Part 27 (1/2)
The pretty young chorus-girls had taken him at his word. They had always cherished a secret desire to live in an unconventional real world, where they could have a chance to be themselves, without the hideous skirts of conventional society veiling their beauty. They had brought these costumes with them and joined the new moral world in the firm faith that their ideal would be realized. It had come very slowly, but it had come at last.
They donned their beautiful costumes with hearts fluttering in triumphant pride. But they had huddled into a corner of the ball-room in a panic of fright at the insane commotion their honest efforts to promote beauty had caused. One by one every woman in skirts save Barbara and Catherine left the room. The married ones seized their husbands and pushed them out ahead.
Norman, who was dancing with Barbara, broke down and burst into a paroxysm of laughter.
Some of the girls began to cry, but others made a brave effort to face the crowd of eager, giggling boys who pressed nearer.
The Bard approached with a serious look on his n.o.ble brow, deliberately put on his gla.s.ses and surveyed the crowd.
”My dear girls,” he began, ”I thank you from the bottom of my heart for the sincerity and honesty of your efforts to express beauty in unconventional form, but really this is beyond my wildest expectation.”
Catherine drove the rude boys out of the room and closed the windows, while Barbara kissed the tears away from the hysterical innovators and led them back to their rooms.
The next morning the general a.s.sembly held an unusually solemn meeting at which it was voted by a large majority to settle at once and forever the question of dress by adopting a Socialist uniform of scarlet and white for the women, and for the men a dull gray suit with scarlet bands on the sleeve, a scarlet stripe and belt for the trousers.
The discussion was brief and Roland Adair, the Bard of Ramcat, protested in vain.
CHAPTER XXI
A PAIR OF COLD GRAY EYES
From the night of the ball at which the group of chorus-girls made their sensational entrance in tights, Norman had his hands full.
Disorder had rapidly grown in the Brotherhood. Two distinct parties began to line up for a desperate struggle for supremacy, the one standing for the widest liberty of the individual members of the community, the other demanding the stern enforcement of law and order and the formulation of a complete and strict code of rules for the government of daily conduct.
Among the men a.s.signed to various tasks there gradually appeared a number who slighted their work. From carelessness they drifted into utter incompetency and downright laziness. Groups of these loafers began to hang around the house daily.
When they had spent the last penny of their credit at the general store of the community, they began to steal. Not a day or night pa.s.sed but complaints of thefts were made from every department of the colony. One of the most serious of these burglaries was the robbery of the winery of an enormous quant.i.ty of the most valuable wines.
Drunkenness had already become one of the serious problems of the Brotherhood, and the right to buy of the steward had been denied a large number of men and several women. These people began at once to show signs of intoxication. It was plain that the thieves had hidden this wine and that they were carrying on a secret traffic with those to whom it had been forbidden.
With the increase of reckless drunkenness another evil grew with alarming rapidity, the carousing of boisterous men and women. One of them very quickly pa.s.sed the limits of tolerance. She was in many respects the most beautiful girl in the colony, barely nineteen years old, with luxuriant blond hair, and big, wide, staring baby-blue eyes.
She had with it all a smile so saucy, so winsome, so elfish, and yet so innocent, it was impossible for the average man or woman to think ill of her. To every appeal of Barbara she merely showed her pretty white teeth in a winsome smile, promised her anything she asked, and proceeded to do as she liked.
At last her room was declared an intolerable nuisance by a committee appointed to enter the complaint on behalf of her neighbours on the floor on which she lived. The night before this committee appealed to Barbara two boys had fought a desperate fist duel in this room. The noise had roused the neighbours, and the case could no longer be ignored by the executive council.
Barbara was sent to this room with full power to deal with the offender.
”Good heavens,” cried the girl, her big blue eyes opening wide with injured innocence, ”how could I help it? They're both in love with me.
I don't care a rap for either one of them, but they got to fighting, and I couldn't stop them. I threw a pitcher of water on them, but they kept right on. I'd have called the police, but there was none to call.
It wasn't my fault.”
”But my dear Blanche,” pleaded Barbara, ”can't you see that you are bringing scandal and disgrace into the colony?”
”It's not me!” the pretty lips pouted. ”It's these old women who are talking. Let them shut their mouths and attend to their own business.
I'm not bothering them.”