"I know I am selfish and fretful and wilful," she said, with a sigh.
"I was only a spoiled child of nineteen when you took me by storm, body and soul. You remember, on our wedding day, when I looked up into your handsome face and the sense of responsibility and joy crushed me for a moment, I cried and begged you, who were so brave and strong, to teach me if I should fail in the least thing? And you promised, dear, so sweetly and tenderly. Do you remember?"
"Yes, I remember," he slowly answered.
"And now, somehow, you seem to have drawn away from me as though the task had wearied you. Come back closer! When I am foolish you must be wise. You can make of me what you will. You know I am afraid of this Socialism. It seems to open gulfs between us. You read and read, while I can only wait and love. You cannot know the silent agony of that waiting for I know not what tragedy in our lives.
Frank, teach and lead me--I will follow. I love you with a love that is deathless. If you will be a Socialist, make me one. Show me there is nothing to fear. I"ve thought marriage meant only self-sacrifice for one"s beloved. I"ve tried to give my very life to you and the children. If I"m making a mistake, show me."
"I will try, Ruth."
She ran her tapering fingers through his hair, smiled and sighed.
"How beautiful you are, my dear! I know it is a sin to love any man so. One should only love G.o.d like this."
CHAPTER III
THE BANKER AND HIS FAD
When Gordon woke next morning from a fitful sleep he was stupid and blue and had a headache. His wife had not slept at all, but was cheerful, tender and solicitous.
"Ruth, I can"t go down to the ministers" meeting this morning,"
he said wearily. "I must take a day off in the country. I"ll lose both soul and body if I don"t take one day"s rest in seven. I didn"t tell you last night that I came near fainting in the pulpit during the evening sermon."
She slipped her hand in his, looking up reproachfully at him out of her dark eyes.
"Why didn"t you tell me that, Frank?"
"I thought you had enough troubles last night. I"ll run out on Long Island and spend the day with Overman. You needn"t frown. You are strangely mistaken in him. I know you hate his brutal frankness, and he is anything but a Christian, but we are old college chums, and he"s the clearest-headed personal friend I have. I need his advice about my fight with Van Meter. Overman is a venomous critic of my Social dreams. I"ve often wondered at your dislike of him, when he so thoroughly echoes your feelings."
She was silent a moment, and gravely said: "Take a good day"s rest, then, and come back refreshed. I"ll try to like even Mr. Overman, if he will help you. I"m going to turn over a new leaf this morning."
He laughed, kissed her, and hurried to catch the train for Babylon, where Overman lived in his great country home.
Mark Overman was a bacholer of forty, noted for the fact that he had but one eye and was so homely it was a joke. His friends said he was so ugly it was fascinating, and he was constantly laughing about it himself. He was a Wall Street banker, several times a millionaire, famed for his wit, his wide reading, his brutally cynical views of society, and his ridicule of modern philanthropy and Socialistic dreams.
He was a man of average height with the heavy-set, bulldog body, face and neck, broad, powerful hands and big feet. He had an enormous nose, s.h.a.ggy eyebrows and a bristling black moustache. But the one striking peculiarity about him was his missing right eye. The large heavy eyelid was drooped and closed tightly over the sightless socket, which seemed to have sunk deep into his head. This cavern on one side of his face gave to the other eye a strange power.
When he looked at you, it gleamed a fierce steady blaze like the electric headlight of an engine. How he lost that eye was a secret he guarded with grim silence, and no one was ever known to ask him twice.
Though five years older, he was Gordon"s cla.s.smate at Wabash College.
Overman had always scorned the suggestion of an artificial eye. He swore he would never stick a piece of gla.s.s in his head to deceive fools. He used to tell Gordon that he was the only one-eyed man in New York who had the money to buy a gla.s.s eye and didn"t do it.
"I prefer life"s grim little joke to stand as it is," he said, as he snapped his big jaws together and twisted the muscles of his mouth into a sneer. He had a habit, when he closed an emphatic speech, of twisting the muscles of his mouth in that way. When animated in talk, he was the incarnation of disobedience, defiance, scorn, success.
Two things he held in special pride--hatred for women and a pa.s.sionate love for game-c.o.c.ks. He allowed no woman on his place in any capacity, and, by the sounds day and night, he kept at least a thousand roosters. He would drop the profoundest discussion of philosophy or economics at the mention of a chicken, and with a tender smile plunge into an endless eulogy of his pets.
