The most fascinating man alive, volunteered a stranger at my elbow, a little fellow with a few wisps of yellow hair and a face like a pug-dog, that Bill Haywood. No show about him, nothing theatrical, not a bit like the usual labour leader. Genuine power, that's what he has. He never goes in for melodrama, not even at a strike meeting. The other day in Paterson, a child was hurt while the police were clearing the street of strikers. One of the policemen, with his billy, struck down the boy's mother and a man who was helping her to her feet. At the meeting the next day, Haywood recited the facts, just the bare facts, without comment or colour and without raising his voice. What's the policeman's name? cried a voice in the hall. His name, replied Haywood, as coldly as possible, is said to be Edward Duffy; his number is 72. That was all, but Edward Duffy, No 72, had been consigned to the perpetual hatred of every one of the two thousand men present at the meeting. He spurns eloquence and soap-box platitudes. He never gibbers about the brotherhood of man, the socialist commonwealth rising upon the ruins of the capitalist system, death to the exploiters, and all the other clichés of the ordinary labour agitator. Workers want simple, homely facts regarding their trades and he gives them these facts. He is—
What are all these God damn bourgeois doing here? demanded a high, shrill voice from the next room.
My companion smiled. That is Hippolyte Havel. He always asks that question, even at anarchist meetings, but it isn't a cliché with him; it's part of his charm.
Hippolyte, sweet, blinking, amblyoptic Hippolyte, his hair as snarly as the Medusa's, strode into the room.
Hush, some one adjured us, Hush! Yorska is going to recite.
After a few seconds, there was silence. All the chairs were filled; many were sitting on the floor or standing against the wall or in the doorways; ladies in black velvet, wearing diamonds, ladies in batik and Greenwich village sacks, ladies with bobbed hair and mannish-cut garments, men in evening dress, men in workmen's clothes. No one present, I noted, looked quite so untidy as Peter. Yorska, her tragic face emerging from three yards of black tulle and satin, recited, in French, Baudelaire's Le Balcon, fingering a red rose at her waist. As she uttered the last lines with passionate intensity,
—O serments! O parfums! O baisers infinis!
there was a scattered clapping of hands, a few exclamations of delight. Now the Tuscan butler, as cynical as Herbert Spencer, threw open the doors to the dining-room, exposing the table laden with sandwiches, salads, cold meats, glasses, and bottles, including kümmel bottles in the form of Russian bears. A few of the young radicals were the first to surge to the repast. My companion and I slipped out in time to hear an instructive lecture on the subject of collective bargaining from a young man with a black flowing tie, who grasped a pinchbottle so fervidly that I felt sure it would never leave his hand until he had usurped the contents. Representation was a word which, in its different senses, was often used that evening. The labourers cooed over it, worshipped it, and set it up in a shrine, while the artists spurned it and cast it from them; "mere photography" was the phrase.
Helen Westley, black and limp, stood beside me.
Who, she asked, is that young man you brought here tonight?