hand suddenly gripped his.
"Let's go back, Norman."
"Nonsense – who's afraid?"
"I am. I don't mind saying it. This is more than I bargained for."
The woman scrambled to her feet and limped back into the doorway.
Elena shivered. "I didn't know such women lived on this earth."
"To say nothing of living but a stone's throw from your own door," he continued.
"Let's go back," she pleaded.
"No. A thing like this is merely one more reason why we should keep on. This only shows that the world we live in isn't quite perfect, as the Governor seems to think. These Socialists may be right after all. Now that we've started let's hear their side of it. Come on! Don't be a quitter!"
Norman seized her arm and hurried through the swiftly moving throng of the under-world – gambling touts, thieves, cut-throats, pick-pockets, opium fiends, drunkards, thugs, carousing miners, and sailors – but above all, everywhere, omnipresent, the abandoned woman – painted, bedizened, lurching through the streets, hanging in doorways, clinging to men on the sidewalks, beckoning from windows, singing vulgar songs on crude platforms among throngs of half-drunken men, whirling past doors and windows in dance-halls, their cracked voices shrill and rasping above the din of cheap music.
Elena stopped suddenly and clung heavily to Norman's arm.
"Please, Norman, let's go back. I can't endure this."
"And you're my chum that never flunked when she gave her word?" he asked with scorn. "We are only a few feet from the hall now."
"Where is it?"
"Right there in the middle of the block where you see that sign with the blazing red torch."
"Come on, then," Elena said, with a shudder.
They walked quickly through the long, dimly lighted passage to the entrance of the hall. It was densely packed with a crowd of five hundred. Elena closed her eyes and allowed Norman to lead her through the mob that blocked the space inside the door. At the entrance to the centre aisle he encountered an usher who stared with bulging eyes at his towering figure. Norman 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.
