Part 30

"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.

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 his degradation must of necessity weaken his aversion to degradation. Just as the worst kings were the best kings because they hastened the fall of monarchy, so the worst capitalists, the most rapacious, the most rigid enforcers of the economic laws of a capitalistic society were the best capitalists, were helping to hasten the day when men would work for what they earned and would earn what they worked for--when every man's pay envelope would contain his wages, his full wages, and nothing but his wages.

Still, where judgment was uncertain, he certainly had been unjust to that well meaning girl. And was she really so worthless as he had on first sight adjudged her? There might be exceptions to the rule that a parasite born and bred can have no other instructor or idea but those of parasitism. She was honest and earnest, was eager to learn the truth. She might be put to some use. At any rate he had been unworthy of his own ideals when he, assuming without question that she was the usual capitalistic snob with the itch for gratifying vanity by patronizing the "poor dear lower classes," had been almost insultingly curt and mocking.

"What was the matter with me?" he asked himself. "I never acted in that way before." And then he saw that his brusqueness had been the cover for fear of of her--fear of the allure of her luxury and her beauty. In love with her? He knew that he was not. No, his feeling toward her was merely the crudest form of the tribute of man to woman--though apparently woman as a rule preferred this form to any other.

"I owe her an apology," he said to himself. And so it came to pass that at three the following afternoon he was once more facing her in that creeper-walled seclusion whose soft lights were almost equal to light of gloaming or moon or stars in romantic charm.

Said he--always direct and simple, whether dealing with man or woman, with devious person or straight:

"I've come to beg your pardon for what I said yesterday."

"You certainly were wild and strange," laughed she.

"I was supercilious," said he. "And worse than that there is not. However, as I have apologized, and you have accepted my apology, we need waste no more time about that. You wished to persuade your father to----"

"Just a moment!" interrupted she. "I've a question to ask. WHY did you treat me--why have you been treating me so--so harshly?"

"Because I was afraid of you," replied he. "I did not realize it, but that was the reason."

"Afraid of ME," said she. "That's very flattering."

"No," said he, coloring. "In some mysterious way I had been betrayed into thinking of you as no man ought to think of a woman unless he is in love with her and she with him. I am ashamed of myself. But I shall conquer that feeling--or keep away from you.... Do you understand what the street car situation is?"

But she was not to be deflected from the main question, now that it had been brought to the front so unexpectedly and in exactly the way most favorable to her purposes. "You've made me uneasy," said she. "I don't in the least understand what you mean. I have wanted, and I still want, to be friends with you--good friends--just as you and Selma Gordon are--though of course I couldn't hope to be as close a friend as she is. I'm too ignorant--too useless."

He shook his head--with him, a gesture that conveyed the full strength of negation. "We are on opposite sides of a line across which friendship is impossible. I could not be your friend without being false to myself. You couldn't be mine unless you were by some accident flung into the working class and forced to adopt it as your own. Even then you'd probably remain what you are. Only a small part of the working class as yet is at heart of the working class. Most of us secretly--almost openly--despise the life of work, and dream and hope a time of fortune that will put us up among the masters and the idlers." His expressive eyes became eloquent. "The false and shallow ideas that have been educated into us for ages can't be uprooted in a few brief years."

She felt the admiration she did not try to conceal. She saw the proud and splendid conception of the dignity of labor--of labor as a blessing, not a curse, as a badge of aristocracy and not of slavery and shame. "You really believe that, don't you?" she said. "I know it's true. I say I believe it--who doesn't SAY so? But I don't FEEL it."

"That's honest," said he heartily. "That's some thing to build on."

"And I'm going to build!" cried she. "You'll help me--won't you? I know, it's a great deal to ask. Why should you take the time and the trouble to bother with one single unimportant person."

"That's the way I spend my life--in adding one man or one woman to our party--one at a time. It's slow building, but it's the only kind that endures. There are twelve hundred of us now--twelve hundred voters, I mean. Ten years ago there were only three hundred. We'd expand much more rapidly if it weren't for the constant shifts of population. Our men are forced to go elsewhere as the pressure of capitalism gets too strong. And in place of them come raw emigrants, ignorant, full of dreams of becoming capitalists and exploiters of their fellow men and idlers. Ambition they call it. Ambition!" He laughed. "What a vulgar, what a cruel notion of rising in the world! To cease to be useful, to become a burden to others! ... Did you ever think how many poor creatures have to toil longer hours, how many children have to go to the factory instead of to school, in order that there may be two hundred and seven automobiles privately kept in this town and seventy-four chauffeurs doing nothing but wait upon their masters? Money doesn't grow on bushes, you know. Every cent of it has to be earned by somebody--and earned by MANUAL labor."

"I must think about that," she said--for the first time as much interested in what he was saying as in the man himself. No small triumph for Victor over the mind of a woman dominated, as was Jane Hastings, by the sex instinct that determines the thoughts and actions of practically the entire female sex.

"Yes--think about it," he urged. "You will never see it--or anything--until you see it for yourself."

"That's the way your party is built--isn't it?" inquired she. "Of those who see it for themselves."