The Conflict [46]
mocked he good-humoredly.
``Really,'' said she with all her power of sweet earnestness.
``Then--cut your nails and go to work. And when you have become a genuine laborer, you'll begin to try to improve not the condition of others, but your own. The way to help workers is to abolish the idlers who hang like a millstone about their necks. You can help only by abolishing the one idler under your control.''
She stood nearer him, very near him. She threw out her lovely arms in a gesture of humility. ``I will do whatever you say,'' she said.
They looked each into the other's eyes. The color fled from her face, the blood poured into his--wave upon wave, until he was like a man who has been set on fire by the furious heat of long years of equatorial sun. He muttered, wheeled about and strode away-- in resolute and relentless flight. She dropped down where he had been sitting and hid her face in her perfumed hands.
``I care for him,'' she moaned, ``and he saw and he despises me! How COULD I--how COULD I!''
Nevertheless, within a quarter of an hour she was in her dressing room, standing at the table, eyes carefully avoiding her mirrored eyes--as she cut her finger nails.
IV
Jane was mistaken in her guess at the cause of Victor Dorn's agitation and abrupt flight. If he had any sense whatever of the secret she had betrayed to him and to herself at the same instant it was wholly unconscious. He had become panic-stricken and had fled because he, faced with her exuberance and tempting wealth of physical charm, had become suddenly conscious of her and of himself in a way as new to him as if he had been fresh from a monkery where no woman had ever been seen. Thus far the world had been peopled for him with human beings without any reference to sex. The phenomena of sex had not interested him because his mind had been entirely taken up with the other aspects of life; and he had not yet reached the stage of development where a thinker grasps the truth that all questions are at bottom questions of the sex relation, and that, therefore, no question can be settled right until the sex relations are settled right.
Jane Hastings was the first girl he had met in his whole life who was in a position to awaken that side of his nature. And when his brain suddenly filled with a torrent of mad longings and of sensuous appreciations of her laces and silk, of her perfume and smoothness and roundness, of the ecstasy that would come from contact with those warm, rosy lips--when Victor Dorn found himself all in a flash eager impetuosity to seize this woman whom he did not approve of, whom he did not even like, he felt bowed with shame. He would not have believed himself capable of such a thing. He fled.
He fled, but she pursued. And when he sat down in the garden behind his mother's cottage, to work at a table where bees and butterflies had been his only disturbers, there was this SHE before him--her soft, shining gaze fascinating his gaze, her useless but lovely white hands extended tantalizingly toward him.
As he continued to look at her, his disapproval and dislike melted. ``I was brutally harsh to her,'' he thought repentantly.
``She was honestly trying to do the decent thing. How was she to know? And wasn't I as much wrong as right in advising her not to help the men?''
Beyond question, it was theoretically best for the two opposing forces, capital and labor, to fight their battle to its inevitable end without interference, without truce, with quarter neither given nor taken on either side. But practically--wasn't there something to be said for such humane proposals of that of Jane Hastings? They would put off the day of right conditions rightly and therefore permanently founded--conditions in which master and slave or serf or wage-taker would be no more; but, on the other hand, slaves with shorter hours of toil and better surroundings could be enlightened more easily. Perhaps. He was by no means sure; he could not but fear that anything that tended to make the slave comfortable in
``Really,'' said she with all her power of sweet earnestness.
``Then--cut your nails and go to work. And when you have become a genuine laborer, you'll begin to try to improve not the condition of others, but your own. The way to help workers is to abolish the idlers who hang like a millstone about their necks. You can help only by abolishing the one idler under your control.''
She stood nearer him, very near him. She threw out her lovely arms in a gesture of humility. ``I will do whatever you say,'' she said.
They looked each into the other's eyes. The color fled from her face, the blood poured into his--wave upon wave, until he was like a man who has been set on fire by the furious heat of long years of equatorial sun. He muttered, wheeled about and strode away-- in resolute and relentless flight. She dropped down where he had been sitting and hid her face in her perfumed hands.
``I care for him,'' she moaned, ``and he saw and he despises me! How COULD I--how COULD I!''
Nevertheless, within a quarter of an hour she was in her dressing room, standing at the table, eyes carefully avoiding her mirrored eyes--as she cut her finger nails.
IV
Jane was mistaken in her guess at the cause of Victor Dorn's agitation and abrupt flight. If he had any sense whatever of the secret she had betrayed to him and to herself at the same instant it was wholly unconscious. He had become panic-stricken and had fled because he, faced with her exuberance and tempting wealth of physical charm, had become suddenly conscious of her and of himself in a way as new to him as if he had been fresh from a monkery where no woman had ever been seen. Thus far the world had been peopled for him with human beings without any reference to sex. The phenomena of sex had not interested him because his mind had been entirely taken up with the other aspects of life; and he had not yet reached the stage of development where a thinker grasps the truth that all questions are at bottom questions of the sex relation, and that, therefore, no question can be settled right until the sex relations are settled right.
Jane Hastings was the first girl he had met in his whole life who was in a position to awaken that side of his nature. And when his brain suddenly filled with a torrent of mad longings and of sensuous appreciations of her laces and silk, of her perfume and smoothness and roundness, of the ecstasy that would come from contact with those warm, rosy lips--when Victor Dorn found himself all in a flash eager impetuosity to seize this woman whom he did not approve of, whom he did not even like, he felt bowed with shame. He would not have believed himself capable of such a thing. He fled.
He fled, but she pursued. And when he sat down in the garden behind his mother's cottage, to work at a table where bees and butterflies had been his only disturbers, there was this SHE before him--her soft, shining gaze fascinating his gaze, her useless but lovely white hands extended tantalizingly toward him.
As he continued to look at her, his disapproval and dislike melted. ``I was brutally harsh to her,'' he thought repentantly.
``She was honestly trying to do the decent thing. How was she to know? And wasn't I as much wrong as right in advising her not to help the men?''
Beyond question, it was theoretically best for the two opposing forces, capital and labor, to fight their battle to its inevitable end without interference, without truce, with quarter neither given nor taken on either side. But practically--wasn't there something to be said for such humane proposals of that of Jane Hastings? They would put off the day of right conditions rightly and therefore permanently founded--conditions in which master and slave or serf or wage-taker would be no more; but, on the other hand, slaves with shorter hours of toil and better surroundings could be enlightened more easily. Perhaps. He was by no means sure; he could not but fear that anything that tended to make the slave comfortable in