THE NEW HEAVEN
Overman had appeared on the scene of Kate's life in a peculiar
crisis. Married two years, she had passed through the period of
love's ecstacy which woman finds first in self-surrender. She had
just reached the point of sex growth when a revolt against man's
dominion became inevitable.
This mood of revolt was made stronger by Gordon's fret over her social
gatherings. In the dim light of the pulpit, preaching with mystic
elation, he had seemed to her a god. Now, in the full blaze of
physical possession, the divine glow had paled about his brow. She
had found him only a man, self-conscious, egotistic and domineering.
He had many personal habits she did not like. He was overfastidious
in his dress, and critical and fussy about her lack of order in
housekeeping. He was finicky about his food. He hated tea, declaring
the odour made him sick. She felt this a covert thrust at her
five-o'clocks.
To his criticisms she at last coolly replied:
"I claim the perfect freedom you preach. I will do as I please.
You can do the same."
He laughed in a weak sort of way and declared he liked her
independence.
At this moment of reaction, satiety, and the beginning of friction
he had introduced her to Overman. His candour, his brutal realism,
his defiance and scorn for poetic theories, presented to her
the sharp contrast which made him doubly fascinating. Just at the
moment Gordon was growing peevishly dogmatic in the reiteration of
his ideals, she had suffered a physical disillusioning and begun
to tire of poetry.
The sheer brute power of the other man, the incarnation of the
thing that is, with a cynic's contempt for dreams and dreamers,
had given voice to her own rebellion and drawn her resistlessly.
The boyish tenderness underlying Overman's nature, which she
discovered later, had made his ugliness and brute strength added
charms.
He had a pathetic way of looking at her with a doglike worship,
as though conscious of his defects, which pleased and nattered her
own sense of the perfection of beauty.
They were seated in his box at the Metropolitan Opera House while
Gordon was at the farewell banquet to his foreign delegates.
"I feel," he said, bitterly, "every time I see this play of 'Faust,'
and hear Edouard De Reszke's deep bass speak for His Majesty the
Devil, that His Majesty really made this world. I'd know it but for
the paradox of such divine perfection before my eyes in the living
reality of a woman like you."
His voice throbbed with earnestness.
"I'm growing to love the world. It's a beautiful old place," she
answered, with a lazy smile.
"Well, it's the only one I'm likely to travel in, so I'm going to
make the best of it, work with its mighty forces, dare and defy the
fools who cross my purposes. If the future has for me only pain,
I'll not complain. I'll grin and bear it, but I'll confess to you
I get a little lonely sometimes."
Her eyes lifted with surprise.
"I never heard you admit that before."
"No; and what's more, no one else ever did or ever will."
He looked at her pathetically, and a deeper colour flooded her
cheeks.
When they reached home Gordon had just returned from the banquet
and was bubbling over with enthusiasm.
"Mark, we have had a grand time to-night--organised a movement that
will put out a sign 'To Let' on every den of thieves in Wall Street."
"What? Founded another church already?"
"A new Brotherhood within the Church Universal."
Overman shrugged his shoulders.
"Talk plain English. What will be its name at Police Headquarters?"
Gordon smilingly and proudly replied, "The Federated Democracy of
the World."
"H'm; what are you going to do? Federate the hobos of all tongues
and demand better straw in empty freight cars and shorter stops at
sidings for express trains to pass?"
"Our purpose will be to inaugurate the Cooperative Commonwealth of
Man. The movement will bring into harmonious action the insurgent
forces of the world. Within ten years an earthquake will shake the
social fabric. Within twenty years profound political and social
revolutions will lift the human race over centuries of plodding
into a new world of real liberty, equality, and fraternity."
Overman growled cynically.
"That has a French accent. I hear there are fifty thousand active
Socialists in France divided into exactly fifty thousand factions.
Which division of this grand army will lead the movement in Gaul?"
Gordon ignored his interruption, and his voice thrilled with
passionate eloquence.
