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CHAPTER III
THE BIRTH OF A MAN
Norman stood silent and thoughtful before the fire in the dining-room, the morning after the meeting of the Socialists. His sleep had been feverish and a hundred half-formed dreams had haunted the moments in which he had lost consciousness with always the shining face of Barbara smiling and beckoning him on.
Elena silently entered and watched him a moment before he saw her.
"Still dreaming of the New Joan of Arc, Norman?" she asked with playful banter.
"I'm going to do it, Elena," he said, with slow, thoughtful emphasis.
"What? Marry her without even giving me the usual two weeks' notice?" Elena laughed.
"Now, isn't that like a woman! I wasn't even thinking of the girl – "
"Of course not."
Norman laughed. "By Jove, you're jealous at last, Elena."
"You flatter yourself."
"Honestly, I wasn't thinking of the girl – "
"Well, I've been thinking of her. She haunts me. I like her and I hate her. I feel that she's charming and vicious, of the spirit and flesh, and yet I can't help believing that she's good. The woman who introduced her is a she-devil, and the man who presided over that meeting is a brute. It's a pity she's mixed up with them. What are you going to do – play the hero and rescue her from their clutches?"
"Nonsense. The girl is nothing to me, except as the symbol of a great idea. It stirs my blood. I'm going to join the Socialist Club."
"Of which the fair Barbara is secretary."
"Come with me, and join too. We'll go together to every meeting."
"Have you gone mad?" Elena asked, with deep seriousness.
"I'm in dead earnest."
"And you think your father will stand for it?"
"That remains to be seen. I'm going to tackle him as soon as he comes down to breakfast."
"Well, if I never see you again, good-bye, old pal." She extended her hand in mock gravity.
"I'm not afraid of him."
"No, of course not!"
"You're a coward, or you'd stand by me. Wait, Elena, he's coming now."
"Why stand by? You're not afraid? I'll return in time for the inquest. Brace up! Remember Barbara. Be a hero!"
With a ripple of laughter she disappeared as the Colonel's footsteps were heard at the door.
Norman braced himself for the ordeal. He had never before dared to test his father's iron will. He had grown accustomed to see strong men bow and cringe before him, and felt a secret contempt for them all. They were bowing to his millions. And yet the boy knew with intuitive certainty that beneath the mask of quiet dignity and polished military bearing of the man he facetiously called "the Governor" there slumbered a will unique, powerful, and overbearing. More than once he had resented the silent pressure of his positive and aggressive personality. His own budding manhood had begun instinctively to bristle at its approach.
The Colonel started on seeing Norman, and looked at him with a quizzical expression.
"Was there an earthquake this morning, Norman?"
"I didn't feel it, sir – why?"
"You're downstairs rather early."
Norman smiled. "I've been a little lazy, I'm afraid, Governor. But you know I wasn't consulted as to whether I wished to be born. You assumed a fearful responsibility. You see the results."
The Colonel dropped his paper and looked at Norman a moment.
"Well, upon my word!" he exclaimed. "What's happened?"
"The biggest thing that ever came into my life, Governor," was the low, serious answer.
"What?"
"The decision that hereafter I'd rather be than seem to be, that I'm going to do some thinking for myself."
"And what brought you to this decision?" the father quietly asked.
"I went last night to that Socialist meeting."
"Indeed!"
"Yes," he went on, impetuously, "and I heard the most wonderful appeal to which I ever listened – an appeal which stirred me to the deepest depths of my being. I think it's the biggest movement of the century. I'm going to study it. I'm going to see what it means. What do you say to it?"
The boy lifted his tall figure with instinctive dignity, and his eyes met his father's in a straight, deep man's gaze.
The faintest smile played about the corners of the Colonel's mouth as he suddenly extended his hand.
"I congratulate you!"
"Congratulate me?" Norman stammered.
"Upon the attainment of your majority. Up to date you have written a few verses and played football. But this is the first evidence you have ever shown of conscious personality. You're in the grub-worm stage as yet, but you're on the move. You're a human being. You have developed the germ of character. And that's the only thing in this world that's worth the candle, my boy. It's funny to hear you say that the appeal of Socialism has worked this miracle. For character is the one thing the scheme of Socialism leaves out of account. A character is the one thing a machine-made society could never produce if given a million years in which to develop the experiment."
"And you don't object?" Norman asked with increasing amazement.
"Certainly not. Study Socialism to your heart's content. Go to the bottom of it. Don't slop over it. Don't accept sentimental mush for facts. Find out for yourself. Read, think, and learn to know your fellow man. When you've picked up a few first principles, and know enough to talk intelligently, I've something to say to you – something I've learned for myself."
