The unlucky girl rolled off at this point, and somebody
caught her, and mercifully carried her to one side.
The wagon rolled on; the advance guard swept everything
out of the way, scenery as well as stage-hands and
actors, and to the vast astonishment of an audience
of a couple of thousand people, the long string of
rope-pullers marched across the stage, and after them
came the canvas-covered vehicle with the red-painted
letters, and the red-painted victim clinging to the
top. The khaki-clad swarm gathered about him,
raising their deafening chant: “Hi!
Hi! The Bolsheviki prophet. Hi! Hi!
The Bolsheviki prophet!”
I had got near enough so that I could see what happened.
I don’t know whether Carpenter fainted; anyhow,
he slipped from his perch, and a score of upraised
hands caught him. Some one tore down a hanging
from the walls of the stage set, and twenty or thirty
men formed a cirfcle about it, and put the prophet
in the middle of it, and began to toss him ten feet
up into the air and catch him and throw him again.
And that was all I could stand—I turned
and went out by the rear entrance of the theatre.
The street in back was deserted; I stood there, with
my hands clasped to my head, sick with disgust; I found
myself repeating out loud, over and over again, those
words of Carpenter: “It is Rome! It
is Rome! Rome that never dies!”
A moment later I heard a crash of glass up above me;
I ducked, just in time to avoid a shower of it.
Then I looked up, and to my consternation saw the
red-painted head and the red and white shoulders of
Carpenter suddenly emerging. The shoulders were
quickly followed by the rest of him; but fortunately
there was a narrow shed between him and the ground.
He struck the shed, and rolled, and as he fell, I
caught him, and let him down without harm.
LXII
I expected to find my prophet nearly dead; I made
ready to get him onto my shoulders and find some place
to hide him. But to my surprise he started to
his feet. I could not see much of him, because
of the streams of paint; but I could see enough to
realize that his face was contorted with fury.
I remembered that gentle, compassionate countenance;
never had I dreamed to see it like this!
He raised his clenched hands. “I meant
to die for this people! But now—let
them die for themselves!” And suddenly he reached
out to me in a gesture of frenzy. “Let
me get away from them! Anywhere, anyway!
Let me go back where I was—where I do not
see, where I do not hear, where I do not think!
Let me go back to the church!”
Copyrights
They Call Me Carpenter from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