"We have abolished crowns and scepters. It is a moral and physical
absurdity that, in a democracy, a whiskered babe, whose labour value
to society is just ten dollars a week, should inherit millions of
dollars that give him the power over men more terrible, absolute
and irresponsible than a Caesar ever wielded over the empire of
the world. No wonder our papers shiver when these babes sneeze,
and report their daily life with servile pride."
"And would the oil of anointment of your new king, the walking
delegate, be strong enough to temper the onion in his breath? I'd
like to know that before drawing too near the throne." The banker's
mouth twisted into a sneer with the last word.
"This new Democracy will itself be the highest nobility, an ethical
aristocracy, and when it comes the Kingdom of Heaven will be at
hand."
The one eye glanced quickly at the speaker and blinked.
"Let me know before it gets here," said Overman, a reminiscent
look overspreading his rugged face, while Kate leaned closer with
eager interest.
"Why?"
"Because I'm going somewhere. When I was a boy I had to go to
church. Our old preacher faithfully urged us for hours at a time to
get ready for heaven, a glorious place away up in space where all
wore crowns and there wasn't a Democrat in town, everybody played
psalms on big gold harps, and every day was Sunday. I early learned
to hate heaven and look on hell as my only home. Now you come along,
rub hell off the map, and threaten me with a heaven here on earth
worse than the old one. Hell would be a summer resort to this thing
you've conjured up. If it comes, I'll get off the earth."
"Get your flying machine ready."
"Oh, ten cents' worth of 'rough on rats' will do me."
Gordon shook his head thoughtfully.
"It's a strange thing to me you conservatives are blind to the
coming of this revolution. It will be the grimmest joke Fate ever
played on the pride of man. Within the generation now living a
Cooperative Commonwealth will supplant the whole system of slave
wages."
The banker suddenly straightened his massive neck and his eye
flashed.
"You mean establish a system of universal slavery. Suppose under
your maudlin cry of brotherhood you set up your fool's paradise,
where would reside the authority of your Commonwealth?"
"In the State, of course."
"And who would be the State? You talk about the State as though it
were some mysterious Ark of the Covenant of God, let down out of
heaven and enshrined in capitals of marble. The State is simply
made out of common dirt called Tom, Dick and Harry, whom a lot of
other plain Toms, Dicks and Harrys set up in power. Will not your
pig-pen you call the Cooperative Commonwealth have men in charge
with authority to call the pigs to dinner and drive them to the
fields to root?"
"Certainly, there must be authority," Gordon snapped.
Overman mused a moment.
"Yet your patron saint, William Morris, proclaims a heaven here
below without law, where man kills his fellow man and answers only
to his own conscience; where we will tear up the railroads and
walk, blow up our steamships and use rowboats, in our harvest fields
the whetstone on the old hand-scythe will still the music of the
McCormick reaper. With his delicate tastes he fears the hoof-beat
of your herd. But you all agree that to go backward means to go
forward, and that the way to save civilisation is to lapse into
barbarism. Whether you call yourselves Socialist or Anarchist--that
is, whether you long for the herd or the solitude of the forest,
you mean the same thing and don't know it, that your mind has not
been able to adjust itself to the speed of modern progress, and has
broken down under the strain. You preach 'Fellowship,' herd-life,
as the cure. You believe in law and authority."
"Yes," Gordon cried, with pride. "Our ideal is constructive in the
largest and noblest sense."
"And if a man can work and will not work?"
"He will be made to work."
"Very well. Suppose your pig heaven established and the herd duly
penned. The Labour Master of your local pen would naturally be a man
after the heart of the herd. He would be a greasy Labour agitator.
No other man could be elected. Suppose he should become interested
in the extraordinary beauty of your wife. Suppose you were presumptuous
enough to resent this, and, in revenge for your insolence, your
Master transferred you, the scholar, idealist and orator, to the
task of cleaning the spittoons in the City Hall, and ordered your
wife to scrub the floor of his office. You both refuse, you who
walk with your head among the stars, What then? The dirty-fingered
one, your Labour Master, sends you to prison for the first offense.
