought of her as a victim, neither of himself nor of her own nature, but of this colossal social injustice to which he referred all the ills of life.

But she never grew to like him, and months after she had come to take his dictation with no thought of Merle, any over-emphasized admiration of Roger's stripped her feeling back to her original disgust.

"The trouble is that you demand perfection in people you don't like," Roger said to her one day, when her annoyance at one of Black Tom's schemes for propaganda had driven her to biting criticism. "You measure every quality in them by their highest peak, and when they don't measure up to this standard all the way down, you reject them."