Comrades: A Story of Social Adventure in California. Thomas Dixon

leaned close and whispered:

      "My boy, can you possibly get us two seats?"

      "Can I git de captain er de football team two seats? Well, des watch me!"

      The boy darted up the aisle, dived under the platform, drew out two folding-chairs, placed them in the aisle on the front row, darted back, and bowed with grave courtesy.

      "Dis way, sir!"

      Norman followed with Elena clinging timidly and blindly to his arm. In a moment they were seated. He offered the boy a dollar.

      The youngster bowed again.

      "De honour is all mine, sir. But you can give it to the Cause when they pass the box."

      Norman turned to Elena. "Well, doesn't that jar you? A sixteen-year-old boy declines a tip, and says give it to the Cause!"

      The boy darted up the steps of the platform and whispered to the chairman:

      "Git on to his curves! Dat's de captain o' de football – de bloke dat's worth millions, an' don't give a doggone!"

      A woman dressed in deep red who sat beside the chairman leaned close and asked with quiet intensity:

      "You mean young Worth, the millionaire of Nob Hill?"

      "Bet yer life! Dat's him!"

      The woman in red whispered to the chairman, who nodded, while his keen gray eyes flashed a ray of light from his heavy brows as he turned toward Norman.

      The woman wheeled suddenly in her chair, and with her back to the audience bent over a girl who was evidently hiding behind her.

      "Outdo yourself to-night, Barbara. Young Norman Worth, the son of our multi-millionaire nabob, is sitting in the aisle just in front of you. Win him for the Cause and I'll give you the half of our kingdom."

      "How can I know him?" the girl asked excitedly.

      "He's not ten feet from the platform in the centre aisle – front row – clean shaven – a young giant of twenty-three – the handsomest man in the house. Put your soul and your body in every word you utter, every breath you breathe – and win him!"

      "I'll try," was the low reply.

      CHAPTER II

      A NEW JOAN OF ARC

      The woman in scarlet rose, lifted her hand, and the crowd sprang to their feet to the music of the most stirring song of revolution ever written.

      Norman and Elena were both swept from their seats in spite of themselves. Elena's eyes flashed with excitement.

      "What on earth is that they are singing, Norman?" she whispered.

      "The Marseillaise hymn."

      "Isn't it thrilling?" she gasped.

      "It makes your heart leap, doesn't it?"

      "And, heavens, how they sing it!" she exclaimed.

      Norman turned and looked over the crowd of eager faces – every man and woman singing with the passionate enthusiasm of religious fanatics – an enthusiasm electric, contagious, overwhelming. In spite of himself he felt his heart beat with quickened sympathy.

      He was amazed at the character of the audience. He had expected to see a throng of low-browed brutes. The first shock he received was the feeling that this crowd was distinctly an intellectual one. They might be fanatics. They certainly were not fools. The stamp of personality was clean cut on almost every face. They were fighters. They meant business and they didn't care who knew it. Some of them wore dirty clothes, but their faces were stamped with the power of free, rebellious thought – a power that always commands respect in spite of shabby clothes. He looked in vain for a single joyous face. Not a smile. Deep, dark eyes, shining with the light of purpose, mouths firm, headstrong, merciless, and bitter, but nowhere the glimmer of a ray of sunlight! He felt with a sense of awe the uncanny presence of Tragedy.

      And to his amazement he noticed a lot of men he knew in the crowd – three or four authors, a newspaper reporter evidently off duty, two college professors, a clergyman, three artists, a priest, and a street preacher.

      The hymn died away into a low sigh, like the sob of the wind after a storm. The crowd sank to their seats so quietly with the dying of the music that Norman and Elena were standing alone for an instant. They awoke from the spell, and dropped into their seats with evident embarrassment.

      A boy of sixteen stepped briskly to the front in answer to a nod from the chairman, and recited a Socialist poem. After the first stanza, which was crude and stilted, Norman's eye rested on the heavy figure of the chairman. He was surprised at the power of his rugged face. Through its brute strength flashed the keenest sense of alert intelligence – an intelligence which seemed to lurk behind the big, shaggy eyebrows as if about to spring on its victim. His heavy-set face was covered with a thick, reddish blond beard and his short hair stood up straight on his head, like the bristles of a wild boar. Of medium height and heavy build, with arms and legs of extraordinary muscle and big, coarse short fingers evidently gnarled and knotted, by the coarsest labor in youth, he looked like a blacksmith who had taken a college course by the light of his forge at night. There was something about the way he sat crouching low in his seat, watching with his keen gray eyes everything that passed, that bespoke the man of reserve power – the man who was quietly waiting his hour.

      "By George, a pretty good pet name they've given him – 'The Blond Beast,'" Norman muttered. "I shouldn't like to tackle him in the dark."

      The woman in red leaned toward the chairman and said something in low tones. He nodded his massive head, smiled, and looked back over his shoulder at the girl sitting behind them. The movement showed for the first time a long ugly scar on the side of his great neck.

      "Look at that fellow's neck!" whispered Elena.

      "Yes. He had a close call that time," Norman answered. "But I'll bet the other one never lived to tell the story – "

      "Sh! 'The Scarlet Nun' is going to speak."

      The woman in red rose and walked to the edge of the platform. She stood silent for a moment, her tall, graceful, willowy figure erect and tense. The crowd burst into a tumult of applause. She smiled, bowed, and lifted her slender hand with a quick, imperious gesture for silence.

      Norman was struck by the note of religious fervour which her whole personality seemed to radiate. The peculiar scarlet robe she wore accented this impression perhaps, and its strangeness added a touch of awe. The dress gave one the impression of a nun's garb except that its long folds were so arranged that they revealed rather than concealed the beautiful lines of her graceful figure. The colour was the deep, warm red of the Socialist flag – the colour of human blood, chosen as the symbol of the universal brotherhood of man. The effect of a nun's cowl was given by a thin scarlet mantilla thrown over the head, the silken meshes of its long fringe mingling with the waves of her thick black hair. Her face was that of a madonna of the slender type, except that the lips were too full, round, and sensuous and her long eyelashes drooped slightly over dark, lustrous eyes.

      "Comrades," she began, in slow, measured tones, "after to-night I retire from the platform to take up work for which I am better fitted. I promised you a big surprise this evening, and you shall not be disappointed – "

      A murmur rippled the audience and she paused, smiling into Norman's face with a curious look. She spoke with a decided foreign accent with little moments of coquettish hesitation as though feeling for words. Norman felt an almost irresistible impulse to help her.

      "I am going to in-tro-duce to you to-night," she continued, "a new leader, whose tongue the God of the poor and the outcast and the dis-in-herited has touched with divine fire. She is no stran-ger. Twenty years ago she was born beneath the bright skies of Cal-i-for-nia at Anaheim, in the little Socialist colony of Polish dreamers led by Madame Modjeska, Count Bozenta, and Henry Sienkiewicz, the distin-guished author of 'Quo Vadis.' As you know, the colony failed. Her mother died in poverty and she was placed in an orphan asylum until eight years of age, when she was taken back to Poland by her foolish kins-men. Four years later I found her, a ragged, homeless waif, in the streets of Warsaw, alone and star-ving. Since then she has been mine.