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, shaggy 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 classmate at Wabash College.
Overman had always scorned the suggestion of an artificial eye. He
swore he would never stick a piece of glass 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 glass 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
passionate love for game-cocks. 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 cocks.
"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 scrapped 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.
"Maybe my grief is a little strained--but really, Frank, I hate
women, not because I don't feel the need of their love--"
He drew the muscles of his big mouth together and looked thoughtfully
out of the window with his single piercing eye.
"No; for the first time on that point I'll make an honest, clean
confession to you. I hate women because I'm afraid of them. I
have a face that can stop an eight-day clock if I look at it hard
enough; and yet beneath this hideous mask there's a poor coward's
soul that worships beauty and hungers for love! I don't allow women
in this house because I can't stand the rustle of their drapery.
I don't want one of them to get her claws into me. They can see
through me in a minute. Women have an X-ray in their eyes. They
can look through a brick wall, without going to see what's on
the other side. A man learns a thing is true by a painful process
of reasoning. A woman knows a thing is so--because! She knows it
thoroughly, too, from top to bottom. Whenever a woman looks at me I
can feel her taking an X-ray photograph of the marrow of my bones."
He wheeled suddenly and fixed his eye on Gordon.
"I'll bet you had another quarrel with your wife last night?"
"How do you know?"
"Tell by your hangdog look. You look like an old Shanghai rooster
that a little game-cock has knocked down and trampled on for half
an hour before letting him up."
"We did have some words."
"Exactly; and I can tell you what about. Your wife is growing more
nervous over the tendency of your religion and your thinking. You
can't fool her about it. She knows you are drifting where she can
never follow. She knows instinctively that Socialism is the return
to the animal herd and that the family will be trampled to death
beneath its hoofs."
"Come, Mark, you're crazy. The Brotherhood of Man and the Solidarity
of the Race can have such meaning only to a lunatic."
"Don't you know that the triumph of Socialism will destroy the
monogamic family?" Overman asked sharply.
"Rubbish."
"Strange, how you sentimentalists slop over things. You have allowed
second-hand Socialistic catch words to change your methods of work
and thought and revolutionize your character, and yet you have never
seriously tried to go to the bottom of it. Come into this room a
minute."
They went into an alcove room.
"Here I have more than a thousand volumes of Socialistic literature.
I've read it all with more or less thoroughness. When I look at the
titles of these books I feel as though I've eaten tons of sawdust.
You are preaching this stuff as the gospel, and yet you don't know
what your masters are really trying to do."
"I know that there can be no true home life until the shadow of
want has been lifted," said the preacher emphatically. "The aim of
Socialism is to bring to pass this dream of heaven on earth."
"Just so. But you've never defined what the dream will be like
when it comes. Your masters have. Let me read some choice bits to
you from these big-brained, clear-eyed men who created your movement.
I like these men because they scorn humbug. Defiance, disobedience,
contempt for thing that is, consumes them."
He drew from the shelves a lot of books, threw them on a table,
and took up a volume.
"This from Fourier: 'Monogamy and private property are the main
characteristics of Civilisation. They are the breastworks behind
which the army of the rich crouch and from which they sally to rob
the poor. The individual family is the unit of all faulty societies
divided by opposing interests.'
"And this choice bit from William Morris: 'Marriage under existing
conditions is absurd. The family, about which so much twaddle is
talked, is hateful. A new development of the family will take place,
as the basis not of a predetermined lifelong business arrangement
to be formally held to irrespective of conditions, but on mutual
inclination and affection, an association terminable at the will
of either party.'"
Overman fixed his eye on Gordon for a moment, laid his hand on his
arm and asked:
"Now, honestly, Frank, confess to me you never read one of those
sentences in your life?"
"No, I never did."
"I was sure of it. Listen again; this from Robert Owen: 'In the new
Moral World the irrational names of husband, wife, parent and child
will be heard no more. Children will undoubtedly be the property
of the whole community.'
"But perhaps the idea has been best expressed by Mr. Grant Allen.