For the second, you would be stripped, placed in the public stocks
and flogged, man and woman alike in this kingdom of equality. For,
mark you, enforced labour is the only possible foundation of such
a society."
Gordon listened with dreamy disgust.
"You've set up a man of straw. In this new world each would choose
his work and labour would be a joy," he answered, with lofty scorn.
The banker chuckled.
"No doubt they would all choose joyous jobs. But there would be a
surplus of joyous labourers hunting for joyful tasks, and a dearth
of fools looking for disagreeable work. In your pig paradise
everything must be fixed. There could be no uncertainty about the
future--no worry, or fret, or anxiety--hence no hopes or fears.
Man would be guaranteed food, clothes, shelter and children, just
as the chattel slave. There could be no inducement to work unless
compelled to, and no man except an idiot would do a disagreeable
task unless forced to do it. You must remember there could be
no lawyers or bankers, preachers or orators. The chief occupation
of your Labour Master would be the assignment of people he didn't
like to the hard, dirty jobs, and the granting of favourite tasks
to such people as made themselves agreeable to His Majesty. Witness
the master of the Russian Commune, who is notoriously the lord of
all the wives of the village."
Overman was still a moment, and then growled from the depths of
his being:
"I call this the lowest, the most degrading, the most bestial
nightmare the human mind ever dreamed!"
Gordon waved him off with an eloquent gesture.
"You have assumed that a free commonwealth of godlike men and women
would choose their worst units for their leaders."
"Nothing of the sort," he snapped. "I've supposed they would do the
inevitable--choose the strongest man who looks like the majority
and smells like the majority."
"A bad man would be removed," the dreamer quickly replied.
"What difference if your master be changed by an election now and
then? All the worse. If I am to be a slave, I prefer the old chattel
system with a master whose favour I could win and hold for life by
faithful service. The old slaves often loved their masters. Could
you love the Executive Officer of a Bureau for the Enforcement
of Labour? Do convicts become infatuated with their keepers? To
assassinate such a man would become a positive joy. How many years
of such life would it take to crush out of the human soul the last
spark of hope and aspiration and reduce man to a beast?"
"But we affirm the inherent divinity of man. You assume him to be
a child of the devil."
There was another silence, and then the banker's brow wrinkled.
"Affirm. Yes, you fellows are all orators. You must affirm else the
crowd will leave you. You never have doubts and fears. You always
know. Only affirm a thing enough and never try to prove it, and
thousands of fools will accept it at last as the word of God. That
is the secret of the power of all demagogues and emotional orators.
The slickest horse-thief that ever operated in the West was a
revivalist who migrated there with a tent. While he held the crowd
spellbound with his eloquence, his confederates loosed the horses
in the woods and got them to a safe place. Oratory is one of the
cheapest tricks ever played on man, but an everlastingly effective
one, because it is based on affirmation. Any man who is too
hard-headed and honest to affirm a thing he don't know and can't
know never leads a mob. They will only follow a man who speaks with
the sublime authority of knowledge he does not possess."
While Overman was talking Gordon's brow clouded as he watched Kate's
face flash with interest and a smile now and then play between her
eyes and lips.
"We seem to be developing another orator," he slowly answered.
Overman pursed his lips.
"I haven't wasted so much breath in a long time. Your French
programme stirred me. I wonder if you recalled the decline of the
French nation in modern times, and its causes, in arranging for
your conquest of France? A little while ago the Anglo-Saxon race
numbered but a few millions, and the Latin ruled the world. Now
the flag of the Anglo-Saxon flies over one-fourth the inhabitants
of the globe, his army can withstand the combined armies of the
world, his navy rules the sea, and his wealth is so great he could
buy the entire possessions of the rest of mankind. Why? Because he
developed the most powerful individual man in history, while other
races have sought refuge in the herd idea of communal interests.
I noticed you never preach now from the old text, 'What shall it
profit a man if he gain the whole world and forfeit his life?' Why
save the world if you destroy man?"
But Gordon had ceased to listen to Overman. With his great
blue-veined fist clenched on his chin and a new gleam of light in
his steel-gray eyes he was watching his wife's face.