The six months abroad which Gordon and Kate had spent in love’s dreaming and drifting had been the fulfilment to the man of the long-felt yearnings of his fierce subconscious nature.
To the woman it had been the revelation of a new heaven and a new earth. She had found herself, the real self, at whose first meeting in the kiss of a man she had trembled. She was no longer afraid. The elemental clear-eyed goddess had taken possession. She had claimed her own, the throne of a queen, and the man who had dreamed of kingship was her courtier.
She was smiling at him in conscious power, her violet eyes flashing with mystery and magic, the sunlight of Italy gleaming through her dark red hair, her full lips half parted with dreamy tenderness, and her sinuous body moving with indolent grace.
“To be your slave is crown enough for man,” he cried.
“And I am in heaven,” she answered, proudly.
“Only, thus, in perfect freedom,” he said, in rapture, “is the fulness of life. Beauty and harmony and love are of God. Surely this is communion with Him—the joy of embraces, the touch of sunlight, the glory of form and colour, the magic of music, the poetry of love, the ecstacy of passion, the kiss of the senses—He is in all and over all.”
“Can such happiness be eternal?” she asked, under her breath.
He kissed her softly.
“If God be infinite.”
They reached New York the first week in November, and Gordon returned to his work with renewed zeal.
The success of his movement was a source of continued surprise and fear to the more thoughtful students of social and religious life.
But Gordon had found on his return an increasing amount of friction between opposing groups in his church which was a source of intense surprise and annoyance. Two factions had broken into an open quarrel in his absence. He found it necessary to devote a large part of his time to smoothing out these quarrels between men who had come together with the principles of unity and fellowship as the foundation of their association. He saw with disgust that he was gathering a crowd of cranks, conceited and stupid, vain and ambitious for fame and leadership. It was all he could do to prevent a battle of Kilkenny cats.
He discovered that many things glittered at a banquet to celebrate universal brotherhood which did not pan out pure gold in the experiment of life. He had heard at such a love feast an aristocratic poet extoll in harangue the unwashed Democracy, a Walking Delegate read a poem, a Jew quote the Koran with unction, a Mohammedan eulogise Monogamy, a Single-Taxer declare himself a Democrat, a Socialist glorify Individualism, and an Anarchist express his love for Order.
But he found next day that as a rule the Egyptian resumed the use of garlic and the hog went back to his wallow.
He found to his chagrin that mental freedom could be made a cloak for the basest mental slavery, and that the most hide-bound dogmatist on earth is the modern crank who boasts his freedom from all dogmas. He found the Liberal to be the most illiberal and narrow man he had ever met.
The absurdity of allowing this mob of Kilkenny cats any authority in his church he saw at once. His dream of triumphant Democracy faded.
He seized the helm at once.
Without a moment’s hesitation he threw out twenty ringleaders of as many factions and restored order. Under such conditions he dared not even incorporate his society under the laws of the state as a religious body lest these incongruous elements control its property and wreck its work. He continued to expend the vast funds needed for his Temple in his wife’s name, leaving its legal ownership vested in her as before.
Within a few months the extraordinary beauty and vivacity of his wife made their house on Gramercy Park the rendezvous of a brilliant group of free-lances and Bohemians. Her mother and father had moved to a house on the opposite side of the park. Men and women of genius in the world of Art and Letters who cared nought for conventions had crowded her receptions. She was nattered with the pleasant fiction that she had restored the ancient Salon of France on a nobler basis.
The increase of her social duties required more and more of her time at the dressmaker’s, and left less and less for work in Gordon’s congregation.
At first he had watched this social success with surprise and pride, and then with an increasing sense of uneasiness for its significance in the development of her character.
The sight of half a dozen handsome men bending over her, enchanted by her beauty, and the ring of her laughter at their wit, irritated him. He had not been actor enough to conceal from her the gleam of, worry in his eyes and the accent of fret in his voice at these functions. She observed, too, that he attended them with regularity, however important might be the work which called him outside.
He was anxious for her to cultivate a few of his intimate friends, but this crowd of strange men and women bored him.
He was especially anxious that she should meet Overman, and by her magnetism and beauty crush him into the acknowledgment of the sanity and right of his course.
But Overman had promised without coming.
Gordon was at his bank on Wall Street again urging him to call.
“It’s no use to talk, Frank,” he said, testily. “All I ask of women is to be let alone.”
