When they were walking over the crisp snow in the woods—now deserted, for hotel guests and peasants alike were at the long midday meal—he resumed the subject. Her vivid sympathy and interest had brought back the bitter struggle of the past two years with a rush.
“How I wish you had been with me when we made our graft fight,” he said, looking at her with fond eager eyes. “What a mate you would have been. When the whole town is howling at a man because he is trying to do the right thing, he needs just such a woman as you to keep the courage in him. The concerted opinion of the majority has an insidious power! Sometimes we wondered if we could be right, if we were not all dreamers, unpractical, doing our city more harm than good. The whole country was aghast at our exposures, business was almost dead, capital refused to come our way; the poor old city that had been wrecked by the most fearful natural calamity of modern times—$500,000,000 went up in smoke—seemed to cry out against us for holding her down, to beg for a chance to limp out of her bog. But we looked ahead, convinced that there could be no permanent prosperity for San Francisco until the sore was scraped to the bone and sterilized; in other words, until the political scoundrels and the get-rich-quick element, that obtained their crushing franchises by corrupting a packed Board of Supervisors, and bought everybody, from the boss and the mayor down to the man in the street with a vote to sell, were either gaoled or so discredited that they would be forced into private life or out of the state. We unseated the boss and the mayor, the supervisors having come through, and we were able to indict several of what we call the higher-ups—the men that had done the buying. I never had much hope of convicting these men, for in California, in its present state of moral development, it is next to impossible to convict a rich man. If you get an honest judge, there are always men in the jury that have got in for no purpose but to be bribed. But we won out in another way. The long trial aired the abominable practices of these corporations, and, together with the many sensational episodes—the shooting of the prosecuting attorney in court, and the suicide of the would-be murderer in prison before he could be put on the stand, the kidnapping of the only editor that fought with us,—woke up the state; it talked of little else, and talking, thought, and was ashamed. The city machine got ahead of us, for the mayor we had managed to seat was too virtuous to build up a machine of his own; but we hope for great things in the state itself when our Reform candidate runs for the office of governor this year. Perhaps it was unreasonable to hope for more at the beginning, and it was a tough fight to get that much.
“Oh, God!” he cried bitterly, “the rottenness of young communities with potentialities of wealth. Human nature in the raw, when it is still in the ingenuous stage of greed, is a damnable thing. It has never shown any originality since the world began. Socialism may clip its wings, if it ever gets control, but—here is the cursed anomaly: you can’t hope for Socialism until a miracle eliminates greed from the nature of man; for it is men that must grant Socialism, and Socialism means the balking of greed. Even if some unforeseen set of circumstances forced it upon us, I doubt if it would last. You can no more eliminate greed from men than you could eliminate sex by forcing men and women to dress alike, shave their heads, and say their prayers three times a day. But the world is better in some respects than it was a century ago, and this is primarily due to the untiring efforts of the minority. But, again, the work must be done by a few men—the few that are awake and can see farther than their noses. Well, my dear, I hope and pray that I am one of those men. There you have my program, so far as a mere finite mind can project it.”
“Now I know why I have been permitted to love you,” said Julia, softly, and looking at him with glowing eyes. “Hadji Sadr? told me that he should watch over me, and that if I dared love a man who would pull me down, instead of being far greater than I could ever hope to be, he would blast me, transform me into a mere commonplace female, but haunted by the memory of what I had been?—”
“How much of all that do you believe?”
“Ah! I saw marvellous exhibitions of power. They are common enough in the East, but one would hardly dare relate them in this part of the world. If I longed with all the concentrated powers of my mind for Hadji Sadr?, he would come to me in a flash—with that secondary material body they call the astral, and we call the ghost. If I were terribly perplexed, I should send for him?—”
“I want no go-betweens, particularly Mohammedan ghosts.”
But Julia had no intention of letting him down.
“I wonder I could remember him, or any one else! It was only because I suddenly realized what all this means—that I may have another and far greater part to play?—”
“You see that at last! Perhaps I should have appealed to you before. But—it is only to-day that I have felt really close to you—really loved you, perhaps. I fancy I was merely infatuated before.” He took her in his arms, and she looked up at him with the deepest sympathy a woman can express, particularly when gifted with eyes that are the dazzling headlights of a finished and powerful machine behind. “Oh, if you could only know,” he continued in tones of intense feeling, “what it will mean to me to have you, not only to love, but to work with! I really want with all my soul to be of use to my country, to be one of the few that are willing to work for her unselfishly, to leave a decent name behind me. It is thankless work, fighting the majority, battling for an ideal nobody wants, to be the butt of the press, accused of sordid motives, balked at every turn. The only sort of patriotism the average American understands is sounding promises by ambitious politicians and huge donations from repentant millionnaires. To raise the morale of a people, and in the process prevent them from growing too rich, may mean the respect of posterity, but it also means the hatred of your contemporaries. The Big Voice! It confuses the mind and the standards. The constant failures, the recurring sense of hopelessness, of futility, the inevitable contempt for the masses you are striving to emancipate from themselves,—many a man that has started out with the loftiest and most selfless ideals loses courage, shrugs his shoulders, and falls back. I am no better and stronger than many of them. I have dreamed one minute, the next wondered how far I would go, how long my enthusiasm would last. Material success is easy enough, and always rewarded by approbation and respect! What is the use? I am young still, but I asked myself that question more than once, for even my family were all against me. My father was furious. He is honest, but his business has been his god. I left home and went to a hotel—to avoid the everlasting discussions at table. My old friends cut me on the street. I was regarded as an enemy of society, and society cast me out. The rest of our little group shared the same fate. We were obliged to keep one another’s courage up. That we carried our lives in our hands and were liable to assassination at any moment was the least of our trials. The Big Voice! We felt as if we were at the foot of an avalanche, or some other inexorable enemy in Nature herself, trying to push it back with our hands. Inevitably there were black moments when we felt we were fools, especially when we faced certain defeat. And it’s all to do again, not once, but many times. Do you wonder that the light side of my nature has given me many cynical moments, or that I have seethed with disgust, or wondered if I would last? But with you—ah! If I had ever dreamed you lived, I believe I never should have despaired for a moment. But my only memory of you was of a charming and lovely child. And it is only to-day, here, that I have realized what it means for any of us to stand alone. With your faith and your brain, with you always beside me, sympathizing, helping—I never shall lose courage for a moment. I could accomplish anything—everything?—”
This sudden vehement disclosure of the serious depths of his nature under its surface gayety, with more than one glimpse of heights and powers she had barely divined, had thrilled Julia even more than his passionate love-making. All her own greatness responded, and for a moment or two she had been swept irresistibly on that tide of self-revealing words. She had a vision of the complete passion, the perfect union. But her brain remained cool. She never lost sight of her purpose.
She sprang from him suddenly and flung out her arms. Her eyes looked black. Her skin shone with a peculiar radiance like white fire. So she had looked more than once on the platform during her last moments of irresistible appeal; when her bewildered audiences had felt as if dissolving in a crucible from which there was no escape. “Oh,” she cried in low vibrating tones of intense passion, “now I know you—the real You! I’............