The Vision Splendid Part 26

"Can a man care much for two women at the same time?" he asked in a low voice.

She laughed with slow mockery.

Her faint perfume was wafted to his brain. He knew a besieging of the blood. Slowly he leaned forward, holding her eyes till the mockery faded from them. Then, very deliberately, he kissed her.

"How dare you!" she voiced softly in a kind of wonder not free from resentment. For with all her sensuous appeal the daughter of Joe Powers was not a woman with whom men took liberties.

"By the G.o.ds, why shouldn't I dare? We played a game and both of us have lost. You were to beckon and coolly flit, while I followed safely at a distance. Do you think me a marble statue? Do you think me too wooden for the strings of my heart to pulsate? By heaven, my royal Hebe, you have blown the fire in me to life. You must pay forfeit."

"Pay forfeit?"

"Yes. I'm your servant no longer, but your lover and your master--and I intend to marry you."

"How ridiculous," she derided. "Have you forgotten Alice?"

"I have forgotten everything but you--and that I'm going to marry you."

She laughed a little tremulously. "You had better forget that too. I'm like Alice. My answer is, 'No, thank you, kind sir.'"

"And my answer, royal Hebe, is this." His hot lips met hers again in abandonment to the racing pa.s.sion in him.

"You--barbarian," she gasped, pus.h.i.+ng him away.

"Perhaps. But the man who is going to marry you."

She looked at him with a flash of almost shy curiosity that had the charm of an untasted sensation. "Would you beat me?"

"I don't know." He still breathed unevenly. "I'd teach you how to live."

"And love?" She was beginning to recover her lightness of tone, though the warm color still dabbed her cheeks.

"Why not?" His eyes were diamond bright. "Why not? You have never known the great moments, the buoyant zest of living in the land that belongs only to the Heirs o Life."

"And can you guide me there?" The irony in her voice was not untouched with wistfulness.

"Try me."

She laughed softly, stepped to the table, and chose a cigarette. "My friend, you promise impossibilities. I was not born to that incomparable company. To be frank, neither were you. Alice, grant you, belongs there.

And that mad cousin of yours. But not we two earth creepers. We're neither of us star dwellers. In the meantime"--she lit her Egyptian and stopped to make sure of her light every moment escaping more definitely from the glamor of his pa.s.sion--"you mentioned an engagement that was imperative. Don't let me keep you from it."

CHAPTER 12

From The New Catechism

Question: What is the whole duty of man?

Answer: To succeed.

Q. What is success?

A. Success is being a Captain of Industry.

Q. How may one become a Captain of Industry?

A. By stacking in his barns the hay made by others while the sun s.h.i.+nes.

Q. But is this not theft?

A. Not if done legally and respectably on a large scale. It is high finance.

THE REBEL AND THE UNDESIRABLE CITIZEN TALK TREASON. THE HERO HAS PRIVATE CONVERSE WITH A GREAT PIONEER OF CIVILIZATION

Part 1

Jeff never for a day desisted from his fight to win back for the people the self rule that had been wrested from them for selfish purposes by corporate greed. "Government by the people" was the watchword he kept at the head of his editorial column. Better a bad government that is representative than a good one emanating from the privileged few, he maintained with conviction.

To his office came one day Oscar Marchant, the little, half-educated Socialist poet, coughing from the exertion of the stairs he had just climbed. He had come begging, the consumptive presently explained.

"Remember Sobieski, the Polish Jew?"

Jeff smiled. "Of course. Philosophical anarchy used to be his remedy."

"Starvation is the one he's trying now," returned Marchant grimly. "He's had typhoid and lost his job. The rent's due and they'll be turned out tomorrow. He's got a wife and two kids."

Farnum asked questions briefly and pulled out his check book. "Tell Sobieski not to worry," he said as he handed over a check. "I'll send a reporter out there and we'll make an appeal through the _World_. Of course his own name won't be used. No one will know who it really is.

We'll look out for him till he's on his feet again."

Marchant gave him the best he had. "You're a pretty good Socialist, even though you don't know it."

"Am I?"

"But you're blind as a bat. The things you fight for in the _World_ don't get to the bottom of what ails us."

"We've got to forge the tools of freedom before we can use them, haven't we?"

"You're all for patching up the rotten system we've got. It will never do."

"Great changes are most easily brought about under the old forms. Men's minds in the ma.s.s move slowly. They can see only a little truth at a time."

"Because they are blinded by ignorance and selfishness. Get at bottom facts, Farnum. What's the one great crime?"

Without a moment's hesitation Jeff answered. "Poverty. All other crimes are paltry beside that."

Marchant c.o.c.ked himself up on the window seat with his legs doubled under him tailor fas.h.i.+on. "Why?"