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!”

I had got near enough so that I could see what happened.  I don’t know whether Carpenter fainted; anyhow, he slipped from his perch, and a score of upraised hands caught him.  Some one tore down a hanging from the walls of the stage set, and twenty or thirty men formed a cirfcle about it, and put the prophet in the middle of it, and began to toss him ten feet up into the air and catch him and throw him again.

And that was all I could stand—­I turned and went out by the rear entrance of the theatre.  The street in back was deserted; I stood there, with my hands clasped to my head, sick with disgust; I found myself repeating out loud, over and over again, those words of Carpenter:  “It is Rome!  It is Rome!  Rome that never dies!”

A moment later I heard a crash of glass up above me; I ducked, just in time to avoid a shower of it.  Then I looked up, and to my consternation saw the red-painted head and the red and white shoulders of Carpenter suddenly emerging.  The shoulders were quickly followed by the rest of him; but fortunately there was a narrow shed between him and the ground.  He struck the shed, and rolled, and as he fell, I caught him, and let him down without harm.

LXII

I expected to find my prophet nearly dead; I made ready to get him onto my shoulders and find some place to hide him.  But to my surprise he started to his feet.  I could not see much of him, because of the streams of paint; but I could see enough to realize that his face was contorted with fury.  I remembered that gentle, compassionate countenance; never had I dreamed to see it like this!

He raised his clenched hands.  “I meant to die for this people!  But now—­let them die for themselves!” And suddenly he reached out to me in a gesture of frenzy.  “Let me get away from them!  Anywhere, anyway!  Let me go back where I was—­where I do not see, where I do not hear, where I do not think!  Let me go back to the church!”