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 protege 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.