The boy looked at his father steadily and spoke with a slight tremor in his voice.
"Governor, you're a bigger man than I thought you were. I like you – even if you are my father."
"Thanks, my boy," the Colonel gravely replied, "I trust we may know each other still better in the future."
CHAPTER IV
AMONG THE SHADOWS
Under the tutelage of Barbara, the young millionaire plunged into the study of Socialism with the zeal of the fresh convert to a holy crusade.
At first he had listened to her stories of the sufferings of the poor and the unemployed with mild incredulity. She laid her warm little hand on his and said:
"Come and see. If you think that Socialism is a dream, I'll show you that capitalism is a nightmare."
He followed her down the ugly pavements of a squalid street into the poorest quarter of the city. She entered a dingy hall and pushed her way through a swarm of filthy children to the rear room. On a bed of rags lay the body of a suicide – a working-man who had shot himself the day before. The wife sat crouching on a broken chair, with eyes staring out of the window at the sunlit skies of a May morning in California. Her body seemed to have turned to stone and her eyes to have frozen in their sockets. Her hands lay limp in her lap, her shoulders drooped, her mouth hung hopelessly open. She was as dead to every sight and sound of earth as though shrouded and buried in six feet of clay instead of sunlight.
Barbara touched her shoulder, but she did not move.
"Have you been sitting there all night, Mrs. Nelson?" she asked, gently.
The woman turned her weak eyes toward the speaker and stared without reply.
"You haven't tasted the food I brought you," Barbara continued.
The drooping figure stirred with sudden energy, as if the realization of the question first asked had begun to stir her intelligence.
"Yes. I set up all night with Jim. He'd a-done as much fer me. There's nobody else that cared enough to come. Ye know it ain't respectful to leave your dead alone – "
"But you must eat something," Barbara urged.
"I can't eat – it chokes me." She paused a moment, and looked at Norman in a dazed sort of way. "I tried to eat and something choked me – what was it? O God, I remember now!" she cried, with strangling emotion. "They are going to bury him in the potter's field unless we can save him, and I know we can't. He's got an old mother way back East that thinks he's doing well out here. Hit'll kill her dead when she finds out he wuz buried by the city."
"He shan't go to the potter's field," Norman interrupted, looking out of the window.
The woman rose, and tried to speak, but sank sobbing:
"Thank God! Thank God! Thank God!"
When the first flood of grateful emotion had spent itself, she looked up at Norman and said:
"You see, sir, he wasn't strong, and kept losin' his job in Chicago. We'd heard about California all our lives. We sold out everything and got enough to come. For two years we've made a hard fight, but it was no use. Jim couldn't git work. I tried and I couldn't. Folks have helped us, but he was proud. He wouldn't beg and he wouldn't let me. He wouldn't sell his gun. I think he always meant to use it that way when he got to the end, and it come yesterday when they give us notice to git out."
She staggered over to the bed and fell across the body, sobbing:
"My poor old boy. He loved me. He was always good to me. I tried to go with him. But I couldn't pull the trigger! I was afraid! I was afraid!"
When they reached the street, Barbara lifted her brown eyes to Norman's face and asked:
"What do you think of a social system that drives thousands of men to kill themselves like that?"
"To tell you the truth I never thought of it at all before."
"He would have been buried in a pauper's grave but for your help. I brought you here this morning because I knew you would save her that anguish when you understood."
"You knew I would?" he softly asked.
"I wouldn't have let you come with me if I hadn't known it," she answered, earnestly.
"It's funny how many of us live in this world without knowing anything about it," he said, musingly.
"It would be funny were it not a tragedy," she answered, turning across the street to the next block. They paused at the entrance of another narrow hallway.
"My work as secretary of the club includes, as you see, a wide range of calls. I'm a dispenser of alms, the pastor of a great parish, the friend, adviser, and champion of a lost world, and you have no idea what a big world it is."
"I'm beginning to understand. What's the trouble here? Another suicide?"
"No – something worse, I think. A man who was afraid to die and took to drink. That's the way with most of them. None but the brave can look into the face of Death. This man is good to his family until he's drunk. Drink is the only thing that makes life worth the candle to him. But when he's under the influence of liquor he's a fiend. Last night he beat his wife into insensibility. This morning he sent one of the children for me."
They climbed two flights of rickety stairs and entered a room littered with broken furniture. Every chair was smashed, the table lay in splinters, pieces of crockery scattered everywhere, and the stove broken into fragments. Two blear-eyed children with the look of hunted rabbits crouched in a corner. A man was bending over the bed, where the form of a woman lay still and white.