“But, you fool, I want you to meet my wife. She’s not a woman merely. She’s the wife of an old college chum, the better half by far.”
Overman pulled his moustache, a humorous twinkle in his eye.
“Well, how many halves are there to you? I’ve met the other half once before. This makes one and a half,” he said, peering at his friend with his single eye.
Gordon laughed.
“Yes, I am large.”
“I’ve my doubts whether you’re quite large enough for the job you’ve undertaken.”
“You’re a pessimist.”
Overman’s face brightened and his mouth twisted.
“Yes, the more I see of men, the more stock I take in chickens. I’ve a rooster at home now that can whip anything that ever wore feathers, and he’s so ugly I love him like a brother.”
“Shut up about roosters,” Gordon growled. “Will you come to see me and meet my wife?”
Overman turned his eye on his friend, frowning.
“Frank, I’m afraid of the atmosphere. There’s enough dynamite in ‘Freedom and Fellowship’ to blow up several houses. I don’t like to get mixed up with women in any sort of fellowship—to say nothing about freedom and fellowship.”
“Well, I’ve asked my wife to call by the bank here for me to-day and I’m going to introduce you.”
Overman did not hear this statement, for his head was turned to one side and he was peering out of his window on Broad Street with excited interest.
He sprang to his feet, suddenly exclaiming:
“Well, what the devil is the matter?”
“What is it?” Gordon asked, stepping to the window.
It had begun to snow on an inch of ice which was still clinging to the stone pavements. At the corner of Broad and Wall Streets the ground dips sharply, forming a difficult crossing.
Gordon saw his wife approaching the bank, laughing. She was dressed in a sealskin cloak which reached to the ground. Its great rolling collar of ermine covered her full breast and stretched upward almost to her hat, rearing its snowy background about her heavy auburn hair, which seemed about to fall and envelop her form. She wore an enormous hat of white fur bent in graceful curves.
She was close to the building now, and her blue eyes were dancing and her cheeks flushed with laughter. The perfect grace and rhythm of movement could be seen even through the heavy seal cloak, whose sheen changed with each touch of her figure.
“Look at the idiots!” cried Overman, excitedly. “So busy stretching their necks to see a woman, there’s five piled up on the ice. They’re ringing for the ambulance. She’s fractured one man’s skull, broken another’s leg, and, by the pale-faced moon, I believe she’s killed one. And you’re after me to meet another woman—great Scott, look, she’s coming in here!”
“Well, she won’t hurt you.”
“I don’t know!”
Overman made a break to reach his inner office when Gordon seized his arm.
“Stop, you fool,” he thundered; “it’s my wife. She’s calling by for me, and you’re going to meet her, if I have to knock you down and sit on you.”
There was no help for it. He heard the rustle of the silk lining of her cloak and she was at the door.
She shook Overman’s hand heartily, her violet eyes smiling in such a friendly candid way he was at once put at ease.
“I am so glad to see you,” she said, earnestly. “I’ve heard Frank speak of you so often and laugh over your college ups and downs. I feel I’ve known you all my life. And then he says you’re such a woman-hater—”
“He’s a grand liar, Mrs. Gordon,” he interrupted, suddenly colouring. “I never said anything of the kind in my life. I’m a great admirer of the fair sex!”
“Then you must prove it by coming to dinner with us to-night and admiring me the whole evening.”
“Nothing could give me greater pleasure,” he answered, bowing his big neck with an ease and grace Gordon noted with amazement.
When they left, Overman walked to the window and watched them thread their way through the crowd.
“Holy Moses and the angels—what a woman!” he said, softly whistling. “By the beard of the prophet, no wonder!”
Long after they disappeared he stood, looking without seeing, as if in a dream.
From the night Overman had taken dinner at the Gramercy Park house he became a constant visitor.
For six months he had usually spent two or three evenings each week in his friend’s library, rehearsing their boyhood days, discussing new books, art and politics, Socialism and religion.
Overman’s cynicism had piqued Kate’s curiosity and opened new views of things she had accepted as moral finalities.
At these battles of wit she was always a charmed listener. She seemed never to tire watching the sparks fly in the rapier thrust of mind in these two men of steel and listening with a shiver to the deep growl of the animal behind their words. The one, so homely he was fascinating, with massive neck, and enormous mouth pursing and twisting under excitement into a sneer that pushed his big nose upward, the incarnation of a battle-scarred bulldog; the other, with his giant figure, hands and feet, his leonine face and locks, his deep voice, handsome and insolent in his conscious strength, the picture of a thoroughbred mastiff.
