GOEST THOU TO SEE A WOMAN?
Again Gordon was seated in Overman's library and his single eye
was asking some uncomfortable questions.
"I sent for you, Frank, because I discovered by accident, in
the office of a newspaper of which I am a stockholder, that some
curious things are going on between you and a young woman of your
congregation. I put two and two together, and I've guessed the
secret of your Temple. There's more behind all this than religious
enthusiasm. That gift was not laid on God's altar, but on the altar
of one of his little images here below. Out with it. You can't fool
me."
"Well, your guess is correct. She gave the money. I love her
and she loves me. Ruth will go South for the winter, and we have
separated. A divorce will be obtained in due time, and I will marry
Miss Ransom under the new forms of Social Freedom, and you will be
my best man."
"Not on your life," Overman slowly growled, bringing his enormous
jaws together and twisting the muscles of his mouth upward as though
he smelled something.
"Can't stand the rustle of a woman's dress?"
"Oh, I might survive. You know they say the only really happy people
at a wedding are the old bachelors."
"Then why not?"
"I draw the line at the progressive harem idea."
"And a bachelor?" Gordon sneered.
Overman nodded. "Many things may be forgiven sinners, but a bishop
must be the husband of one wife."
"I'm not a bishop. I'm a man. I ask no quarter of my enemies."
"You have but one enemy. You can see him in the mirror any time."
"It's funny to hear you preach!"
The banker bent forward.
"Frank, you're joking. You don't mean to tell me that your Socialist
poppy plant has borne its opium fruit so soon? That you are going
to desert that charming little woman, shy, timid and tremulous,
with her great soulful eyes, the bride of your youth, the mother
of your babes, and take up with another woman, just as any ordinary
cur has done now and then for the past four thousand years?"
Gordon winced.
"No. I am going to form a union with this beautiful woman which
shall be a prophecy and a propaganda of the freedom of the race,
when comrade life shall forget the ancient fears, each shall be
free to find and love his own, love be loosed from tragedy, doubt
or moan, each life be its own, original and masterful, each man a
god, arrayed and beautiful!"
Overman laughed softly.
"So fine as that? You're great on the frills. You have dressed it
up nicely. But when two of your man-gods, arrayed and beautiful,
get their eyes, set on the same woman-god, still more beautiful,
arrayed or unarrayed, you'll hear the rattle of the police wagon
in the streets of Heaven, with the ambulance close behind."
The banker grinned and fixed his eye on his friend with a quizzical
look.
"Don't be a monkey," Gordon scowled.
"Why not? You propose to go back to forest life."
"I propose to make human society a vast brotherhood," the preacher
cried, with a wave of his arm.
"Well, don't forget that Cain killed his brother Abel for less than
a woman's smile."
"Society is lost unless some great upheaval shall clear the rubbish
and we build new foundations on truth and fellowship and freedom."
Overman put his hand on Gordon's knee.
"Frank, I'm a godless, crusty bachelor, but I read history. Destroy
the integrity of the family and the salt of the earth is lost. The
whole thing will rot."
"But I propose to purify and glorify the home its life by building
it on love."
"Your dream's a fake and its world peopled with fools."
"Love must conquer all," the dreamer insisted.
"And to do it, Frank, it must begin at home. You are blinded by a
woman's beauty."
"No; I love her with the one master passion of manhood. Such love
is itself the highest expression of life."
"Confound you," snapped Overman, "love as many women as you
please, but don't desert your wife and children. It's too vulgar.
I'm ashamed of you."
"I will not live a lie," Gordon said, with emphasis.
"Strange madness. I urge you to tell a tiny little polite lie and
save your wife and children. You're too good to lie, so you kill your
wife, proclaim an insane crusade of lust, and call it a religion!"
"We can't control the beat of our hearts," was the dreamy reply.
