Page:The Green Bay Tree (1926).pdf/315



T must have occurred to Lily that the man was talking in an hysterical fashion with all the frenzy of a neurasthenic. "Madame, you should see one of our towns where there are great furnaces . . . Essen, Madame, or Saarbrucken . . . black, incredibly vile, a wallow of roaring fire and white hot steel . . . I know them, Madame, I have lived in them."

Then for the first time Lily stirred. She even laughed, faintly yet with unmistakable bitterness. "Know them? I know them. We have them in America."

The stranger paid no heed to her interruption. "Look, Madame," he commanded, pointing to the north where the horizon was lighted by the glow of a burning town. "Look, Madame. You see that fire in the sky. The ladles have overflowed. The white hot steel has spread across Europe. There is gold in it too . . . red hot gold. . . . Melted Gods . . . idols which we worship to-day."

His voice rose until he was shouting. When he finished, he leaned back in his chair, the fine uniform suddenly crumpled and limp. And after a time he began to speak again, softly as if the torrent of emotion had exhausted him.

"And where have we to go? If we sought to escape where have we to go? There is no place. Because the monkeys . . . the fools have civilized all the world, so that they might sell their cheap cotton and tin trays. They have created a monster which is destroying them. There is no longer any peace . . . any solitude. They have even wrenched the peasant from his plow . . . the shepherd from his hillside." Again he pointed toward the burning horizon. "They have driven them out upon the plains where the cauldrons have overflowed across all Europe. It is the monsters, Madame, who are at the bottom of all this. Ah, commerce, industry, wealth, power." He tossed away his cigarette and lighted another. "When this is over,