"For God's sake, brace up, Mary!" he was saying. "Ye mustn't die! Ye mustn't, I tell ye! Your white face will haunt me and drive me into hell a raving maniac. I didn't know what I was doin', old gal. I was crazy. I wouldn't 'a' hurt a hair of your head if I'd 'a' knowed what I was doin'!"
He bowed his face in his coarse, bloated hands and sobbed.
The thin white hand of the wife stroked his hair feebly.
"It's all right, Sam. I know ye didn't mean it," she sighed.
Norman sent for a doctor, and left some money.
With each new glimpse of the under-world of pain and despair the conviction grew in Norman's mind that he had not lived, and the determination deepened that he would get acquainted with his fellow men and the place he called his home.
"You are not tired?" Barbara asked, as they hurried into the street.
"No, I'm just beginning to live," he answered, soberly.
"Good. Then you shall be allowed the honour of accompanying me to the county jail, to the poorhouse, to the hospital, and to the morgue – the four greatest institutions of modern civilization. We must hurry. I've another sadder visit after these."
As they hurried through the streets, Norman began to study with increasing intensity the phenomena presented in the development of Barbara's character. The more he saw of her, the more he realized the lofty ideals of her life, the more puerile and contemptible his own past seemed.
At the jail they found a boy who had been convicted of stealing and sentenced to the penitentiary. His old mother was ill. Barbara bore her last message of love.
They stopped at the poorhouse to see a curious old pauper who had become a regular attendant on the Socialists' meetings. He was called "Methodist John," because he was forever shouting "Glory, Hallelujah!" and interrupting the speakers. Barbara was the bearer of a painful message to John. Wolf had instructed her to keep him out of the meetings. She had decided to try a gentler way – to warn him against yelling "Glory" again under penalty of being deprived of a dish of soup of which he was particularly fond. The Socialist Club served this simple, wholesome meal to all who asked for it after its weekly meetings.
John promised Barbara faithfully to stop shouting.
"Remember, John," she warned him finally, "shout – no soup! No shout – soup!"
"I understand, Miss Barbara," he answered, solemnly.
"You see, sir," he said, apologetically, turning to Norman, "I get along all right till she begins ter speak, and when I hears her soft, sweet voice it seems ter run all down my back in little ticklin' waves clean down ter my toes, an' I holler 'Glory' before I can stop it!"
Norman laughed.
"I understand, old man."
"You feel that way yerself, don't ye, now, when she looks down into yer soul with them big, soft eyes o' hern, an' her voice comes a-stealin' inter yer heart like the music of the angels – "
Barbara's face lighted, and a slight blush suffused her cheeks as she caught the look of admiring assent in Norman's expression.
"That will do, John," she said, firmly. "Mr. Wolf was very angry with you yesterday."
"I'll remember, Miss Barbara," he repeated. "And God bless your dear heart fer comin' by ter tell me."
"I suppose he has no people living who are interested in him?" Norman asked, as they turned toward the Socialist hall.
"No. He came from a big mill town in the East. His children all died before they were grown, and he landed here with his wife ten years ago. When she died, he was sent to the poorhouse. He hasn't much mind, but there's enough left to burst into flame at the memory of his children being slowly ground to death by the wheels of those mills. I've seen his dead soul start to life more than once as I've looked into his face from our platform. What an awful thing to see dead men walking about!"
"Yes. People who are dead and don't know it. I never thought of it before." Norman exclaimed.
They stopped in front of a house with a scarlet light in the hall, which threw its rays through a red-glass transom over a door of coloured leaded glass. The shadows of evening had begun to fall, and for the first time the girl showed a sign of hesitation and embarrassment.
"I hate to ask you to go in here with me, and I'd hate worse to have you see me go alone. Yet I have to do it. My work leads me."
"I'm going with you, whether you ask it or not," he firmly replied.
"Then words are useless," she said, simply, as she rang the bell.
A Negro maid opened the door, and smiled a look of recognition. "She ain't no better, miss. She's been crying for you all day."
Barbara led the way up two flights of stairs to a small room in the rear, and entered without knocking. With a bound she was beside the bed on which lay a slender girl of nineteen. A mass of golden blond hair was piled in confusion on the pillow, and a pair of big, childish-looking blue eyes blinked at her through her tears.
"Oh! you've come at last! I'm so glad. It makes me strong to see you. Your face shines so, Barbara! They say I can't live, but it's not so. I shall live! I'm feeling better every day. It's nonsense. The doctors haven't got any sense. I wish you'd get me one that knows something. Won't you, dear?"