Hear his clean-cut statement: 'No man, indeed, is truly civilised
till he can say in all sincerity to every woman of all the women
he loves, to every woman of all the women who love him: "Give me
what you can of your love and yourself; but never strive for my
sake to deny any love, to strangle any impulse that pants for breath
within you. Give me what you can, while you can, without grudging,
but the moment you feel you love me no more, don't do injustice to
your own prospective children by giving them a father whom you no
longer respect, or admire, or yearn for." When men and women can
both alike say this, the world will be civilised. Until they can
say it truly, the world will be as now, a jarring battle-field of
monopolist instincts.'
"Then this gem from another of the frousy-headed--Karl Pearson:
'In a Socialist form of government the sex relation would vary
according to the feelings and wants of individuals.'
"Observe in all these long-haired philosophers how closely the
idea of private property is linked with the family. That is why the
moment you attack private property in your pulpit your wife knows
instinctively that you are attacking the basis of her life and home.
Private property had its origin in the family. The family is the
source of all monopolistic instincts, and your reign of moonshine
brotherhood can never be brought to pass until you destroy monogamic
marriage."
"But my dream is of an ideal marriage and home life," cried the
preacher.
"Yes, and that is why you make me furious. You don't know the origin
or meaning of this Socialistic dream and yet you are preaching it
every Sunday, inflaming the minds of that crowd. I don't blame your
wife. She sees in her soul the rock on which you must wreck your
ship sooner or later. The herd and the mating pair cannot co-exist
as dominant forces. This is why Socialism never converts a woman
except through some--individual man. Woman's maternal instinct
created monogamic marriage. The only women who become Socialists
directly are the sexless, the defectives and the oversexed, who
can always be depended on to make the herd a lively place for its
fighting male members. What have you to say to this?"
Overman turned his head sideways and pierced Gordon again with his
single eye.
"Well, I confess you've given me something to think about, and I'm
going to the bottom of the subject. You've opened vistas of great
ideas. It's the question of the century, the thought that is sweeping
life before it. While I've been listening to you, more and more
I've seen the need of consecration to the leading and teaching of
the people who are being swept by millions into this movement. But
you haven't told me what to do with Van Meter."
"Yes, I have, The trouble, I tell you, is with you, not Van Meter.
He's a little man, but he's just the size of a deacon in a modern
church in New York. Win him over and work with him. He's your only
hope. Van Meter knows his business as a deacon and trustee. You
are off the track."
"But how can I ever reconcile Van Meter's commercialism with any
living religion?"
Overman frowned and shrugged his shoulders.
"Religion? Man, you haven't religion! Religion is the worship of
a Superior Being, fear of His power, submission to His commands,
inability to discuss theoretically the formulas of faith, the desire
to spread the faith, and the habit of considering as enemies all
who do not accept it. You can't pass examination on any of these
points. Your idea of God is the First Cause. You do not really
worship or fear anything. You submit blindly to nothing. You have
written an interrogation point before every dogma. You have ceased
to be missionary and become humanitarian. As a priest you're a
joke. Van Meter is a better deacon than you are a priest. I don't
blame him. He must put you out, or be put out of business sooner or
later. Your passion for reforming the world, your 'enthusiasm for
humanity,' are things apart from worship and absolutely antagonistic
to it."
"But not antagonistic to the mission of Christ."
"Granted. But the Christianity of Christ is one thing and modern
Christianity another thing. The ancient Church, you must remember,
absorbed Paganism. Van Meter's religion is, I grant you, a pretty
stiff mixture of Paganism and Christianity, but historically he
is in line with the Church and you are out of line with it. I'd do
one of two things--use Van Meter for all he is worth, or get out
of his church and let him alone. It's his. He and his kind built
it. You are an interloper."
"Perhaps so," Gordon mused.
"You know my opinion of your dream of social salvation. I say let
the fit survive and the weak go to the wall. If you could save all
the floating trash that so moves your pity, you would only lower
the standard of humanity. Hell is the furnace made to consume such
worthless rubbish. You are even apologising for hell because you
can't stand the odour of burning flesh. I like the old God of Israel
better than the ghost you moderns have set up. Honestly, Frank,
you have never treated Van Meter decently. He's a small man, but
he is in dead earnest, and he is historically a Christian. I don't
know what the devil you are, and I don't believe you know yourself.
Go to Van Meter, have a plain business talk with him, and see if
you can't come to an understanding."
"That's the only sensible thing you've said to me."
"And the only immoral thing; for if you and Van Meter ever agree
you will both do some tall lying."
"I think I'll take your advice and see him, anyhow."