The Silent Prophet Read Online Free PDF Page B

acquaintance.
    'I saw you once on the Ring,' Savelli said to him. 'What are you doing now? Are you working? I don't mean studying.' He meant whether Friedrich was working for the Cause. Friedrich confessed that he was doing nothing. Savelli spoke of the war. It might break out within a week. The Russian General Staff was at work in Serbia. Russian agents trailed the émigrés in Paris, Berlin and Vienna. Suspicious customers had appeared several weeks ago in a café they frequented in the 9th precinct. Would Friedrich put in an appearance?
    'I'll meet you again, here or at the café,' said Friedrich.
    'Good-day!' said Savelli, as if he were taking leave of a man who had given him a light.
    R. was without doubt the most interesting man besides P., Dr T., and Savelli. A number of younger men gathered round him and formed his 'group'. They walked through the late still nights. R. addressed them, they hung on his words.
    'Tell me,' he began, 'whether this world isn't as quiet as a cemetery. People sleep in their beds like graves, they read a leading article, dunk a crisp croissant in their coffee, the whipped cream spills over the edge of the cup. Then they tap their egg carefully with the knife, out of respect for their own breakfast. The children saunter off to school with satchels and dangling blackboard sponges to learn about emperors and wars. The workers have already been at work in the factories for a long time, young girls glueing cartridges, big men cutting steel. For some hours, soldiers have been at exercise in the fields.
    Trumpets blare. Meanwhile it's ten o'clock, councillors and ministers drive up to their offices, sign, sign, telegraph, dictate, telephone; typists sit in editorial offices and take dictation, pass it to editors who conceal and disclose, disguise and reveal. And as if nothing eventful had happened during the day, bells shrill to signal in the evening and the theatres fill with women, flowers and perfume. And then the world falls asleep again. But we are awake. We hear the ministers come and go, the kings and emperors groaning in their sleep, we hear how the steel is sharpened in the factories, we hear the birth of the big guns and the soft rustle of papers on the desks of diplomats. Already we see the great conflagration, from which men can no longer salvage their small sorrows and their small joys ... .'

8
    Friedrich now worked—as he and his friends tended to say—'for the Cause'. He got himself into the habit of obtaining the enthusiasm, without which he could not live, from renunciation and anonymity. He even charmed a stimulus from the inexorability he had so feared, comfort from despair. He was young. And he believed not only in the efficacy of sacrifice, but also in the reward which engarlands sacrifice like flowers a grave. And yet there were hours, his 'weak' ones as he called them, in which he indulged a private hope that the Idea might triumph, and that he might live to experience it. But he owned to this only when he met R.
    'Don't worry about that!' said R. 'I believe only in the altruism of the dead. We would all like to experience the right moment and a sweet revenge.'
    'Except Savelli!' said Friedrich.
    'You deceive yourself,' replied R., not without malevolence, or so it seemed to me at the time. 'You don't know Savelli. People will only understand him when it's too late. He acts the part of a man who no longer owns his heart because he has presented it to mankind. But don't be taken in, he has none. I prefer an egoist. Egoism is a sign of humanity. But our friend is not human. He has the temperament of a crocodile in the drought, the imagination of a groom, the idealism of an Izvoschik.'
    'But what about all he's done so far?'
    'A stupid error, to judge men by their deeds. Forget the bourgeois historians! Men get involved with affairs as innocently as they do with dreams. Our friend could just as well have organized pogroms as robbed banks!'
    'Then why does he stay in our