A SCARLET FLAME IN THE SKY
From the night Overman had taken dinner at the Gramercy Park house
he became a constant visitor.
For six months he had usually spent two or three evenings each week
in his friend's library, rehearsing their boyhood days, discussing
new books, art and politics, Socialism and religion.
Overman's cynicism had piqued Kate's curiosity and opened new views
of things she had accepted as moral finalities.
At these battles of wit she was always a charmed listener. She
seemed never to tire watching the sparks fly in the rapier thrust
of mind in these two men of steel and listening with a shiver to
the deep growl of the animal behind their words. The one, so homely
he was fascinating, with massive neck, and enormous mouth pursing
and twisting under excitement into a sneer that pushed his big nose
upward, the incarnation of a battle-scarred bulldog; the other,
with his giant figure, hands and feet, his leonine face and locks,
his deep voice, handsome and insolent in his conscious strength,
the picture of a thoroughbred mastiff.
With the grace of a goddess she would sit and watch this battle
to the death in the arena of thought.
Overman had keenly interested her from the first, and she stimulated
him to unusual brilliancy. His remorseless logic, his thorough
scholarship, his grasp of history, his savage common sense presented
so sharp a contrast to the idealism of Gordon, she was shocked and
startled.
He fell into the habit of calling on Sunday mornings and walking
with them to the Opera House. They would leave Gordon at the stage
entrance and sit together during the services.
He would comment softly to her on many of the little absurdities of
the preacher's flights of sentiment, and often convulsed her with
laughter by a single word or phrase which made ridiculous his
mysticism. He did this with his single eye fixed on Gordon without
the quiver of a nerve or the movement of a muscle to indicate ought
but profound rapture in the speaker and his message.
Overman's business ability had been of great service in the Temple
enterprise, which had involved difficulties with contractors, and
Gordon had opened an account in Kate's name with his banking house.
Her signature to legal documents had made her a frequent visitor
to the bank, and she often took lunch with him.
Alone with her at these impromptu lunches, without the restraint
of Gordon's presence, he had revealed to her a new phase of his
character which had interested her still more deeply. It was here
that she discovered the secret of his real attitude toward women,
his deep hunger for love, tenderness and sympathy, and his terror
lest his ugliness and the loss of his eye might entrap him into
hopeless suffering.
She laughed at his fears.
"Ridiculous," she cried, closing her red lips. "You ought to have
sense enough to know that a woman of character past the schoolgirl
age is often fascinated by the ruggedness of such a man. Savage
strength is sometimes resistless to women of rare beauty."
"You think so?" he asked, pathetically.
"Certainly; I know it," she answered, her lips twitching playfully.
Overman looked at her steadily.
"Sort of beauty-and-beast idea, I suppose. There may be something
in it. It never struck me before."
"I'll put you in training for a handsome woman I know," she said,
with a curious smile playing about her eyes.
"No, thank you," he quickly replied. "I'm just beginning to feel
at home with you. I am content."
The opening of the Temple was an event which commanded the attention
of the world. Leaders of Socialism from every quarter of the globe
poured into New York.
The building was one of imposing grandeur. The auditorium filled
the entire space of the first-four stories. It seated five thousand
people within easy reach of the speaker's voice. The line of its
ceiling was marked outside by the serried capitals of Greek columns
springing from their massive bases on the ground. The grand stairway
was of polished marble, its wainscoting and walls of onyx.
Resting on the capitals of the columns, the outer walls of rough
marble rose twenty stories to the first offset. Dropping back
fifty feet, another structure, crowned by Greek facades, sprang ten
stories higher, forming the base of the central dome. From each
corner rose a tower of bronze supporting the figures of Faith, Hope,
Love and Truth, while scores of minarets flamed upward, flying the
flags of every nation.
From the centre of this pile of marble, the huge dome, finished in
gold, solemnly loomed among the clouds, higher than its model in
Washington, dominating the city from every point of the compass.
The magnificent sweep of Jefferson Avenue, stretching through miles
of palatial homes, terminating at its base, seemed a tiny pathway
leading through its grand arched and pillared entrance.
The dome was crowned by a statue of Liberty holding aloft a steel
staff, from which flew the solid red battle-flag of Socialism,
flinging into the heavens its challenge to civilisation, rising,
falling, waving, fluttering, quivering, rippling in the wind, a
scarlet blaze sweeping a hundred feet across the sky far above the
cross on the Cathedral spire.
The cost of the building had exceeded the estimate, and it had been
finished by a loan of two million dollars secured by a mortgage held
by the banking house of Overman & Company. It could have commanded
a larger loan, as the entire structure, except the two stories
below ground and the auditorium, was devoted to business offices
occupied by the best class of tenants. The auditorium was for rent
at a nominal sum during the week, and was designed to be the forum
of free thought for the nation.
The dedication programme began on Monday, lasting through an entire
week, day and night, and culminated on Sunday with Gordon's address
at eleven o'clock. The elaborate ceremonials and speeches had worn
out Kate's body by Saturday, and the praise of pygmies had long
before worn out her soul.
Ruth had read with interest the accounts of these meetings, and
Morris King tried in vain to dissuade her from attending the Sunday
exercises at which Gordon was to speak.
"It's useless to talk, Morris," she said, firmly. "I am going. I'd
as well tell you I've been slipping into the gallery of the Opera
House the past six months. I've tried to keep away, but I had to
go. I am going to-day. I've heard him talk and dream and plan so
much of this, it seems my own."
"Well, I'm going with you. You shall not enter that den of Anarchists
alone again."
She hesitated.
"You may go if you'll agree to sit behind a pillar in the gallery
where we will not be seen."
When they were seated he whispered to Ruth: "But for you, I wouldn't
be caught dead in this place. I'll soon be the Governor, and it
will be my duty to see that some of these gentlemen are carefully
packed in quicklime at Sing Sing."
She started suddenly, her brow clouded, and she placed a trembling
hand on his arm.
"Hush, Morris."
"It'll be so, mark my word."
"Hush!" she repeated, with such a shudder of pain he hastened to
whisper.
"I beg your pardon, Ruth. You know I was joking."
Gordon rose and gazed for a moment over the sea of faces. His quick
sympathies and brilliant imagination were stirred to their depths.
When the beautifully modulated voice first filled the room, Ruth
felt with quick sympathy, beneath the tremor of his tones, the
storm of suppressed feeling. Her eyes filled, and she bent forward,
following him breathlessly.
He held the crowd spellbound.
Even the foreign Socialists, unable to understand a word of English,
hung on every gesture, held by the magnetism of his powerful
personality.
As he reached an impassioned 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 massive head cocked 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 surpassed 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 massive 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 institutions are an exact reflection
of their personal attainments."
"But we propose," Gordon flashed, "to make institutions 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 space
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, God 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."