The Conflict Part 1

The Conflict.

by David Graham Phillips.

I

Four years at Wellesley; two years about equally divided among Paris, Dresden and Florence. And now Jane Hastings was at home again. At home in the unchanged house--s.p.a.cious, old-fashioned--looking down from its steeply sloping lawns and terraced gardens upon the sooty, smoky activities of Remsen City, looking out upon a charming panorama of hills and valleys in the heart of South Central Indiana. Six years of striving in the East and abroad to satisfy the restless energy she inherited from her father; and here she was, as restless as ever--yet with everything done that a woman could do in the way of an active career. She looked back upon her years of elaborate preparation; she looked forward upon--nothing. That is, nothing but marriage--dropping her name, dropping her personality, disappearing in the personality of another. She had never seen a man for whom she would make such a sacrifice; she did not believe that such a man existed.

She meditated bitterly upon that cruel arrangement of Nature's whereby the father transmits his vigorous qualities in twofold measure to the daughter, not in order that she may be a somebody, but solely in order that she may transmit them to sons. "I don't believe it," she decided.

"There's something for ME to do." But what? She gazed down at Remsen City, connected by factories and pierced from east, west and south by railways. She gazed out over the fields and woods. Yes, there must be something for her besides merely marrying and breeding--just as much for her as for a man. But what? If she should marry a man who would let her rule him, she would despise him. If she should marry a man she could respect--a man who was of the master cla.s.s like her father--how she would hate him for ignoring her and putting her in her ordained inferior feminine place. She glanced down at her skirts with an angry sense of enforced masquerade. And then she laughed--for she had a keen sense of humor that always came to her rescue when she was in danger of taking herself too seriously.

Through the foliage between her and the last of the stretches of highroad winding up from Remsen City she spied a man climbing in her direction--a long, slim figure in cap, Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers. Instantly--and long before he saw her--there was a grotesque whisking out of sight of the serious personality upon which we have been intruding. In its stead there stood ready to receive the young man a woman of the type that possesses physical charm and knows how to use it--and does not scruple to use it. For a woman to conquer man by physical charm is far and away the easiest, the most fleeting and the emptiest of victories. But for woman thus to conquer without herself yielding anything whatsoever, even so little as an alluring glance of the eye--that is quite another matter. It was this sort of conquest that Jane Hastings delighted in--and sought to gain with any man who came within range. If the men had known what she was about, they would have denounced her conduct as contemptible and herself as immoral, even brazen. But in their innocence they accused only their sophisticated and superbly masculine selves and regarded her as the soul of innocence. This was the more absurd in them because she obviously excelled in the feminine art of inviting display of charm.

To glance at her was to realize at once the beauty of her figure, the exceeding grace of her long back and waist. A keen observer would have seen the mockery lurking in her light-brown eyes, and about the corners of her full red lips.

She arranged her thick dark hair to make a secret, half-revealed charm of her fascinating pink ears and to reveal in dazzling unexpectedness the soft, round whiteness of the nape of her neck.

Because you are thus let into Miss Hastings' naughty secret, so well veiled behind an air of earnest and almost cold dignity, you must not do her the injustice of thinking her unusually artful. Such artfulness is common enough; it secures husbands by the thousand and by the tens of thousands. No, only in the skill of artfulness was Miss Hastings unusual.

As the long strides of the tall, slender man brought him rapidly nearer, his face came into plain view. A refined, handsome face, dark and serious. He had dark-brown eyes--and Miss Hastings did not like brown eyes in a man. She thought that men should have gray or blue or greenish eyes, and if they were cruel in their love of power she liked it the better.

"h.e.l.lo, Dave," she cried in a pleasant, friendly voice. She was posed--in the most unconscious of att.i.tudes--upon a rustic bench so that her extraordinary figure was revealed at its most attractive.

The young man halted before her, his breath coming quickly--not altogether from the exertion of his steep and rapid climb. "Jen, I'm mad about you," he said, his brown eyes soft and luminous with pa.s.sion.

"I've done nothing but think about you in the week you've been back. I didn't sleep last night, and I've come up here as early as I dared to tell you--to ask you to marry me."

He did not see the triumph she felt, the joy in having subdued another of these insolently superior males. Her eyes were discreetly veiled; her delightful mouth was arranged to express sadness.

"I thought I was an ambition incarnate," continued the young man, unwittingly adding to her delight by detailing how brilliant her conquest was. "I've never cared a rap about women--until I saw you. I was all for politics--for trying to do something to make my fellow men the better for my having lived. Now--it's all gone. I want you, Jen.

Nothing else matters."

As he paused, gazing at her in speechless longing, she lifted her eyes--simply a glance. With a stifled cry he darted forward, dropped beside her on the bench and tried to enfold her in his arms. The veins stood out in his forehead; the expression of his eyes was terrifying.

She shrank, sprang up. His baffled hands had not even touched her.

