Comrades Part 27

The pretty young chorus-girls had taken him at his word. They had always cherished a secret desire to live in an unconventional real world, where they could have a chance to be themselves, without the hideous skirts of conventional society veiling their beauty. They had brought these costumes with them and joined the new moral world in the firm faith that their ideal would be realized. It had come very slowly, but it had come at last.

They donned their beautiful costumes with hearts fluttering in triumphant pride. But they had huddled into a corner of the ball-room in a panic of fright at the insane commotion their honest efforts to promote beauty had caused. One by one every woman in skirts save Barbara and Catherine left the room. The married ones seized their husbands and pushed them out ahead.

Norman, who was dancing with Barbara, broke down and burst into a paroxysm of laughter.

Some of the girls began to cry, but others made a brave effort to face the crowd of eager, giggling boys who pressed nearer.

The Bard approached with a serious look on his n.o.ble brow, deliberately put on his gla.s.ses and surveyed the crowd.

"My dear girls," he began, "I thank you from the bottom of my heart for the sincerity and honesty of your efforts to express beauty in unconventional form, but really this is beyond my wildest expectation."

Catherine drove the rude boys out of the room and closed the windows, while Barbara kissed the tears away from the hysterical innovators and led them back to their rooms.

The next morning the general a.s.sembly held an unusually solemn meeting at which it was voted by a large majority to settle at once and forever the question of dress by adopting a Socialist uniform of scarlet and white for the women, and for the men a dull gray suit with scarlet bands on the sleeve, a scarlet stripe and belt for the trousers.

The discussion was brief and Roland Adair, the Bard of Ramcat, protested in vain.

CHAPTER XXI

A PAIR OF COLD GRAY EYES

From the night of the ball at which the group of chorus-girls made their sensational entrance in tights, Norman had his hands full.

Disorder had rapidly grown in the Brotherhood. Two distinct parties began to line up for a desperate struggle for supremacy, the one standing for the widest liberty of the individual members of the community, the other demanding the stern enforcement of law and order and the formulation of a complete and strict code of rules for the government of daily conduct.

Among the men a.s.signed to various tasks there gradually appeared a number who slighted their work. From carelessness they drifted into utter incompetency and downright laziness. Groups of these loafers began to hang around the house daily.

When they had spent the last penny of their credit at the general store of the community, they began to steal. Not a day or night pa.s.sed but complaints of thefts were made from every department of the colony. One of the most serious of these burglaries was the robbery of the winery of an enormous quant.i.ty of the most valuable wines.

Drunkenness had already become one of the serious problems of the Brotherhood, and the right to buy of the steward had been denied a large number of men and several women. These people began at once to show signs of intoxication. It was plain that the thieves had hidden this wine and that they were carrying on a secret traffic with those to whom it had been forbidden.

With the increase of reckless drunkenness another evil grew with alarming rapidity, the carousing of boisterous men and women. One of them very quickly pa.s.sed the limits of tolerance. She was in many respects the most beautiful girl in the colony, barely nineteen years old, with luxuriant blond hair, and big, wide, staring baby-blue eyes.

She had with it all a smile so saucy, so winsome, so elfish, and yet so innocent, it was impossible for the average man or woman to think ill of her. To every appeal of Barbara she merely showed her pretty white teeth in a winsome smile, promised her anything she asked, and proceeded to do as she liked.

At last her room was declared an intolerable nuisance by a committee appointed to enter the complaint on behalf of her neighbours on the floor on which she lived. The night before this committee appealed to Barbara two boys had fought a desperate fist duel in this room. The noise had roused the neighbours, and the case could no longer be ignored by the executive council.

Barbara was sent to this room with full power to deal with the offender.

"Good heavens," cried the girl, her big blue eyes opening wide with injured innocence, "how could I help it? They're both in love with me.

I don't care a rap for either one of them, but they got to fighting, and I couldn't stop them. I threw a pitcher of water on them, but they kept right on. I'd have called the police, but there was none to call.

It wasn't my fault."

"But my dear Blanche," pleaded Barbara, "can't you see that you are bringing scandal and disgrace into the colony?"

"It's not me!" the pretty lips pouted. "It's these old women who are talking. Let them shut their mouths and attend to their own business.

I'm not bothering them."

"You deny the accusations they bring against your good name?" Barbara said, with some surprise.

"Of course I deny them," she snapped. "I've got to have some fun, haven't I? I can't help it that a dozen boys come to see me and n.o.body ever sees the old tabbies who lie about me, can I? I can't help it that they are old and ugly, can I?"

Barbara had ceased to listen to the glib tongue, whose lying chatter tired her. She looked about the room with increasing amazement. It was stuffed with presents of every conceivable description. Costly rugs adorned the floor. Soft pillows filled the couch by the window. Dainty and expensive works of art adorned her mantel, and the richest and most beautiful underwear lay in a smoothly laundered pile on her luxuriant bed.

"And how did you get all these costly and beautiful things, my dear?"

Barbara asked, with a touch of sarcasm.

The big blue eyes opened wide again with wonder.

"Why, the boys who are in love with me gave them. Why shouldn't they?

I can't help it that they are foolish, can I? G.o.d made them so."

"And you accepted these rich and costly things in perfect innocence of the evil meaning others might put on them?"

"Of course! How can I keep their tongues from wagging? Life's too short. I have but one life to live. I can't waste it worrying over nothing."

For the first time in her career Barbara stood face to face with naked evil--with a liar to whom a lie was good--a radiantly beautiful girl to whom shame was sweet.

For a moment the thought was suffocating. She looked out of the window at the infinite blue sea until the tears slowly blinded her. The first doubt of her theory of life crept into her heart and threw its shadow over the ideal of the new world she had built.

She took the girl's hand, slipped her arm around her neck, kissed the soft, s.h.i.+ning hair, and sobbed:

"Poor little foolish sister! I'm afraid you've broken my heart to-day."

"I haven't done a thing! Honestly, I haven't!" the l.u.s.ty young liar rattled on and on, in a hundred silly, vain protests, which Barbara never heard.

She left the room at length with a sickening sense of defeat, though the girl had promised her on the honour of her soul never again to give the slightest cause for complaint.

Many a day she had trudged through the streets of the great city, after hours of nerve-racking struggles with sin and shame and despair in the old world, but she had always come home at night with a heart singing a battle-hymn of victory. She knew the cause of all the pain, and she had given her life to right the wrong. Nothing daunted her, nothing disconcerted her. In the end triumph was sure, and while she felt this there could be no such thing as failure.

She stood before the full meeting of the executive council, honestly reported the case, and for the first time tasted the bitterness of defeat, helpless, complete, and overwhelming. While she was talking a peculiar expression in Wolf's cold gray eyes suddenly caught her attention and fixed her gaze on him with a curious fascination and horror. Wolf was quick to note her look, recovered himself and smiled in his old fatherly, friendly way.

"Don't worry, comrade. We've got to meet and settle such questions.

They are merely the inheritance of civilization. It will take a little time, that's all."

But as Barbara's gaze lingered on the heavy brutal lines of Wolf's ma.s.sive figure and she caught again the gleam of his gray eyes a sickening sense of foreboding gripped her heart.

CHAPTER XXII

THE FIGHTING INSTINCT

As questions of discipline became more and more pressing old Tom refused to sit as an active judge in the executive council.