al has rights, bargain with it, but for us there
can be only one bargain, complete surrender of the tools to the workers.
For the capitalists are parasites who suck your blood and your children's
blood. From now on there can be no compromise, no truce, no peace until
they are exterminated. It is war." War! In Janet's soul the word
resounded like a tocsin. And again, as when swept along East Street with
the mob, that sense of identity with these people and their wrongs, of
submergence with them in their cause possessed her. Despite her ancestry,
her lot was cast with them. She, too, had been precariously close to
poverty, had known the sordidness of life; she, too, and Lise and Hannah
had been duped and cheated of the fairer things. Eagerly she had drunk in
the vocabulary of that new and terrible philosophy. The master class must
be exterminated! Was it not true, if she had been of that class, that
Ditmar would not have dared to use and deceive her? Why had she never
thought of these things before?... The light was beginning to fade, the
great meeting was breaking up, and yet she lingered. At the foot of the
bandstand steps, conversing with a small group of operatives that
surrounded him, she perceived the man who had just spoken. And as she
stood hesitating, gazing at him, a desire to hear more, to hear all of
this creed he preached, that fed the fires in her soul, urged her
forward. Her need, had she known it, was even greater than that of these
toilers whom she now called comrades. Despite some qualifying reserve she
felt, and which had had to do with the redness of his lips, he attracted
her. He had a mind, an intellect, he must possess stores of the knowledge
for which she thirsted; he appeared to her as one who had studied and
travelled, who had ascended heights and gained the wider view denied her.
A cynical cosmopolitanism would have left her cold, but here, apparently,
was a cultivated man burning with a sense of the world's wrongs. Ditmar,
who was to have led her out of captivity, had only thrust her the deeper
into bondage.... She joined the group, halting on the edge of it,
listening. Rolfe was arguing with a man about the labour unions, but
almost at once she knew she had fixed his attention. From time to time,
as he talked, his eyes sought hers boldly, and in their dark pupils were
tiny points of light that stirred and confused her, made her wonder what
was behind them, in his soul. When he had finished his ar