As he reached an impa.s.sioned 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 ma.s.sive head c.o.c.ked 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 surpa.s.sed 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 ma.s.sive 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 inst.i.tutions are an exact reflection of their personal attainments."
"But we propose," Gordon flashed, "to make inst.i.tutions 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 s.p.a.ce 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, G.o.d 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 pa.s.sed through the period of love"s ecstacy which woman finds first in self-surrender. She had just reached the point of s.e.x 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 G.o.d. 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.