With the grace of a goddess she would sit and watch this battle to the death in the arena of thought.
Overman had keenly interested her from the first, and she stimulated him to unusual brilliancy. His remorseless logic, his thorough scholarship, his grasp of history, his savage common sense presented so sharp a contrast to the idealism of Gordon, she was shocked and startled.
He fell into the habit of calling on Sunday mornings and walking with them to the Opera House. They would leave Gordon at the stage entrance and sit together during the services.
He would comment softly to her on many of the little absurdities of the preacher’s flights of sentiment, and often convulsed her with laughter by a single word or phrase which made ridiculous his mysticism. He did this with his single eye fixed on Gordon without the quiver of a nerve or the movement of a muscle to indicate ought but profound rapture in the speaker and his message.
Overman’s business ability had been of great service in the Temple enterprise, which had involved difficulties with contractors, and Gordon had opened an account in Kate’s name with his banking house. Her signature to legal documents had made her a frequent visitor to the bank, and she often took lunch with him.
Alone with her at these impromptu lunches, without the restraint of Gordon’s presence, he had revealed to her a new phase of his character which had interested her still more deeply. It was here that she discovered the secret of his real attitude toward women, his deep hunger for love, tenderness and sympathy, and his terror lest his ugliness and the loss of his eye might entrap him into hopeless suffering.
She laughed at his fears.
“Ridiculous,” she cried, closing her red lips. “You ought to have sense enough to know that a woman of character past the schoolgirl age is often fascinated by the ruggedness of such a man. Savage strength is sometimes resistless to women of rare beauty.”
“You think so?” he asked, pathetically.
“Certainly; I know it,” she answered, her lips twitching playfully.
Overman looked at her steadily.
“Sort of beauty-and-beast idea, I suppose. There may be something in it. It never struck me before.”
“I’ll put you in training for a handsome woman I know,” she said, with a curious smile playing about her eyes.
“No, thank you,” he quickly replied. “I’m just beginning to feel at home with you. I am content.”
The opening of the Temple was an event which commanded the attention of the world. Leaders of Socialism from every quarter of the globe poured into New York.
The building was one of imposing grandeur. The auditorium filled the entire space of the first-four stories. It seated five thousand people within easy reach of the speaker’s voice. The line of its ceiling was marked outside by the serried capitals of Greek columns springing from their massive bases on the ground. The grand stairway was of polished marble, its wainscoting and walls of onyx.
Resting on the capitals of the columns, the outer walls of rough marble rose twenty stories to the first offset. Dropping back fifty feet, another structure, crowned by Greek facades, sprang ten stories higher, forming the base of the central dome. From each corner rose a tower of bronze supporting the figures of Faith, Hope, Love and Truth, while scores of minarets flamed upward, flying the flags of every nation.
From the centre of this pile of marble, the huge dome, finished in gold, solemnly loomed among the clouds, higher than its model in Washington, dominating the city from every point of the compass. The magnificent sweep of Jefferson Avenue, stretching through miles of palatial homes, terminating at its base, seemed a tiny pathway leading through its grand arched and pillared entrance.
The dome was crowned by a statue of Liberty holding aloft a steel staff, from which flew the solid red battle-flag of Socialism, flinging into the heavens its challenge to civilisation, rising, falling, waving, fluttering, quivering, rippling in the wind, a scarlet blaze sweeping a hundred feet across the sky far above the cross on the Cathedral spire.
The cost of the building had exceeded the estimate, and it had been finished by a loan of two million dollars secured by a mortgage held by the banking house of Overman & Company. It could have commanded a larger loan, as the entire structure, except the two stories below ground and the auditorium, was devoted to business offices occupied by the best class of tenants. The auditorium was for rent at a nominal sum during the week, and was designed to be the forum of free thought for the nation.
The dedication programme began on Monday, lasting through an entire week, day and night, and culminated on Sunday with Gordon’s address at eleven o’clock. The elaborate ceremonials and speeches had worn out Kate’s body by Saturday, and the praise of pygmies had long before worn out her soul.
Ruth had read with interest the accounts of these meetings, and Morris King tried in vain to dissuade her from attending the Sunday exercises at which Gordon was to speak.