"My friend, Mr. Worth, who has called with me, has kindly agreed to send you another doctor, little sister – that's why I brought him to see you."
Norman extended his hand, and grasped the thin, cold one the girl extended. He felt the chill of death in its icy touch as he stammered:
"I'll send him right away."
"Thank you," the girl replied, as a smile flitted about her weak mouth. She turned to Barbara with a look of infinite tenderness.
"I knew you'd come, and I knew you'd save me. You're my angel! When I dream at night, you're always hovering over me."
"I'll come again to-morrow, dearie, when the new doctor has seen you," Barbara answered, as she pressed her hand good-bye.
When they reached the street, Norman asked:
"You knew her before she fell into evil ways?"
"Yes," Barbara answered, with feeling. "She was just a little child of joy and sunlight. She couldn't endure the darkness. She loved flowers and music, beauty and love. She hated drudgery and poverty. She tried to work, and gave up in despair. A man came into her life at a critical moment and she broke with the world. She's been sending all the money she could make the past two years to her mother and four little kids. Her father was killed at work in a mine for a great corporation."
"She can't live, can she?" Norman asked.
"Of course not. I only did this to humour her. She has developed acute consumption – she may not live a month."
Barbara paused.
"I must leave you now – I'm very tired, and I must sleep a while before I attend the meeting to-night. It has been a great strain on me to-day, this trip with you. How do you like our boasted civilization? Do you think it perfect? Are you satisfied with a system which drives hundreds of thousands of such girls into a life of shame? Are you content with a system which produces three million paupers in a land flowing with milk and honey? Do you like a system which drives thousands to the madness of drink and suicide every year?"
"And to think," responded Norman, dreamily, "that for the past two years of my manhood I've been writing verses and playing football! Great God!"
"Then from to-day we are comrades in the cause of humanity?" she asked tenderly, extending her hand. His own clasped hers with firm grasp.
"Comrades!"
CHAPTER V
THE ISLAND OF VENTURA
Norman had never been a boy to do things by halves. In college, when he went in for football, he made it the one supreme end of life – and won. He incidentally managed to pull through a course in mining engineering. He knew mining by instinct and inheritance from his father. It came easy.
When he had a three months' vacation from football he took up the modelling of a dredge for mining gold from the sands of the beaches. The thing had never been perfected, but after three months' experiment and study he was just on the point of making the castings for the machinery when the football season opened and he dropped such trifling matters for the more serious work of training his men for a successful season. He won the championship and forgot the dredge.
Into the new movement of Socialism he naturally threw his whole personality without reservation. Its daring programme thrilled him. The audacity of its leaders and their refusal to discuss anything less than the salvation of man appealed to every instinct of his nature. He devoured every book on the subject he could find, and in his new-found enthusiasm for humanity accepted as the inspired voice of God their wildest visions of social regeneration.
In his work of charity and organization with Barbara he found everything to confirm and nothing to shake his faith in these theories. When once he caught the idea that all the ills of modern civilization were due directly to the fiendish system of "capitalism" and its "iron law of wages," it was the key which unlocked every mystery of Pain and every tragedy of the Soul. All sin and crime and shame and suffering became the incidents of a social system whose movements were as inexorable as Fate, as merciless as Death. There was but one thing worth talking about, and that was how to destroy modern society, root and branch, and do it quickly, thoroughly and without compromise.
The same daring enthusiasm and capacity for leadership which made him the captain of his football team brought him at once to the front as a Socialist leader. He would have gained this leadership had he been the poorest man among them. It was a gift as his birthright.
But, added to this capacity for daring and successful action, was his wealth and social prestige. He had cast his lot with a class whose avowed purpose was to destroy all social distinctions, to level all wealth to a common standard. And for this reason in particular he was conspicuous and heroic in the eyes of his Socialist comrades.
He found soon after his entrance into their active councils that the woman known to the world as "The Scarlet Nun," to her associates as "Sister Catherine," was the inspiring brain of their movement in the West. This remarkable woman interested him deeply from their first hour's talk. Born in Poland and educated in Germany, she spoke fluently the Russian, German, French, and English languages. She had led two great strikes of women workers in New York and had been arrested, convicted, and sentenced twice to the penitentiary for exciting riots. To her associates she had always remained a saint and a martyr for their cause.
She had been married before her association with Wolf had begun, ten years ago. Her first husband had been divorced, and her marriage to Wolf had been merely "announced" at a Socialist meeting. And yet the young millionaire had never questioned the sincerity of their devotion or the apparent happiness of their union. He was amazed at her learning, her grasp of affairs, the simplicity and refinement of her manners, and the charm of her conversation.
