CHAPTER XIX
TRANSFORMATION
"You must make yourself over again," Ernest wrote to me. "You must
cease to be. You must become another woman--and not merely in the
clothes you wear, but inside your skin under the clothes. You must
make yourself over again so that even I would not know you--your
voice, your gestures, your mannerisms, your carriage, your walk,
everything."
This command I obeyed. Every day I practised for hours in burying
forever the old Avis Everhard beneath the skin of another woman
whom I may call my other self. It was only by long practice that
such results could be obtained. In the mere detail of voice
intonation I practised almost perpetually till the voice of my new
self became fixed, automatic. It was this automatic assumption of
a role that was considered imperative. One must become so adept as
to deceive oneself. It was like learning a new language, say the
French. At first speech in French is self-conscious, a matter of
the will. The student thinks in English and then transmutes into
French, or reads in French but transmutes into English before he
can understand. Then later, becoming firmly grounded, automatic,
the student reads, writes, and THINKS in French, without any
recourse to English at all.
And so with our disguises. It was necessary for us to practise
until our assumed roles became real; until to be our original
selves would require a watchful and strong exercise of will. Of
course, at first, much was mere blundering experiment. We were
creating a new art, and we had much to discover. But the work was
going on everywhere; masters in the art were developing, and a fund
of tricks and expedients was being accumulated. This fund became a
sort of text-book that was passed on, a part of the curriculum, as
it were, of the school of Revolution.*
* Disguise did become a veritable art during that period. The
revolutionists maintained schools of acting in all their refuges.
They scorned accessories, such as wigs and beards, false eyebrows,
and such aids of the theatrical actors. The game of revolution was
a game of life and death, and mere accessories were traps.
Disguise had to be fundamental, intrinsic, part and parcel of one's
being, second nature. The Red Virgin is reported to have been one
of the most adept in the art, to which must be ascribed her long
and successful career.
It was at this time that my father disappeared. His letters, which
had come to me regularly, ceased. He no longer appeared at our
Pell Street quarters. Our comrades sought him everywhere. Through
our secret service we ransacked every prison in the land. But he
was lost as completely as if the earth had swallowed him up, and to
this day no clew to his end has been discovered.*
* Disappearance was one of the horrors of the time. As a motif, in
song and story, it constantly crops up. It was an inevitable
concomitant of the subterranean warfare that raged through those
three centuries. This phenomenon was almost as common in the
oligarch class and the labor castes, as it was in the ranks of the
revolutionists. Without warning, without trace, men and women, and
even children, disappeared and were seen no more, their end
shrouded in mystery.
Six lonely months I spent in the refuge, but they were not idle
months. Our organization went on apace, and there were mountains
of work always waiting to be done. Ernest and his fellow-leaders,
from their prisons, decided what should be done; and it remained
for us on the outside to do it. There was the organization of the
mouth-to-mouth propaganda; the organization, with all its
ramifications, of our spy system; the establishment of our secret
printing-presses; and the establishment of our underground
railways, which meant the knitting together of all our myriads of
places of refuge, and the formation of new refuges where links were
missing in the chains we ran over all the land.
So I say, the work was never done. At the end of six months my
loneliness was broken by the arrival of two comrades. They were
young girls, brave souls and passionate lovers of liberty: Lora
Peterson, who disappeared in 1922, and Kate Bierce, who later
married Du Bois,* and who is still with us with eyes lifted to to-
morrow's sun, that heralds in the new age.
* Du Bois, the present librarian of Ardis, is a lineal descendant
of this revolutionary pair.
The two girls arrived in a flurry of excitement, danger, and sudden
death. In the crew of the fishing boat that conveyed them across
San Pablo Bay was a spy. A creature of the Iron Heel, he had
successfully masqueraded as a revolutionist and penetrated deep
into the secrets of our organization. Without doubt he was on my
trail, for we had long since learned that my disappearance had been
cause of deep concern to the secret service of the Oligarchy.
Luckily, as the outcome proved, he had not divulged his discoveries
to any one. He had evidently delayed reporting, preferring to wait
until he had brought things to a successful conclusion by
discovering my hiding-place and capturing me. His information died
with him. Under some pretext, after the girls had landed at
Petaluma Creek and taken to the horses, he managed to get away from
the boat.
Part way up Sonoma Mountain, John Carlson let the girls go on,
leading his horse, while he went back on foot. His suspicions had
been aroused. He captured the spy, and as to what then happened,
Carlson gave us a fair idea.
"I fixed him," was Carlson's unimaginative way of describing the
affair. "I fixed him," he repeated, while a sombre light burnt in
his eyes, and his huge, toil-distorted hands opened and closed
eloquently. "He made no noise. I hid him, and tonight I will go
back and bury him deep."
During that period I used to marvel at my own metamorphosis. At
times it seemed impossible, either that I had ever lived a placid,
peaceful life in a college town, or else that I had become a
revolutionist inured to scenes of violence and death. One or the
other could not be. One was real, the other was a dream, but which
was which? Was this present life of a revolutionist, hiding in a
hole, a nightmare? or was I a revolutionist who had somewhere,
somehow, dreamed that in some former existence I have lived in
Berkeley and never known of life more violent than teas and dances,
debating societies, and lectures rooms? But then I suppose this
was a common experience of all of us who had rallied under the red
banner of the brotherhood of man.
I often remembered figures from that other life, and, curiously
enough, they appeared and disappeared, now and again, in my new
life. There was Bishop Morehouse. In vain we searched for him
after our organization had developed. He had been transferred from
asylum to asylum. We traced him from the state hospital for the
insane at Napa to the one in Stockton, and from there to the one in
the Santa Clara Valley called Agnews, and there the trail ceased.
There was no record of his death. In some way he must have
escaped. Little did I dream of the awful manner in which I was to
see him once again--the fleeting glimpse of him in the whirlwind
carnage of the Chicago Commune.
Jackson, who had lost his arm in the Sierra Mills and who had been
the cause of my own conversion into a revolutionist, I never saw
again; but we all knew what he did before he died. He never joined
the revolutionists. Embittered by his fate, brooding over his
wrongs, he became an anarchist--not a philosophic anarchist, but a
mere animal, mad with hate and lust for revenge. And well he
revenged himself. Evading the guards, in the nighttime while all
were asleep, he blew the Pertonwaithe palace into atoms. Not a
soul escaped, not even the guards. And in prison, while awaiting
trial, he suffocated himself under his blankets.
Dr. Hammerfield and Dr. Ballingford achieved quite different fates
from that of Jackson. They have been faithful to their salt, and
they have been correspondingly rewarded with ecclesiastical palaces
wherein they dwell at peace with the world. Both are apologists
for the Oligarchy. Both have grown very fat. "Dr. Hammerfield,"
as Ernest once said, "has succeeded in modifying his metaphysics so
as to give God's sanction to the Iron Heel, and also to include
much worship of beauty and to reduce to an invisible wraith the
gaseous vertebrate described by Haeckel--the difference between Dr.
Hammerfield and Dr. Ballingford being that the latter has made the
God of the oligarchs a little more gaseous and a little less
vertebrate."
Peter Donnelly, the scab foreman at the Sierra Mills whom I
encountered while investigating the case of Jackson, was a surprise
to all of us. In 1918 I was present at a meeting of the 'Frisco
Reds. Of all our Fighting Groups this one was the most formidable,
ferocious, and merciless. It was really not a part of our
organization. Its members were fanatics, madmen. We dared not
encourage such a spirit. On the other hand, though they did not
belong to us, we remained on friendly terms with them. It was a
matter of vital importance that brought me there that night. I,
alone in the midst of a score of men, was the only person unmasked.
After the business that brought me there was transacted, I was led
away by one of them. In a dark passage this guide struck a match,
and, holding it close to his face, slipped back his mask. For a
moment I gazed upon the passion-wrought features of Peter Donnelly.
Then the match went out.
"I just wanted you to know it was me," he said in the darkness.
"D'you remember Dallas, the superintendent?"
I nodded at recollection of the vulpine-face superintendent of the
Sierra Mills.
"Well, I got him first," Donnelly said with pride. "'Twas after
that I joined the Reds."
"But how comes it that you are here?" I queried. "Your wife and
children?"
"Dead," he answered. "That's why. No," he went on hastily, "'tis
not revenge for them. They died easily in their beds--sickness,
you see, one time and another. They tied my arms while they lived.
And now that they're gone, "'tis revenge for my blasted manhood I'm
after. I was once Peter Donnelly, the scab foreman. But to-night
I'm Number 27 of the 'Frisco Reds. Come on now, and I'll get you
out of this."
More I heard of him afterward. In his own way he had told the
truth when he said all were dead. But one lived, Timothy, and him
his father considered dead because he had taken service with the
Iron Heel in the Mercenaries.* A member of the 'Frisco Reds
pledged himself to twelve annual executions. The penalty for
failure was death. A member who failed to complete his number
committed suicide. These executions were not haphazard. This
group of madmen met frequently and passed wholesale judgments upon
offending members and servitors of the Oligarchy. The executions
were afterward apportioned by lot.
* In addition to the labor castes, there arose another caste, the
military. A standing army of professional soldiers was created,
officered by members of the Oligarchy and known as the Mercenaries.
This institution took the place of the militia, which had proved
impracticable under the new regime. Outside the regular secret
service of the Iron Heel, there was further established a secret
service of the Mercenaries, this latter forming a connecting link
between the police and the military.