“It’s useless to talk, Morris,” she said, firmly. “I am going. I’d as well tell you I’ve been slipping into the gallery of the Opera House the past six months. I’ve tried to keep away, but I had to go. I am going to-day. I’ve heard him talk and dream and plan so much of this, it seems my own.”
“Well, I’m going with you. You shall not enter that den of Anarchists alone again.”
She hesitated.
“You may go if you’ll agree to sit behind a pillar in the gallery where we will not be seen.”
When they were seated he whispered to Ruth: “But for you, I wouldn’t be caught dead in this place. I’ll soon be the Governor, and it will be my duty to see that some of these gentlemen are carefully packed in quicklime at Sing Sing.”
She started suddenly, her brow clouded, and she placed a trembling hand on his arm.
“Hush, Morris.”
“It’ll be so, mark my word.”
“Hush!” she repeated, with such a shudder of pain he hastened to whisper.
“I beg your pardon, Ruth. You know I was joking.”
Gordon rose and gazed for a moment over the sea of faces. His quick sympathies and brilliant imagination were stirred to their depths.
When the beautifully modulated voice first filled the room, Ruth felt with quick sympathy, beneath the tremor of his tones, the storm of suppressed feeling. Her eyes filled, and she bent forward, following him breathlessly.
He held the crowd spellbound.
Even the foreign Socialists, unable to understand a word of English, hung on every gesture, held by the magnetism of his powerful personality.
As he reached an impassioned climax, Ruth was startled to hear a note of suppressed laughter from a woman sitting in the same row behind the next pillar.
She looked quickly, and saw Overman’s massive head cocked to one side, his face an immovable mask, and his single gleaming eye fixed on Gordon, with Kate beside him.
Overman stayed to dinner and congratulated his friend on his effort.
“Frank, you surpassed yourself,” he said. “You made the grandest defense of an indefensible absurdity I ever heard.”
“H’m, that’s saying a good deal for you.”
Overman pulled his moustache thoughtfully.
“But I couldn’t help wishing I were an orator to jaw back at you. A preacher has such an easy thing, with no back talk except the sonorous echo of his own voice.”
“Think you could have talked back to-day?”
There was a moment’s silence. Overman leaned back and locked his hands behind his massive neck.
“If you hit a man with a brick, he may hurt you. Drop a millstone on him, he’ll not even reply. If I could have gotten at you to-day, your wife would have lost her insurance policy, because there wouldn’t have been anything to identify.”
“Nothing like a good opinion of oneself,” Gordon replied, good-naturedly.
Overman nodded.
“I never heard you explain so beautifully that ‘Back to Nature’ idea. I went West once and lived a year with some red folks who have been so fortunate as to never get away from Nature. They have been doing business at the same stand for several thousand years. Their women are old hags at your wife’s age, and their men die at mine—forty-five. Their social institutions are an exact reflection of their personal attainments.”
“But we propose,” Gordon flashed, “to make institutions an advance on man’s attainments and so lead him onward and upward.”
“Exactly,” he answered, dryly. “Make human nature divine by writing it on paper that it is so, pile water into a pyramid upside down, and repeal the law of gravitation by the vote of a mob. I don’t like the law of gravitation myself, but I haven’t time to repeal it.”
“You are a hopeless materialist.”
“Yet you, who preach the Spirit, propose to build a heaven here out of mud.”
“Socialism may be the great delusion, but it’s coming. It sweeps the imagination of the world,” Gordon cried, with enthusiasm.
“There you go! Every time I pin you down, you sail off into space with prophecy or poetry. If it does conquer the world, the world will not be worth conquering. The one thing worth while is character, and your Socialistic pig-pen cannot produce it. In this herd of swine to which you hope to reduce society an Edison or a Darwin is rewarded with the pay of a hod-carrier. The hod-carrier gets all he’s worth now. This instinct for the herd, which you call Solidarity and Brotherhood, is not a prophecy of progress; it is a memory—a memory of the dirt out of which humanity has slowly grown.”
Gordon grunted contemptuously.
“Yet only a brute can be content with the cruelty and infamy of our present society.”
“All our ills can be met by careful legislation. You propose to pull the tree up by the roots because you see bugs crawling on a limb.”
Kate rose and left the room, saying she would return in a moment, and Overman leaned back in his chair again, gazing at the ceiling.
