Books: The One Woman
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Thomas Dixon >> The One Woman
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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.
CHAPTER XXII
A SCARLET FLAME IN THE SKY
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."
CHAPTER XXIII
THE NEW HEAVEN
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."
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