Part 7 (1/2)
”Thank you,” the girl replied, as a smile flitted about her weak mouth. She turned to Barbara with a look of infinite tenderness.
”I knew you'd come, and I knew you'd save me. You're my angel! When I dream at night, you're always hovering over me.”
”I'll come again to-morrow, dearie, when the new doctor has seen you,”
Barbara answered, as she pressed her hand good-bye.
When they reached the street, Norman asked:
”You knew her before she fell into evil ways?”
”Yes,” Barbara answered, with feeling. ”She was just a little child of joy and sunlight. She couldn't endure the darkness. She loved flowers and music, beauty and love. She hated drudgery and poverty. She tried to work, and gave up in despair. A man came into her life at a critical moment and she broke with the world. She's been sending all the money she could make the past two years to her mother and four little kids. Her father was killed at work in a mine for a great corporation.”
”She can't live, can she?” Norman asked.
”Of course not. I only did this to humour her. She has developed acute consumption--she may not live a month.”
Barbara paused.
”I must leave you now--I'm very tired, and I must sleep a while before I attend the meeting to-night. It has been a great strain on me to-day, this trip with you. How do you like our boasted civilization?
Do you think it perfect? Are you satisfied with a system which drives hundreds of thousands of such girls into a life of shame? Are you content with a system which produces three million paupers in a land flowing with milk and honey? Do you like a system which drives thousands to the madness of drink and suicide every year?”
”And to think,” responded Norman, dreamily, ”that for the past two years of my manhood I've been writing verses and playing football!
Great G.o.d!”
”Then from to-day we are comrades in the cause of humanity?” she asked tenderly, extending her hand. His own clasped hers with firm grasp.
”Comrades!”
CHAPTER V
THE ISLAND OF VENTURA
Norman had never been a boy to do things by halves. In college, when he went in for football, he made it the one supreme end of life--and won. He incidentally managed to pull through a course in mining engineering. He knew mining by instinct and inheritance from his father. It came easy.
When he had a three months' vacation from football he took up the modelling of a dredge for mining gold from the sands of the beaches.
The thing had never been perfected, but after three months' experiment and study he was just on the point of making the castings for the machinery when the football season opened and he dropped such trifling matters for the more serious work of training his men for a successful season. He won the champions.h.i.+p and forgot the dredge.
Into the new movement of Socialism he naturally threw his whole personality without reservation. Its daring programme thrilled him.
The audacity of its leaders and their refusal to discuss anything less than the salvation of man appealed to every instinct of his nature.
He devoured every book on the subject he could find, and in his new-found enthusiasm for humanity accepted as the inspired voice of G.o.d their wildest visions of social regeneration.
In his work of charity and organization with Barbara he found everything to confirm and nothing to shake his faith in these theories. When once he caught the idea that all the ills of modern civilization were due directly to the fiendish system of ”capitalism”
and its ”iron law of wages,” it was the key which unlocked every mystery of Pain and every tragedy of the Soul. All sin and crime and shame and suffering became the incidents of a social system whose movements were as inexorable as Fate, as merciless as Death. There was but one thing worth talking about, and that was how to destroy modern society, root and branch, and do it quickly, thoroughly and without compromise.
The same daring enthusiasm and capacity for leaders.h.i.+p which made him the captain of his football team brought him at once to the front as a Socialist leader. He would have gained this leaders.h.i.+p had he been the poorest man among them. It was a gift as his birthright.