The Conflict Part 17

"Why not drop in here when you're down town?" suggested Victor.

She wondered why she did not hang up the receiver and forget him.

But she did not. She murmured, "In due time I'll punish you for this, sir," and said to him: "There are reasons why it's impossible for me to go there just now. And you know I can't meet you in a saloon or on a street corner."

"I'm not so sure of that," laughed he. "Let me see. I'm very busy.

But I could come for half an hour this afternoon."

She had planned an evening session, being well aware of the favorable qualities of air and light after the matter-of-fact sun has withdrawn his last rays. But she promptly decided to accept what offered. "At three?"

"At four," replied he.

"You haven't forgotten those books?"

"Books? Oh, yes--yes, I remember. I'll bring them."

"Thank you so much," said she sweetly. "Good-by."

And at four she was waiting for him on the front veranda in a house dress that was--well, it was not quite the proper costume for such an occasion, but no one else was to see, and he didn't know about that sort of thing--and the gown gave her charms their best possible exposure except evening dress, which was out of the question. She had not long to wait. One of the clocks within hearing had struck and another was just beginning to strike when she saw him coming toward the house. She furtively watched him, admiring his walk without quite knowing why. You may perhaps know the walk that was Victor's--a steady forward advance of the whole body held firmly, almost rigidly--the walk of a man leading another to the scaffold, or of a man being led there in conscious innocence, or of a man ready to go wherever his purposes may order--ready to go without any heroics or fuss of any kind, but simply in the course of the day's business. When a man walks like that, he is worth observing--and it is well to think twice before obstructing his way.

That steady, inevitable advance gave Jane Hastings an absurd feeling of nervousness. She had an impulse to fly, as from some oncoming danger.

Yet what was coming, in fact? A clever young man of the working cla.s.s, dressed in garments of the kind his cla.s.s dressed in on Sunday, and plebeianly carrying a bundle under his arm.

"Our clock says you are three seconds late," cried she, laughing and extending her hand in a friendly, equal way that would have immensely flattered almost any man of her own cla.s.s. "But another protests that you are one second early."

"I'm one of those fools who waste their time and their nerves by being punctual," said he.

He laid the books on the wicker sofa. But instead of sitting Jane said: "We might be interrupted here. Come to the west veranda."

There she had him in a leafy solitude--he facing her as she posed in fascinating grace in a big chair. He looked at her--not the look of a man at a woman, but the look of a busy person at one who is about to show cause for having asked for a portion of his valuable time. She laughed--and laughter was her best gesture. "I can never talk to you if you pose like that," said she. "Honestly now, is your time so pricelessly precious?"

He echoed her laugh and settled himself more at his ease. "What did you want of me?" he asked.

"I intend to try to get better hours and better wages for the street car men," said she. "To do it, I must know just what is right--what I can hope to get. General talk is foolish. If I go at father I must have definite proposals to make, with reasons for them. I don't want him to evade. I would have gotten my information elsewhere, but I could think of no one but you who might not mislead me."

She had confidently expected that this carefully thought out scheme would do the trick. He would admire her, would be interested, would be drawn into a position where she could enlist him as a constant adviser.

He moved toward the edge of his chair as if about to rise. He said, pleasantly enough but without a spark of enthusiasm:

"That's very nice of you, Miss Hastings. But I can't advise you--beyond saying that if I were you, I shouldn't meddle."

She--that is, her vanity--was cut to the quick. "Oh!" said she with irony, "I fancied you wished the laboring men to have a better sort of life."

"Yes," said he. "But I'm not in favor of running hysterically about with a foolish little atomizer in the great stable. You are talking charity. I am working for justice. It will not really benefit the working man for the company, at the urging of a sweet and lovely young Lady Bountiful, to deign graciously to grant a little less slavery to them. In fact, a well fed, well cared for slave is worse off than one who's badly treated--worse off because farther from his freedom. The only things that do our cla.s.s any good, Miss Hastings, are the things they COMPEL--compel by their increased intelligence and increased unity and power. They get what they deserve. They won't deserve more until they compel more. Gifts won't help--not even gifts from--" His intensely blue eyes danced--"from such charming white hands so beautifully manicured."

She rose with an angry toss of the head. "I didn't ask you here to annoy me with impertinences about my finger nails."

He rose, at his ease, good-humored, ready to go. "Then you should have worn gloves," said he carelessly, "for I've been able to think only of your finger nails--and to wonder WHAT can be done with hands like that.

Thank you for a pleasant talk." He bowed and smiled. "Good-by.

Oh--Miss Gordon sent you her love."

"What IS the matter, Mr. Dorn?" cried the girl desperately. "I want your friendship--your respect. CAN'T I get it? Am I utterly hopeless in your eyes?"

A curious kind of color rose in his cheeks. His eyes regarded her with a mysterious steadiness. "You want neither my respect nor my friendship," said he. "You want to amuse yourself." He pointed at her hands. "Those nails betray you." He shrugged his shoulders, laughed, said as if to a child: "You are a nice girl, Jane Hastings. It's a pity you weren't brought up to be of some use. But you weren't--and it's too late."

Her eyes flashed, her bosom heaved. "WHY do I take these things from you? WHY do I invite them?"

"Because you inherit your father's magnificent persistence--and you've set your heart on the whim of making a fool of me--and you hate to give up."

"You wrong me--indeed you do," cried she. "I want to learn--I want to be of use in the world. I want to have some kind of a real life."

"Really?" 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 s.e.x. The phenomena of s.e.x 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 s.e.x relation, and that, therefore, no question can be settled right until the s.e.x 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 b.u.t.terflies 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, a.s.suming without question that she was the usual capitalistic sn.o.b with the itch for gratifying vanity by patronizing the "poor dear lower cla.s.ses," 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 pa.s.s 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: