United States or Gambia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Rose-Marie listened, apprehensively, to the sounds before she spoke again. "Perhaps I'd better go in and see what's the matter," she suggested. Mrs. Volsky, looking back over her shoulder, gave a helpless little shrug. "If you t'inks best," she said hopelessly. "But Ella she not never want to take any help..." Only too well Rose-Marie knew what Mrs. Volsky meant by her twisted sentence.
The following statement was made to me by Volsky, leader of the right social revolutionaries, the largest opposition party: "Intervention of any kind will prolong the régime of the Bolsheviki by compelling us, like all honorable Russians, to drop opposition and rally round the Soviet Government in defense of the revolution.
With regard to help given to individual groups or governments fighting against Soviet Russia, Volsky said that they saw no difference between such intervention and intervention in the form of sending troops. I asked what he thought would happen. He answered in almost the same words as those used by Martov, that life itself would compel the Bolsheviks to alter their policy or to go.
With Pa gone the air would clear, magically, of some of its heaviness. Rose-Marie, telling herself how much the death of Pa was going to benefit the Volsky family, felt all at once heartless. She had been brought up in an atmosphere where death carries sorrow with it deep sorrow and sanctity.
Quickly she changed the subject to the one bright spot in the Volsky family to Lily. "Your little sister," she asked Bennie, "has she always been as she is now? Wasn't there ever a time when she could hear, or speak, or see?" Bennie winked back a suspicion of tears before he answered. Rose-Marie, who found herself almost forgetting the episode of the kitten, liked him better for the tears.
She looked at the dingy apron, the unkempt hair, the sagging flesh upon the gray cheeks. And she was conscious suddenly of a feeling of revulsion. She fought it back savagely. "Christ," she told herself, "never turned away from people because they were dirty, or ugly, or stupid. Christ loved everybody no matter how low they were. He would have loved Mrs. Volsky."
It seemed as if peace, with her white wings folded and at rest, was hovering, at last, above the Volsky flat. And then, all at once, the momentary lull was over. All at once the calm was shattered as a china cup, falling from a careless hand, is broken. There was a sudden burst of noise in the front room; of rough words; of a woman sobbing. There was the sound of Mrs.
Jim's laugh rang out heartlessly, eerily, upon the air. "It ain't so terrible!" he told Rose-Marie. "Pa he wasn't no good! He wasn't a reg'lar feller like me." All at once his well-manicured white hand crept down over her hand. "He wasn't a reg'lar feller," he repeated, "like me!" As Rose-Marie left the Volsky flat Ella had begged her to go; had assured her that it would be better to leave Mrs.
As the days crept into weeks, Rose-Marie no longer felt the dull unrest of inaction. She was busy at the Settlement House her clubs for mothers and young girls, her kindergarten for the little tots, had grown amazingly popular. And at the times when she was not busy at the Settlement House, she had the Volsky family and their many problems to occupy her. The Volsky family and their many problems!
Volsky, who would keep neither her flat nor herself neat, quite evidently saw to it that Lily's little dress was spotless. Ella, whose temper would flare up at the slightest word, cared for the child with the tender efficiency of a professional nurse; Bennie's face, as he looked at his tiny sister, had taken on a cherubic softness.
Word Of The Day