Gordon found him in a chicken yard fitting gaffs on two c.o.c.ks.
"Caught in the act!" he cried.
"Well, who cares? They"ve got to fight it out. It"s in "em. They"re full brothers, too. Hatched the same day. They never sc.r.a.pped in their lives till yesterday, when I brought a new pullet and put her in the neighbouring yard. They both tried to make love to her through the wire fence at the same time, and they were so busy crowing and strutting and showing off to this pullet they ran into each other and began to fight. Now one must die, and I"m just fixing these little steel points on for them so the function can be performed decently. I"m a man of fine feelings."
"You"re a brute when you let them kill one another with gaffs."
"Nonsense. The fighting instinct is elemental in all animal life--two-legged and four-legged. Animals fight as inevitably as they breathe. You can trace the progress of man by the evolution of his weapons--the stone, the spear, the bow and arrow, the sword, the gun."
"Well, you"re not going to have the fight this morning. Put up those inventions of the devil and come into the house."
"All right. You"re a parson; I"ll not allow them to fight. I"ll just chop the head off of one and let you eat him for dinner." Overman grinned, and pierced Gordon with his gleaming eye.
"It would be more sensible than the exhibition of brutality you were preparing."
"Not from the rooster"s point of view, or mine. I love chickens.
If I tried to eat one it would choke me. But I can see your mouth watering now, looking at that fat young pullet over there, dreaming of the dinner hour when you expect to smash her beautiful white breast between your cannibal jaws. Funny men, preachers!"
Gordon laughed. "After all, you may be right. Our deepest culture is about skin deep. Scratch any of us with the right tool and you"ll find a savage."
They strolled into the library and sat down. It was the largest and best-furnished room in the house. Its lofty ceiling was frescoed in sectional panels by a great artist. Its walls were covered as high as the arm could reach with loaded bookshelves, and alcove doors opened every ten feet into rooms stored with special treasures of subjects on which he was interested. Masterpieces of painting hung on the walls over the cases, while luxurious chairs and lounges in heavy leather were scattered about the room among the tables, desks and filing cabinets. At one end of the room blazed an open wood fire of cord wood full four feet in length. Beside the chimney windows opened with entrancing views of the Great South Bay and the distant beaches of Fire Island. Across the huge oak mantel he had carved the sentence:
"I AM AN OLD MAN NOW; I"VE HAD LOTS OF TROUBLE, AND MOST OF IT NEVER HAPPENED."
"Frank, old boy, you look as though you had been pulled through a small-sized auger hole yesterday. How is the work going?"
"All right. But Van Meter puzzles me. I want your advice about him.
You"ve come in contact with him in Wall Street and know him. He is the one man power in my church--the senior deacon and chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Society. In spite of all my eloquence and the crowds that throng the building, he has set the whole Board against me. He is really trying to oust me from the pastorate of the church. Shall I take the bull by the horns now and throw him and his Mammon-worshiping satellites out, or try to work such material into my future plans? Give me your advice as a cool-headed outsider."
Overman was silent a moment.
"Well, Frank, now you"ve put the question squarely, I"m going to be candid. I"m alarmed about you. The strain on your nerves is too great. This maggot of Socialism in your brain is the trouble.
It is the mark of mental and moral breakdown, the fleeing from self-reliant individual life into the herd for help. You call it "brotherhood," the "solidarity of the race." Sentimental mush. It"s a stampede back to the animal herd out of which a powerful manhood has been evolved. This idea is destroying your will, your brain, your religion, and will finally sap the moral fiber of your character.
It is the greatest sentimentalist."
Gordon grunted.
"It"s funny how you have the faculty of putting the opposition in terms of its last absurdity."
"Grunt if you like; I"m in dead earnest. You want to put on the brakes. You"ve struck the down grade. Socialism takes the temper out of the steel fiber of character. It makes a man flabby. It is the earmark of racial degeneracy. The man of letters who is poisoned by it never writes another line worth reading; the preacher who tampers with it ends a materialist or atheist; the philanthropist bitten by it, from just a plain fool, develops a madman; while the home-builder turns free-lover and rake under its teachings."
"You"re a beauty to grieve over the loss to the world of home-builders!"
Gordon cried, with scorn.