The One Woman Part 36

He had a pathetic way of looking at her with a doglike wors.h.i.+p, 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 ba.s.s 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 pa.s.s?"

"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 pa.s.sionate 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 s.h.i.+ver 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 n.o.bility, 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 s.p.a.ce 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 h.e.l.l as my only home. Now you come along, rub h.e.l.l off the map, and threaten me with a heaven here on earth worse than the old one. h.e.l.l 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 ma.s.sive 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 G.o.d, let down out of heaven and enshrined in capitals of marble. The State is simply made out of common dirt called Tom, d.i.c.k and Harry, whom a lot of other plain Toms, d.i.c.ks 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 steams.h.i.+ps 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 'Fellows.h.i.+p,' herd-life, as the cure. You believe in law and authority."

"Yes," Gordon cried, with pride. "Our ideal is constructive in the largest and n.o.blest 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.