In fact, the business that brought me there the night of my visit
was such a trial. One of our own comrades, who for years had
successfully maintained himself in a clerical position in the local
bureau of the secret service of the Iron Heel, had fallen under the
ban of the 'Frisco Reds and was being tried. Of course he was not
present, and of course his judges did not know that he was one of
our men. My mission had been to testify to his identity and
loyalty. It may be wondered how we came to know of the affair at
all. The explanation is simple. One of our secret agents was a
member of the 'Frisco Reds. It was necessary for us to keep an eye
on friend as well as foe, and this group of madmen was not too
unimportant to escape our surveillance.
But to return to Peter Donnelly and his son. All went well with
Donnelly until, in the following year, he found among the sheaf of
executions that fell to him the name of Timothy Donnelly. Then it
was that that clannishness, which was his to so extraordinary a
degree, asserted itself. To save his son, he betrayed his
comrades. In this he was partially blocked, but a dozen of the
'Frisco Reds were executed, and the group was well-nigh destroyed.
In retaliation, the survivors meted out to Donnelly the death he
had earned by his treason.
Nor did Timothy Donnelly long survive. The 'Frisco Reds pledged
themselves to his execution. Every effort was made by the
Oligarchy to save him. He was transferred from one part of the
country to another. Three of the Reds lost their lives in vain
efforts to get him. The Group was composed only of men. In the
end they fell back on a woman, one of our comrades, and none other
than Anna Roylston. Our Inner Circle forbade her, but she had ever
a will of her own and disdained discipline. Furthermore, she was a
genius and lovable, and we could never discipline her anyway. She
is in a class by herself and not amenable to the ordinary standards
of the revolutionists.
Despite our refusal to grant permission to do the deed, she went on
with it. Now Anna Roylston was a fascinating woman. All she had
to do was to beckon a man to her. She broke the hearts of scores
of our young comrades, and scores of others she captured, and by
their heart-strings led into our organization. Yet she steadfastly
refused to marry. She dearly loved children, but she held that a
child of her own would claim her from the Cause, and that it was
the Cause to which her life was devoted.
It was an easy task for Anna Roylston to win Timothy Donnelly. Her
conscience did not trouble her, for at that very time occurred the
Nashville Massacre, when the Mercenaries, Donnelly in command,
literally murdered eight hundred weavers of that city. But she did
not kill Donnelly. She turned him over, a prisoner, to the 'Frisco
Reds. This happened only last year, and now she had been renamed.
The revolutionists everywhere are calling her the "Red Virgin."*
* It was not until the Second Revolt was crushed, that the 'Frisco
Reds flourished again. And for two generations the Group
flourished. Then an agent of the Iron Heel managed to become a
member, penetrated all its secrets, and brought about its total
annihilation. This occurred in 2002 A.D. The members were
executed one at a time, at intervals of three weeks, and their
bodies exposed in the labor-ghetto of San Francisco.
Colonel Ingram and Colonel Van Gilbert are two more familiar
figures that I was later to encounter. Colonel Ingram rose high in
the Oligarchy and became Minister to Germany. He was cordially
detested by the proletariat of both countries. It was in Berlin
that I met him, where, as an accredited international spy of the
Iron Heel, I was received by him and afforded much assistance.
Incidentally, I may state that in my dual role I managed a few
important things for the Revolution.
Colonel Van Gilbert became known as "Snarling" Van Gilbert. His
important part was played in drafting the new code after the
Chicago Commune. But before that, as trial judge, he had earned
sentence of death by his fiendish malignancy. I was one of those
that tried him and passed sentence upon him. Anna Roylston carried
out the execution.
Still another figure arises out of the old life--Jackson's lawyer.
Least of all would I have expected again to meet this man, Joseph
Hurd. It was a strange meeting. Late at night, two years after
the Chicago Commune, Ernest and I arrived together at the Benton
Harbor refuge. This was in Michigan, across the lake from Chicago.
We arrived just at the conclusion of the trial of a spy. Sentence
of death had been passed, and he was being led away. Such was the
scene as we came upon it. The next moment the wretched man had
wrenched free from his captors and flung himself at my feet, his
arms clutching me about the knees in a vicelike grip as he prayed
in a frenzy for mercy. As he turned his agonized face up to me, I
recognized him as Joseph Hurd. Of all the terrible things I have
witnessed, never have I been so unnerved as by this frantic
creature's pleading for life. He was mad for life. It was
pitiable. He refused to let go of me, despite the hands of a dozen
comrades. And when at last he was dragged shrieking away, I sank
down fainting upon the floor. It is far easier to see brave men
die than to hear a coward beg for life.*
* The Benton Harbor refuge was a catacomb, the entrance of which
was cunningly contrived by way of a well. It has been maintained
in a fair state of preservation, and the curious visitor may to-day
tread its labyrinths to the assembly hall, where, without doubt,
occurred the scene described by Avis Everhard. Farther on are the
cells where the prisoners were confined, and the death chamber
where the executions took place. Beyond is the cemetery--long,
winding galleries hewn out of the solid rock, with recesses on
either hand, wherein, tier above tier, lie the revolutionists just
as they were laid away by their comrades long years agone.