"David Hull!" she cried, and the indignation and the repulsion in her tone and in her manner were not simulated, though her artfulness hastened to make real use of them. She loved to rouse men to frenzy.

She knew that the sight of their frenzy would chill her--would fill her with an emotion that would enable her to remain mistress of the situation.

At sight of her aversion his eyes sank. "Forgive me," he muttered.

"You make me--CRAZY."

"I!" she cried, laughing in angry derision. "What have I ever done to encourage you to be--impertinent?"

"Nothing," he admitted. "That is, nothing but just being yourself."

"I can't help that, can I?"

"No," said he, adding doggedly: "But neither can men help going crazy about you."

She looked at him sitting there at once penitent and impenitent; and her mind went back to the thoughts that had engaged it before he came into view. Marriage--to marry one of these men, with their coa.r.s.e physical ideas of women, with their pitiful weakness before an emotion that seemed to her to have no charm whatever. And these were the creatures who ruled the world and compelled women to be their playthings and mere appendages! Well--no doubt it was the women's own fault, for were they not a poor, spiritless lot, trembling with fright lest they should not find a man to lean on and then, having found the man, settling down into fat and stupid vacuity or playing the cat at the silly game of social position? But not Jane Hastings! Her bosom heaved and her eyes blazed scorn as she looked at this person who had dared think the touch of his coa.r.s.e hands would be welcome. Welcome!

"And I have been thinking what a delightful friendship ours was," said she, disgustedly. "And all the time, your talk about your ambition--the speeches you were going to make--the offices you were going to hold--the good you were going to do in purifying politics--it was all a blind!"

"All a blind," admitted he. "From the first night that you came to our house to dinner--Jen, I'll never forget that dress you wore--or the way you looked in it."

Miss Jane had thought extremely well of that toilet herself. She had heard how impervious this David Hull, the best catch in the town, was to feminine charm; and she had gone prepared to give battle. But she said dejectedly, "You don't know what a shock you've given me."

"Yes, I do," cried he. "I'm ashamed of myself. But--I love you, Jen!

Can't you learn to love me?"

"I hadn't even thought of you in that way," said she. "I haven't bothered my head about marriage. Of course, most girls have to think about it, because they must get some one to support them----"

"I wish to G.o.d you were one of that sort," interrupted he. "Then I could have some hope."

"Hope of what," said she disdainfully. "You don't mean that you'd marry a girl who was marrying you because she had to have food, clothing and shelter?"

"I'd marry the woman I loved. Then--I'd MAKE her love me. She simply couldn't help it."

Jane Hastings shuddered. "Thank heaven, I don't have to marry!" Her eyes flashed. "But I wouldn't, even if I were poor. I'd rather go to work. Why shouldn't a woman work, anyhow?"

"At what?" inquired Hull. "Except the men who do manual labor, there are precious few men who can make a living honestly and self-respectingly. It's fortunate the women can hold aloof and remain pure."

Jane laughed unpleasantly. "I'm not so sure that the women who live with men just for shelter are pure," said she.

"Jen," the young man burst out, "you're ambitious--aren't you?"

"Rather," replied she.

"And you like the sort of thing I'm trying to do--like it and approve of it?"

"I believe a man ought to succeed--get to the top."

"So do I--if he can do it honorably."

Jane hesitated--dared. "To be quite frank," said she, "I worship success and I despise failure. Success means strength. Failure means weakness--and I abominate weakness."

He looked quietly disapproving. "You don't mean that. You don't understand what you're saying."

"Perfectly," she a.s.sured him. "I'm not a bit good. Education has taken all the namby-pamby nonsense out of me."

But he was not really hearing; besides, what had women to do with the realities of life? They were made to be the property of men--that was the truth, though he would never have confessed it to any woman. They were made to be possessed. "And I must possess this woman," he thought, his blood running hot. He said:

"Why not help me to make a career? I can do it, Jen, with you to help."

She had thought of this before--of making a career for herself, of doing the "something" her intense energy craved, through a man. The "something" must be big if it were to satisfy her; and what that was big could a woman do except through a man? But--this man. Her eyes turned thoughtfully upon him--a look that encouraged him to go on:

"Politics interest you, Jen. I've seen that in the way you listen and in the questions you ask."

She smiled--but not at the surface. In fact, his political talk had bored her. She knew nothing about the subject, and, so, had been as one listening to an unknown language. But, like all women, having only the narrowest range of interests herself and the things that would enable her to show off to advantage, she was used to being bored by the conversational efforts of men and to concealing her boredom. She had listened patiently and had led the conversation by slow, imperceptible stages round to the interesting personal--to the struggle for dominion over this difficult male.

"Anyhow," he went on, "no intelligent person could fail to be interested in politics, once he or she appreciated what it meant. And people of our cla.s.s owe it to society to take part in politics. Victor Dorn is a crank, but he's right about some things--and he's right in saying that we of the upper cla.s.s are parasites upon the ma.s.ses. They earn all the wealth, and we take a large part of it away from them.