Suddenly straightening himself, he drew his brow down close over his eye, half closing its lid, bent toward Gordon, and in a low tone slowly asked:
“But I would like to know, Frank, what in the devil you really meant by that ‘Freedom and Fellowship’ in marriage?”
“Just what I said.”
“Bah! You don’t mean to apply such tommyrot to your own wife now that she’s yours?”
“Certainly.”
“It’s beyond belief that you’re such a fool. You say to your wife and to the world, ‘This peerless woman is my comrade, but she is free; take her if you can.’”
Gordon laughed.
“Yes; but, Mark, old boy, God has not yet made the man who can take her from me.”
The one eye dreamily closed, the banker whistled softly, and said:
“I see.”
Overman had appeared on the scene of Kate’s life in a peculiar crisis. Married two years, she had passed through the period of love’s ecstacy which woman finds first in self-surrender. She had just reached the point of sex growth when a revolt against man’s dominion became inevitable.
This mood of revolt was made stronger by Gordon’s fret over her social gatherings. In the dim light of the pulpit, preaching with mystic elation, he had seemed to her a god. Now, in the full blaze of physical possession, the divine glow had paled about his brow. She had found him only a man, self-conscious, egotistic and domineering. He had many personal habits she did not like. He was overfastidious in his dress, and critical and fussy about her lack of order in housekeeping. He was finicky about his food. He hated tea, declaring the odour made him sick. She felt this a covert thrust at her five-o’clocks.
To his criticisms she at last coolly replied:
“I claim the perfect freedom you preach. I will do as I please. You can do the same.”
He laughed in a weak sort of way and declared he liked her independence.
At this moment of reaction, satiety, and the beginning of friction he had introduced her to Overman. His candour, his brutal realism, his defiance and scorn for poetic theories, presented to her the sharp contrast which made him doubly fascinating. Just at the moment Gordon was growing peevishly dogmatic in the reiteration of his ideals, she had suffered a physical disillusioning and begun to tire of poetry.
The sheer brute power of the other man, the incarnation of the thing that is, with a cynic’s contempt for dreams and dreamers, had given voice to her own rebellion and drawn her resistlessly.
The boyish tenderness underlying Overman’s nature, which she discovered later, had made his ugliness and brute strength added charms.
He had a pathetic way of looking at her with a doglike worship, as though conscious of his defects, which pleased and nattered her own sense of the perfection of beauty.
They were seated in his box at the Metropolitan Opera House while Gordon was at the farewell banquet to his foreign delegates.
“I feel,” he said, bitterly, “every time I see this play of ‘Faust,’ and hear Edouard De Reszke’s deep bass speak for His Majesty the Devil, that His Majesty really made this world. I’d know it but for the paradox of such divine perfection before my eyes in the living reality of a woman like you.”
His voice throbbed with earnestness.
“I’m growing to love the world. It’s a beautiful old place,” she answered, with a lazy smile.
“Well, it’s the only one I’m likely to travel in, so I’m going to make the best of it, work with its mighty forces, dare and defy the fools who cross my purposes. If the future has for me only pain, I’ll not complain. I’ll grin and bear it, but I’ll confess to you I get a little lonely sometimes.”
Her eyes lifted with surprise.
“I never heard you admit that before.”
“No; and what’s more, no one else ever did or ever will.”
He looked at her pathetically, and a deeper colour flooded her cheeks.
When they reached home Gordon had just returned from the banquet and was bubbling over with enthusiasm.
“Mark, we have had a grand time to-night—organised a movement that will put out a sign ‘To Let’ on every den of thieves in Wall Street.”
“What? Founded another church already?”
“A new Brotherhood within the Church Universal.”
Overman shrugged his shoulders.
“Talk plain English. What will be its name at Police Headquarters?”
Gordon smilingly and proudly replied, “The Federated Democracy of the World.”
“H’m; what are you going to do? Federate the hobos of all tongues and demand better straw in empty freight cars and shorter stops at sidings for express trains to pass?”
“Our purpose will be to inaugurate the Cooperative Commonwealth of Man. The movement will bring into harmonious action the insurgent forces of the world. Within ten years an earthquake will shake the social fabric. Within twenty years profound political and social revolutions will lift the human race over centuries of plodding into a new world of real liberty, equality, and fraternity.”
Overman growled cynically.
“That has a French accent. I hear there are fifty thousand active Socialists in France divided into exactly fifty thousand factions. Which division of this grand army will lead the movement in Gaul?”