"No, you can't; but you can control the stroke of your big, blue-veined
fist! You have struck the mother of your children with your brute
claws. It's a mean, low thing to do, call it by as many high names
as you please. Love as many women as you like, but for decency's
sake--can't you honour your wife with a polite lie?"
"It's not in me to lie, or to love but one woman."
The banker's massive shoulders went up and his bushy brows lifted.
"You'll end with a dozen, and it's such a stupid old story. You
think the performance an original drama in which you are playing
a star role. It's as old as the brute beneath the skin of your big
hairy hand. Alexander could conquer the world, but he died in drunken
revelry with a worthless woman. Caesar and Mark Antony forgot the
Roman Empire for the smile of Cleopatra. Frederick the Great became
a puppet in the hands of a ballet dancer. She spoke and he obeyed.
Conde, in the meridian of his splendid manhood, the pride and glory
of France, sacrificed his family, his fortune and his friends for
an adventuress, who murdered him. Charles Stewart Parnell, the
uncrowned king of Ireland, forgot his people and stumbled into
death and oblivion over the form of a woman. The hills and valleys
of the centuries are white with the bones of these fools."
"There was never a case just like mine."
"So every fool thought."
"But you have not seen this woman. You do not know her," Gordon
protested, hotly.
"No; and I don't want to know her. 'Goest thou to see a woman? Take
thy whip!' Women, savages and children are inferior and immature
forms of evolution. But they are going to prove more than a match
for you, my boy."
"Yes; I've heard you talk such rubbish before," Gordon replied,
dreamily. "Mark, I'm sorry for the poverty of your life. The man
who has not loved is not a man. He is a monstrosity out of touch
of sympathy with the race. You cannot understand me when I tell
you that our love is so pure, so wonderful, so perfect, it is its
own defense."
"Indeed! Which love? For Ruth or Kate? Frank, I marvel at the
childlike simplicity of your folly and your mental antics to justify
it. It's enough to make that cat laugh that broke up your sermon."
"We are going to bear in our union and life the flaming standard
of a revolution that will yet redeem society."
"I admire your ingenuity. Just a plain rooster-fighting sinner like
me would never have thought of making his sin a holy religion. You
haven't studied theology for nothing. I'll bet you could argue the
devil or the Archangel Michael to a standstill on any proposition
you'd set your heart on."
The preacher smiled.
"I never saw my course with greater clearness."
"Yes; but a nail in the pilot-house will draw the needle and drive
the mightiest ocean greyhound on the rocks with the captain at the
wheel dead sure of his course."
"Mark, it's utterly useless to talk. You and I are miles apart at
our starting-point and we get farther with every step. You look at
it from the vulgar point of view of the world. What I am doing is
a great act of the soul, a breaking of bonds and chains. You see
only the body. I am going to lead a crusade that shall so purify
and exalt the body that it shall become one with the soul. The
freedom of man can only be attained in unfettered fellowship, and
this beautiful woman will be with me a comrade priestess to teach
the world this sublime truth."
"And will you be the only priest with her in the Temple of Humanity?"
asked the banker, quizzically.
Gordon laughed with insolent assurance.
"In her eyes, yes."
"But other men have eyes."
"Their gaze will not disturb the serenity of our love, because it
will be built on oneness of ideal, hope, faith, taste and work."
"And yet dark hair loves the blond, and blue eyes hunger for the
brown. It's an old trick Nature has played before, Frank."
"Well, we are going to show you a miracle, and you are coming with
us by and by and be a deacon in this Church of the Son of Man."
Overman drew his straight bushy brow down over his one eye until
it looked like the gleam of a lighthouse through the woods, turned
his head sideways, peered at his friend and growled:
"Well, you are a fool!"
"I have faith that will remove mountains."
"You'll need it. I've been waiting for a church in New York broad
enough to invite the devil to join. I'll come when it's ready."
"Good. We'll give you a welcome."
Overman grunted, and gazed into the fire with his single eye,
frowning and twisting the muscles of his mouth into a sneer.