And after all, what proof was there that the spoliation of the rich and the ending of riches would mean the enrichment of the poor? When panics came and the rich fasted the poor starved. Would the reduction of the opulent and the elevation of the paupers all to the same plain average make anybody happier? Would the poor be glad to learn that they could never be rich? With nobody to envy, would contentment set in? With ambition rated as a crime, the bequeathing of comfort to one’s children rendered impossible, the establishment of one’s destiny left to the decision of boards and by-laws, would there be satisfaction? The Bolsheviki had voted “universal happiness.” It would be interesting to see how well Russia fared during the next year and how universally happiness might be distributed.
He frowned and shook his head as if to free himself from 254 these nettlesome riddles and left them to the Bolshevist Samaritans to solve in the vast laboratory where the manual laborers at last could work out their hearts’ desires, with the upper class destroyed and the even more hateful middle class at their mercy.
It was bitter cold on the way to the ballroom in the Willard Hotel, and Davidge in his big coat studied Mamise smothered in a voluminous sealskin overcoat. This, too, had meant hardship for the poor. Many men had sailed on a bitter voyage to arctic regions and endured every privation of cold and hunger and peril that this young woman might ride cozy in any chill soever. The fur coat had cost much money, but little of it had fallen into the frosted hands of the men who clubbed the seal to death on the ice-floes. The sleek furrier in the warm city shop, when he sold the finished garment, took in far more than the men who went out into the wilderness and brought back the pelts. That did not seem right; yet he had a heavy rent to pay, and if he did not create the market for the furs, the sealers would not get paid at all for their voyage.
A division of the spoils that would rob no one, nor kill the industry, was beyond Davidge’s imagining. He comforted himself with the thought that those loud mouths that advertised solutions of these labor problems were fools or liars or both; and their mouths were the tools they worked with most.
The important immediate thing to contemplate was the fascinating head of Mamise, quaintly set on the shapeless bulk of a sea-lion.
CHAPTER III
Davidge had been a good dancer once, and he had not entirely neglected the new school of foot improvisation, so different from the old set steps.
Mamise was amazed to find that the strenuous business man had so much of the faun in his soul. He had evidently listened to the pipes of Pan and could “shake a sugar-heel” with a practised skill. There was a startling authority in the firmness with which he gathered her in and swept her through the kaleidoscopic throng, now dipping, now skipping, now limping, now running.