Gordon ignored his interruption, and his voice thrilled with passionate eloquence.
“We have abolished crowns and scepters. It is a moral and physical absurdity that, in a democracy, a whiskered babe, whose labour value to society is just ten dollars a week, should inherit millions of dollars that give him the power over men more terrible, absolute and irresponsible than a Caesar ever wielded over the empire of the world. No wonder our papers shiver when these babes sneeze, and report their daily life with servile pride.”
“And would the oil of anointment of your new king, the walking delegate, be strong enough to temper the onion in his breath? I’d like to know that before drawing too near the throne.” The banker’s mouth twisted into a sneer with the last word.
“This new Democracy will itself be the highest nobility, an ethical aristocracy, and when it comes the Kingdom of Heaven will be at hand.”
The one eye glanced quickly at the speaker and blinked.
“Let me know before it gets here,” said Overman, a reminiscent look overspreading his rugged face, while Kate leaned closer with eager interest.
“Why?”
“Because I’m going somewhere. When I was a boy I had to go to church. Our old preacher faithfully urged us for hours at a time to get ready for heaven, a glorious place away up in space where all wore crowns and there wasn’t a Democrat in town, everybody played psalms on big gold harps, and every day was Sunday. I early learned to hate heaven and look on hell as my only home. Now you come along, rub hell off the map, and threaten me with a heaven here on earth worse than the old one. Hell would be a summer resort to this thing you’ve conjured up. If it comes, I’ll get off the earth.”
“Get your flying machine ready.”
“Oh, ten cents’ worth of ‘rough on rats’ will do me.”
Gordon shook his head thoughtfully.
“It’s a strange thing to me you conservatives are blind to the coming of this revolution. It will be the grimmest joke Fate ever played on the pride of man. Within the generation now living a Cooperative Commonwealth will supplant the whole system of slave wages.”
The banker suddenly straightened his massive neck and his eye flashed.
“You mean establish a system of universal slavery. Suppose under your maudlin cry of brotherhood you set up your fool’s paradise, where would reside the authority of your Commonwealth?”
“In the State, of course.”
“And who would be the State? You talk about the State as though it were some mysterious Ark of the Covenant of God, let down out of heaven and enshrined in capitals of marble. The State is simply made out of common dirt called Tom, Dick and Harry, whom a lot of other plain Toms, Dicks and Harrys set up in power. Will not your pig-pen you call the Cooperative Commonwealth have men in charge with authority to call the pigs to dinner and drive them to the fields to root?”
“Certainly, there must be authority,” Gordon snapped.
Overman mused a moment.
“Yet your patron saint, William Morris, proclaims a heaven here below without law, where man kills his fellow man and answers only to his own conscience; where we will tear up the railroads and walk, blow up our steamships and use rowboats, in our harvest fields the whetstone on the old hand-scythe will still the music of the McCormick reaper. With his delicate tastes he fears the hoof-beat of your herd. But you all agree that to go backward means to go forward, and that the way to save civilisation is to lapse into barbarism. Whether you call yourselves Socialist or Anarchist—that is, whether you long for the herd or the solitude of the forest, you mean the same thing and don’t know it, that your mind has not been able to adjust itself to the speed of modern progress, and has broken down under the strain. You preach ‘Fellowship,’ herd-life, as the cure. You believe in law and authority.”
“Yes,” Gordon cried, with pride. “Our ideal is constructive in the largest and noblest sense.”
“And if a man can work and will not work?”
“He will be made to work.”
“Very well. Suppose your pig heaven established and the herd duly penned. The Labour Master of your local pen would naturally be a man after the heart of the herd. He would be a greasy Labour agitator. No other man could be elected. Suppose he should become interested in the extraordinary beauty of your wife. Suppose you were presumptuous enough to resent this, and, in revenge for your insolence, your Master transferred you, the scholar, idealist and orator, to the task of cleaning the spittoons in the City Hall, and ordered your wife to scrub the floor of his office. You both refuse, you who walk with your head among the stars, What then? The dirty-fingered one, your Labour Master, sends you to prison for the first offense. For the second, you would be stripped, placed in the public stocks and flogged, man and woman alike in this kingdom of equality. For, mark you, enforced labour is the only possible foundation of such a society.”
Gordon listened with dreamy disgust.
“You’ve set up a man of straw. In this new world each would choose his work and labour would be a joy,” he answered, with lofty scorn.
The banker chuckled.
“No doubt they would all choose joyous jobs. But there would be a surplus of joyous labourers hunting for joyful tasks, and a dearth of fools looking for disagreeable work. In your pig paradise everything must be fixed. There could be no uncertainty about the future—no worry, or fret, or anxiety—hence no hopes or fears. Man would be guaranteed food, clothes, shelter and children, just as the chattel slave. There could be no inducement to work unless compelled to, and no man except an idiot would do a disagreeable task unless forced to do it. You must remember there could be no lawyers or bankers, preachers or orators. The chief occupation of your Labour Master would be the assignment of people he didn’t like to the hard, dirty jobs, and the granting of favourite tasks to such people as made themselves agreeable to His Majesty. Witness the master of the Russian Commune, who is notoriously the lord of all the wives of the village.”
Overman was still a moment, and then growled from the depths of his being:
“I call this the lowest, the most degrading, the most bestial nightmare the human mind ever dreamed!”
Gordon waved him off with an eloquent gesture.
“You have assumed that a free commonwealth of godlike men and women would choose their worst units for their leaders.”
“Nothing of the sort,” he snapped. “I’ve supposed they would do the inevitable—choose the strongest man who looks like the majority and smells like the majority.”
“A bad man would be removed,” the dreamer quickly replied.
“What difference if your master be changed by an election now and then? All the worse. If I am to be a slave, I prefer the old chattel system with a master whose favour I could win and hold for life by faithful service. The old slaves often loved their masters. Could you love the Executive Officer of a Bureau for the Enforcement of Labour? Do convicts become infatuated with their keepers? To assassinate such a man would become a positive joy. How many years of such life would it take to crush out of the human soul the last spark of hope and aspiration and reduce man to a beast?”
“But we affirm the inherent divinity of man. You assume him to be a child of the devil.”
There was another silence, and then the banker’s brow wrinkled.
“Affirm. Yes, you fellows are all orators. You must affirm else the crowd will leave you. You never have doubts and fears. You always know. Only affirm a thing enough and never try to prove it, and thousands of fools will accept it at last as the word of God. That is the secret of the power of all demagogues and emotional orators. The slickest horse-thief that ever operated in the West was a revivalist who migrated there with a tent. While he held the crowd spellbound with his eloquence, his confederates loosed the horses in the woods and got them to a safe place. Oratory is one of the cheapest tricks ever played on man, but an everlastingly effective one, because it is based on affirmation. Any man who is too hard-headed and honest to affirm a thing he don’t know and can’t know never leads a mob. They will only follow a man who speaks with the sublime authority of knowledge he does not possess.”
While Overman was talking Gordon’s brow clouded as he watched Kate’s face flash with interest and a smile now and then play between her eyes and lips.
“We seem to be developing another orator,” he slowly answered.
Overman pursed his lips.
“I haven’t wasted so much breath in a long time. Your French programme stirred me. I wonder if you recalled the decline of the French nation in modern times, and its causes, in arranging for your conquest of France? A little while ago the Anglo-Saxon race numbered but a few millions, and the Latin ruled the world. Now the flag of the Anglo-Saxon flies over one-fourth the inhabitants of the globe, his army can withstand the combined armies of the world, his navy rules the sea, and his wealth is so great he could buy the entire possessions of the rest of mankind. Why? Because he developed the most powerful individual man in history, while other races have sought refuge in the herd idea of communal interests. I noticed you never preach now from the old text, ‘What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and forfeit his life?’ Why save the world if you destroy man?”
But Gordon had ceased to listen to Overman. With his great blue-veined fist clenched on his chin and a new gleam of light in his steel-gray eyes he was watching his wife’s face.
Overman was quick to detect the hostility of his friend’s unusual silence, and hastily rose.
“Excuse me, old boy,” he said, apologetically, “if I’ve hit too hard. I think the world of you in spite of your fool theories. You know that.”
“Don’t worry, Mark,” he answered, carelessly. “I haven’t been listening to you at all. I’ve been thinking of something else. Life’s too short to pay any attention to your big Philistine jaw.”
The banker smiled.
“Well, you have the instrument handy with which Samson slew the Philistine.”
“Yes, if you would only loan it to me. Goodnight.”
When he had gone, Kate leaned back on the lounge and said with evident amusement:
“You forgot something in parting with your old schoolmate.”
“Yes, I thought it quite unnecessary to tell him to drop in any time, unless you wish to let the front room.”
A tremor of catlike fun slyly played about her mouth.
“And yet women have been called fickle. Mr. Overman was no college chum of mine.”
“No; but he is evidently trying to make up for it now.”
A low musical laugh seemed to come from the depth of Kate’s spirit.
“And I thought I was pleasing you by neglecting my Bohemians and cultivating your powerful friend.”
“Still it is not necessary to hang on his words with such melting interest,” he said, with quiet emphasis.
She looked up sharply and a gleam of cruelty flashed from her blue eyes and struck the steel-gray in his. Beneath the quiet words of the man and woman there was raging the mortal struggle of will and personality, the woman in fierce rebellion, his iron egotism demanding submission.
“‘Oh, I see,” she purred, softly. “There is to be but one man-god, arrayed and beautiful, if I may quote your formula. There may be many women-gods in paradise. I saw Ruth in the Temple the first Sunday you spoke, hanging on your words as the voice of the Lord.”
Gordon flushed and turned uneasily in his chair.
“I’d as well be frank with you, Kate. Overman is coming to this house too often. I was shocked beyond measure when I failed to find you in your accastomed seat on the Sunday of the dedication of the Temple. I was told you were in the gallery with him.”
She straightened herself up suddenly.
“You took the pains to find that out?”
“Yes.”
She fixed on him a look of scorn.
“And stooped to ask an usher instead of asking me? You, who boldly say to the world that I am your free comrade, the mate and equal of man?”
“An odd way you took to show comradeship in such an hour,” he answered, doggedly.
“Am I a slave, to sit in solemn rapture at your feet and await your nod?”
“You seemed to eagerly await the nod of another man to-night.”
She laughed.
“Am I not your serene-browed Grecian goddess whose untamed eyes of primeval womanhood proclaim the end of slave marriage?”
Gorden winced, scowled and was silent.
“I like the beautiful ceremony you invented. I’ve memorised every word of it,” she said, teasingly.
He sat for several minutes sullenly looking at her with a strange fire in his eyes, now and then moistening his lips as though they burned.
At length he said: “It will be necessary for you to go to his office to-morrow to sign papers in the transfer of the deed of the Temple to me. The lawyers informed me to-day that everything was in readiness for your signature. After this event there will be no business requiring your further attendance at his bank.”
She closed her eyes lazily.
“I am not going to sign any such deed,” came the firm answer.
Gordon turned pale, nervously fumbled at his watch-chain and stammered:
“Kate, you don’t mean this?”
“I do.”
The man hesitated, as though stunned.
“After your announcement to the world, and all that has passed between us, would you humiliate me by the withdrawal of your gift?”
She lifted her beautiful brows.
“Humiliate you? Surely I have honoured you with the richest gift woman can bestow on man: myself. The ownership of property can have no meaning after this. I claim my rights as your equal. Your eloquence and genius give you power. This money is scarcely its equivalent. You have your Temple, and I still have my fortune. Its investment in this building has enhanced its value. What more can you ask?”
“The fulfilment of your word of honour to the cause of truth,” he firmly answered.
She smiled.
“Nonsense! You were my cause, my truth—the god I worshiped. I desired you. Now at closer range the aureole has slightly faded, though you are as handsome as ever, Frank, dear. What is money between us? We are equals. I will take the worry of financial details off your shoulders and leave you free for your inspiring work.”
Gordon’s eyes grew soft; he went over to the lounge on which she was resting, sat down and slipped his arm about her.
The full lips smiled with conscious cruelty.
He bent and kissed her passionately.
“You are my priceless treasure, my dear. I am honoured in your beauty and love. Money is nothing to me, so long as you are mine.”
She drew his head down and kissed him in a sudden burst of intensity.
“You know I love you, Frank!”
“And we must not quarrel,” he said, wistfully, slipping to his knees with one arm still encircling her waist. “You and I have gone through too much for harsh words or thoughts to ever shadow our life. But you must give me more of your time, and other men less. A growing uneasiness and the loss of the sense of finality in life are robbing me of my capacity for thought and work.”
“Not so bad as that surely,” she cried, with teasing laughter. “You’re not afraid of losing me?”
“No; but you will promise?” he asked, tenderly.
She placed one of her arms about his neck, a soft warm hand under his chin, and, still laughing, slowly kissed him and murmured:
“I’ll do just what I please, and you may do the same.”