Around this flag-pole Norman had built the speakers' platform, with every inch of its boards covered with the deep-red bunting symbolic of the Socialist cause. Behind the stand toward the mountains rose a smooth grass-carpeted hillside in semi-circular form, making a natural amphitheatre on which five thousand people might sit in tiers one above the other and distinctly hear every word uttered on the platform.
By noon every inch of this space was packed with a dense crowd of Socialists, their friends, and the curious who had come, drawn by the sensational announcement of the launching of the Socialist colony on the island of Ventura.
In the front row, packed close against the platform, were a number of famous people—conspicuous among whom was an author whose impassioned stories of the coming social upheaval had resulted in fame for himself and a divorce-suit by his first wife. His new wife, the "affinity" who caused the disturbance, sat by his side.
On his left sat a solemn looking poet with bushy, unkempt hair. He had deliberately chosen the title "The Bard of Ramcat." The name Ramcat had been long applied to a shabby section of the outskirts of San Francisco. Here the poet had chosen to dwell and sing of social horrors which existed only in his fertile imagination.
He had won wide fame, however, as the supreme exponent of the "affinity" theory which has always been epidemic among thoughtful Socialists. He coolly informed his wife that he had discovered his true "affinity" in a woman he had installed as her guest. The two affinities accompanied the wife and her child to a steamer for Europe with instructions to obtain a divorce.
The poet married the affinity, and on the birth of a new son and heir acquired the habit of beating her as a form of relaxation from the strain of work. Considerable trouble followed, and he spent a portion of his time in jail. He had once gone barefooted and bareheaded. But since his "affinity" marriage he had been compelled for reasons best known to himself to resume shoe-leather and to buy a hat. Nevertheless he was still a striking-looking figure, seated beside his new wife whose strong, intellectual face won the sympathy of all who saw her.
Just behind him sat an ex-clergyman with whom a rich young woman in his congregation had fallen in love. To avoid trouble, the woman of wealth got him to leave the ministry, and bought him from his wife for a good round sum. He became an apostle of the new gospel of Socialism, and secured a position as a professor of economics. When finally he lost this position by his vagaries, his wife hired a hall and set him up in business as an inspired leader of new thought emancipated from the chains of capitalistic tyranny.
Beside the distinguished ex-clergyman Socialistic apostle sat Professor Otto Schmitt, a famous teacher of economics at a Western university. His supreme passion was hatred of women. His one big book was written to prove that woman has no soul, that she is the mere matter on which man by his will acts, that she is not immoral, but merely non-moral, having never possessed even the rudiments of a moral nature. Schmitt had, therefore, maintained that the entrance of women into competition in the economic world presaged the downfall of man and the utter extinction of humanity. For this reason he had joined the Socialists.
Not three feet away from him sat a thoughtful, elderly, short-haired woman who had written a book on the evolution of woman to prove that woman alone is the original unit of creation, man a superfluous and temporary addition, merely the missing link between woman and the monkey, and in the process of human development the male biped would be eliminated. She demanded equal rights with man, and more besides, and she, too, had joined the Socialists.
Yet through all these ludicrous incongruities there ran the single scarlet thread of social discontent which made them one. In every soul rang the stirring cry: