Women in Love

He did not care whether they made way with alacrity, or grudgingly. He

did not care what they thought of him. His vision had suddenly

crystallised. Suddenly he had conceived the pure instrumentality of

mankind. There had been so much humanitarianism, so much talk of

sufferings and feelings. It was ridiculous. The sufferings and feelings

of individuals did not matter in the least. They were mere conditions,

like the weather. What mattered was the pure instrumentality of the

individual. As a man as of a knife: does it cut well? Nothing else

mattered.

Everything in the world has its function, and is good or not good in so

far as it fulfils this function more or less perfectly. Was a miner a

good miner? Then he was complete. Was a manager a good manager? That

was enough. Gerald himself, who was responsible for all this industry,

was he a good director? If he were, he had fulfilled his life. The rest

was by-play.

The mines were there, they were old. They were giving out, it did not

pay to work the seams. There was talk of closing down two of them. It

was at this point that Gerald arrived on the scene.

He looked around. There lay the mines. They were old, obsolete. They

were like old lions, no more good. He looked again. Pah! the mines were

nothing but the clumsy efforts of impure minds. There they lay,

abortions of a half-trained mind. Let the idea of them be swept away.

He cleared his brain of them, and thought only of the coal in the under

earth. How much was there?

There was plenty of coal. The old workings could not get at it, that

was all. Then break the neck of the old workings. The coal lay there in

its seams, even though the seams were thin. There it lay, inert matter,

as it had always lain, since the beginning of time, subject to the will

of man. The will of man was the determining factor. Man was the archgod

of earth. His mind was obedient to serve his will. Man's will was the

absolute, the only absolute.

And it was his will to subjugate Matter to his own ends. The

subjugation itself was the point, the fight was the be-all, the fruits

of victory were mere results. It was not for the sake of money that

Gerald took over the mines. He did not care about money, fundamentally.

He was neither ostentatious nor luxurious, neither did he care about

social position, not finally. What he wanted was the pure fulfilment of

his own will in the struggle with the natural conditions. His will was

now, to take the coal out of the earth, profitably. The profit was

merely the condition of victory, but the victory itself lay in the feat

achieved. He vibrated with zest before the challenge. Every day he was

in the mines, examining, testing, he consulted experts, he gradually

gathered the whole situation into his mind, as a general grasps the

plan of his campaign.