A PAIR OF COLD GRAY EYES
From the night of the ball at which the group of chorus-girls made
their sensational entrance in tights, Norman had his hands full.
Disorder had rapidly grown in the Brotherhood. Two distinct parties
began to line up for a desperate struggle for supremacy, the one
standing for the widest liberty of the individual members of the
community, the other demanding the stern enforcement of law and order
and the formulation of a complete and strict code of rules for the
government of daily conduct.
Among the men assigned to various tasks there gradually appeared a
number who slighted their work. From carelessness they drifted into
utter incompetency and downright laziness. Groups of these loafers
began to hang around the house daily.
When they had spent the last penny of their credit at the general
store of the community, they began to steal. Not a day or night passed
but complaints of thefts were made from every department of the
colony. One of the most serious of these burglaries was the robbery
of the winery of an enormous quantity of the most valuable wines.
Drunkenness had already become one of the serious problems of the
Brotherhood, and the right to buy of the steward had been denied a
large number of men and several women. These people began at once to
show signs of intoxication. It was plain that the thieves had hidden
this wine and that they were carrying on a secret traffic with those
to whom it had been forbidden.
With the increase of reckless drunkenness another evil grew with
alarming rapidity, the carousing of boisterous men and women. One of
them very quickly passed the limits of tolerance. She was in many
respects the most beautiful girl in the colony, barely nineteen years
old, with luxuriant blond hair, and big, wide, staring baby-blue eyes.
She had with it all a smile so saucy, so winsome, so elfish, and yet
so innocent, it was impossible for the average man or woman to think
ill of her. To every appeal of Barbara she merely showed her pretty
white teeth in a winsome smile, promised her anything she asked, and
proceeded to do as she liked.
At last her room was declared an intolerable nuisance by a committee
appointed to enter the complaint on behalf of her neighbours on the
floor on which she lived. The night before this committee appealed to
Barbara two boys had fought a desperate fist duel in this room. The
noise had roused the neighbours, and the case could no longer be
ignored by the executive council.
Barbara was sent to this room with full power to deal with the
offender.
"Good heavens," cried the girl, her big blue eyes opening wide with
injured innocence, "how could I help it? They're both in love with me.
I don't care a rap for either one of them, but they got to fighting,
and I couldn't stop them. I threw a pitcher of water on them, but they
kept right on. I'd have called the police, but there was none to call.
It wasn't my fault."
"But my dear Blanche," pleaded Barbara, "can't you see that you are
bringing scandal and disgrace into the colony?"
"It's not me!" the pretty lips pouted. "It's these old women who are
talking. Let them shut their mouths and attend to their own business.
I'm not bothering them."
"You deny the accusations they bring against your good name?" Barbara
said, with some surprise.
"Of course I deny them," she snapped. "I've got to have some fun,
haven't I? I can't help it that a dozen boys come to see me and nobody
ever sees the old tabbies who lie about me, can I? I can't help it
that they are old and ugly, can I?"
Barbara had ceased to listen to the glib tongue, whose lying chatter
tired her. She looked about the room with increasing amazement. It was
stuffed with presents of every conceivable description. Costly rugs
adorned the floor. Soft pillows filled the couch by the window. Dainty
and expensive works of art adorned her mantel, and the richest and
most beautiful underwear lay in a smoothly laundered pile on her
luxuriant bed.
"And how did you get all these costly and beautiful things, my dear?"
Barbara asked, with a touch of sarcasm.
The big blue eyes opened wide again with wonder.
"Why, the boys who are in love with me gave them. Why shouldn't they?
I can't help it that they are foolish, can I? God made them so."
"And you accepted these rich and costly things in perfect innocence of
the evil meaning others might put on them?"
"Of course! How can I keep their tongues from wagging? Life's too
short. I have but one life to live. I can't waste it worrying over
nothing."
For the first time in her career Barbara stood face to face with naked
evil--with a liar to whom a lie was good--a radiantly beautiful girl
to whom shame was sweet.
For a moment the thought was suffocating. She looked out of the window
at the infinite blue sea until the tears slowly blinded her. The first
doubt of her theory of life crept into her heart and threw its shadow
over the ideal of the new world she had built.
She took the girl's hand, slipped her arm around her neck, kissed the
soft, shining hair, and sobbed:
"Poor little foolish sister! I'm afraid you've broken my heart
to-day."
"I haven't done a thing! Honestly, I haven't!" the lusty young liar
rattled on and on, in a hundred silly, vain protests, which Barbara
never heard.
She left the room at length with a sickening sense of defeat, though
the girl had promised her on the honour of her soul never again to
give the slightest cause for complaint.
Many a day she had trudged through the streets of the great city,
after hours of nerve-racking struggles with sin and shame and despair
in the old world, but she had always come home at night with a heart
singing a battle-hymn of victory. She knew the cause of all the pain,
and she had given her life to right the wrong. Nothing daunted her,
nothing disconcerted her. In the end triumph was sure, and while she
felt this there could be no such thing as failure.
She stood before the full meeting of the executive council, honestly
reported the case, and for the first time tasted the bitterness of
defeat, helpless, complete, and overwhelming. While she was talking a
peculiar expression in Wolf's cold gray eyes suddenly caught her
attention and fixed her gaze on him with a curious fascination and
horror. Wolf was quick to note her look, recovered himself and smiled
in his old fatherly, friendly way.
"Don't worry, comrade. We've got to meet and settle such questions.
They are merely the inheritance of civilization. It will take a little
time, that's all."
But as Barbara's gaze lingered on the heavy brutal lines of Wolf's
massive figure and she caught again the gleam of his gray eyes a
sickening sense of foreboding gripped her heart.