They Call Me Carpenter: A Tale of the Second ComingSinclair, Upton
General
They Call Me Carpenter: A Tale of the Second Coming
Sinclair, Upton
Hollywood (Los Angeles, Calif.) -- Fiction; Jesus Christ -- Fiction
Half way down the block we came to the Palace Hotel, and uniformed
men came pouring out of that. I heard the shrieks of a woman, and
put my foot on the edge of a store-window, and raised myself up by
an awning, to see over the heads of the crowd. Half a dozen rowdies
had got hold of a girl; I don't know what she had done--maybe her
skirts were too short, or maybe she had been saucy to one of the
gang; anyhow, they were tearing her clothes to shreds, and having
done this gaily, they took her on their shoulders, and ran her out
to the wagon, and tossed her up beside the Red Prophet. “There's a
girl for you!” they yelled; and the drunken fellow who wanted
Carpenter to cure him, suddenly thought of a new witticism: “Hey,
you goddam Bolsheviki, why don't you nationalize her?” Men laughed
and whooped over that; some of them were so tickled that they danced
about and waved their arms in the air. For, you see, they knew all
the details concerning the “nationalization of women in Russia,” and
also they had read in the papers about Mary Magna, and Carpenter's
fondness for picture-actresses and other gay ladies. He stretched
out his hand to the girl, to save her from falling off; and at this
there went up such a roar from the mob, that it made me think of
wild beasts in the arena. So to my whirling brain came back the
words that Carpenter had spoken: “It is Rome! It is Rome! Rome that
never dies!”
The cortege came to the “Hippodrome,” which is our biggest theatre,
and which, like everything else, had declared open house for Brigade
members during the convention. Some one in the crowd evidently knew
the building, and guided the procession down a side street, to the
stage-entrance. They have all kinds of shows in the “Hippodrome,”
and have a driveway by which they bring in automobiles, or
war-chariots, or wild animals in cages, or whatever they will. Now
the mob stormed the entrance, and brushed the door-keepers to one
side, and unbolted and swung back the big gates, and a swarm of
yelling maniacs rushed the lumbering prairie-schooner up the slope
into the building.
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!”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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