A MESSAGE TO MARS

We were five in the little blue room in the War Hotel that night. It was one of my last in Petrograd. The electric lights, fickle at best, had failed entirely.

The tiny sputtering flame of the olive-green candle disclosed distant vistas in the eyes of Zamiatin.

Zamiatin was one of the younger of the Russian writers—a deep, quiet, imaginative chap, who talked in fables, with long spaces of silence between.

The Bolsheviki were the subject of our discussion. We argued breathlessly, with flushed faces and shining eyes, as one always argued in Russia during the hectic nights and days of the red Russian year.

Zamiatin put down his glass of tea, and with his forefinger began to trace the crimson pattern on the Bokhara table-cover.

“When I was a boy,” he said, “a little fellow about thirteen or fourteen, I read a book—I have forgotten the name—a Russian version of something like ‘A Romance of Two Worlds.’ It set strange imaginings whirling in my brain. I told my comrades about it, and they became as excited as I.

“Off there in the big black sky above the silver birches was a planet called Mars, peopled like ours with human beings. We made up our minds to get into communication with those other people. We thought of many plans. Finally we conceived the idea of building a great letter ‘A’ and setting it on fire. We believed Mars would see and answer us, and in a very short time we would arrange an alphabet and carry on long conversations. Perhaps it would revolutionize the whole universe—who knew? We were on fire with the idea.

“We told our parents about it, but somehow they did not seem to realize its importance. There was a famine in the village that year, and they were busy trying to get food to the people. They had no time for us and our great scheme.

“But this did not discourage us. We went on just the same. We cut down logs in the forest, and built a monster ‘A,’ bigger even than our dreams of it. The great night came. We set it on fire, and then, standing in breathless silence, eyes fastened on the velvet blackness, we waited. We waited and we waited. Nothing happened. Mars did not answer.”

Zamiatin lifted his finger from the crimson spot upon the Bokhara cover, and settled back in his chair. For a moment we sat there, tense and quiet as that group of small boys on the edge of the forest a score of years ago.

They built a letter “A” there in the City of Peter in the fall of 1917. They set it afire. Then—simple, trusting, hoping children that they are—they waited—and waited. There was nothing wrong with the letter “A,” but Mars did not answer.

Blinded by schemes of conquest and dreams of Empire, Mars could not see.

“Universal peace; brotherhood; no annexations or contributions; and self-definition of nations—”

It was an alphabet Mars could not comprehend, born of a blind faith the glory and beauty of which Mars can not know, and the rest of us only half suspect.

Zamiatin was not a Bolshevik. He belongs to the Russian intelligentzia. Like the others, he had preached theoretical revolution, but his spirit shrank from the hard, accomplished fact.

But Zamiatin, with his boy’s experience and his artist’s visioning, had seen the letter ‘A,’ and felt the wonder and the tragedy of the dream of those men drawn back from exile to flash flaming signals at the universe.

******

The train that carried me away from Petrograd was almost the last to pass in safety through war-torn Finland. Troubled days were full upon her, but the frozen face of her was as calm and peaceful as a sleeping child.

The City of Peter lay behind me, wrapped in the gray morning mist. Tragedy was in the air. That vague, frightful thing—the Terror—was on every man’s tongue. Apprehension was in every man’s eye. Lurking there in the black shadows of every human brain were the words: “The Germans!” To a few they were a secret hope—restored titles, estates returned. To the mass—death and destruction and shattered dreams.

I looked through the mist down a long vista of coming years, and asked of the mysterious, inscrutable city what would be left of the hour and the place for another age.

Time seems to have his own peculiar sense of values. He sifts out most of the things we would save. For every time the world of to-day thinks of the Franco-Prussian War it speaks a hundred times of the French Revolution. Out of the defeat of France there came that great historic milestone marking the struggle of the mass to climb from under.

Out of the success of Prussia there came Prussian militarism, to breed its own ultimate destruction. Time may reject the battle of the Somme and the Gallipoli campaign, and dismiss the blockade and the submarine with a word; possibly he will have forgotten entirely the names of Cabinet ministers and great generals: but I doubt whether he will discard the Russian Revolution.

Revolution is the blind protest of the mass against their own ignorant state. It is as important to Time as the first awkward struggle of the amœba. It is man in the act of making himself.

Time will be able to overlook the pathetic, the tragic, the cruel, the silly forms of expression that revolt frequently takes, and see only the magnificent urge behind those expressions.

Time will have all the advantage over us. He will be able to keep his emotions from getting tangled up in the situation. He will be able to put the Bolsheviki and the Mensheviki, the Cadets and the Social Revolutionists, in their proper pigeonholes.

Time will give to the world war, the political revolution, and the social revolution their true values. We can not do it. We are too close to the facts to see the truth.

To have failed to see the hope in the Russian Revolution is to be as a blind man looking at a sunrise.

Mingled with my sorrow, the morning I left Petrograd, was a certain exultant, tragic joy. I had been alive at a great moment, and knew that it was great.

THE END