Wolf he found to be a man of wide reading and deep convictions. As he came in daily contact with these two powerful personalities, and watched the singular zeal with which they devoted themselves to their self-appointed task of destroying modern society, he could not divest himself of the impression that they belonged to a religious order and were leading a crusade, as the monks of the Middle Ages led men and women to die to rescue the tomb of Christ from the desecration of Turk and Saracen.
The woman in particular gave him this impression of religious fanaticism. The apparent simplicity and austerity of her life, the tireless zeal with which she planned and worked for the spread of the gospel of Socialism, to his mind gave the lie emphatically to all the stories he had read of her affairs with men.
The only moments of suspicion about her which ever clouded his mind came with the accidental discovery that she had skilfully managed to throw him and Barbara together for a day. It seemed just a little like the old habit of a scheming mamma angling for the rich young man, and deliberately using the beauty of her daughter as the bait with which to land him in the household.
Yet, when he found himself with Barbara he had always dismissed the thought as absurd. Whatever might be the dimly formed design in the back of the older woman's fancy, her brilliant protégé gave no sign of being her accomplice.
Norman had found Barbara a charming but baffling enigma. She walked through a world of sin and shame, filth and mire, with never a speck on the white of her soul or body. She spoke in the simplest and most direct way of things about which the ordinary girl in society would never dare to utter a word, and yet he took it as a matter of course. He grew to feel that she was a mysterious messenger from the spirit world. Yet when he took her arm and felt its warm round lines soft and thrilling against his own, or the warmth of her lithe body pressing close to his side in some lonely or dangerous spot on their rounds of work, he was brought up sharply against the fact that she was both flesh and spirit. Yet the moment he tried to draw nearer to her inner thoughts, he found her a skilful little fencer, an adept in all the arts of the most delicate and subtle coquetry.
He grew at last, however, to know, with unerring masculine instinct, that with all her brave and frank talk about her "fallen" sisters, she hadn't an idea of what their fall really meant. She was as innocent as a child, and when at last she caught the young athlete smiling at one of her apparently frank and learned discussions of the modern degradation of woman, she blushed and became silent. Whereat he laughed, and she became so angry they parted in silence.
Baffled in his efforts to approach Barbara's heart, he threw himself with zeal into the Cause. When two months had been spent in mastering the details of the Socialist programme, in studying its history and the condition of its movement, he called a meeting of the council of the Socialist Club, and fairly took away the breath of the Wolfs and Barbara by the magnitude and audacity of a scheme which he proposed to launch immediately.
He had secured, without consulting any of his associates, an option on a rich, beautiful, and fertile island off the coast of Southern California. It was owned by a corporation which had invested more than a million dollars in its improvement. The enterprise had failed for two reasons – the money had been expended recklessly in the days of the famous land boom, and it had been found impossible to induce labourers to isolate themselves on this lonely spot, sixty miles from the coast of Santa Barbara, with no means of regular connection with the outside world.
His eyes flashing with enthusiasm and his voice ringing with conviction, Norman closed his description of the island of Ventura with a demand for its immediate purchase by the Socialists.
"It can be bought," he declared impetuously, "for $200,000. A million dollars' worth of improvements are already there. I propose that we immediately raise $500,000, buy this island, establish a steamship line, plant a colony of ten thousand Socialists, found the Brotherhood of Man, build a model city, and create a vast fund for the propaganda of our faith."
Barbara's brown eyes danced with excitement, her cheeks flushed, while her little hands clapped approval.
"Good! Good! It's great! It's beautiful! We must do it!" she cried.
Wolf grimly shook his head.
"The idea has failed a hundred times. We must conquer the world by political action – we have the weapon in our hand – manhood suffrage. All colonies fail sooner or later. They are corrupted from outside – "
"Just so!" Norman interrupted. "But this one you can't reach from the outside. We will own the only means of communication. We will inherit all the advantages of modern civilization with none of its drawbacks. We can demonstrate the truths we hold and from our impregnable Gibraltar send out our missionaries to conquer the world. We will not merely dream dreams and see visions; we will make history. We will prove the God that's in man and establish the fact of his universal brotherhood."
"It's a wonderful idea, comrade!" Catherine exclaimed, with enthusiasm. "I congratulate you! We will accept your plan, and I move that we appoint you our agent vested with full power to collect this fund from the enemy!"
The motion was put and carried unanimously, even Wolf voting for it.
Barbara sprang to Norman's side, and grasped his hand:
"Our feud is over! I forgive you for laughing at me. You are a born leader. You've won your spurs to-night. You will raise this money?"
"As sure as I'm living!" was the firm reply.
