Women in Love

Gerald was a boy at the time of the strike, but he longed to be a man,

to fight the colliers. The father however was trapped between two

halftruths, and broken. He wanted to be a pure Christian, one and equal

with all men. He even wanted to give away all he had, to the poor. Yet

he was a great promoter of industry, and he knew perfectly that he must

keep his goods and keep his authority. This was as divine a necessity

in him, as the need to give away all he possessed--more divine, even,

since this was the necessity he acted upon. Yet because he did NOT act

on the other ideal, it dominated him, he was dying of chagrin because

he must forfeit it. He wanted to be a father of loving kindness and

sacrificial benevolence. The colliers shouted to him about his

thousands a year. They would not be deceived.

When Gerald grew up in the ways of the world, he shifted the position.

He did not care about the equality. The whole Christian attitude of

love and self-sacrifice was old hat. He knew that position and

authority were the right thing in the world, and it was useless to cant

about it. They were the right thing, for the simple reason that they

were functionally necessary. They were not the be-all and the end-all.

It was like being part of a machine. He himself happened to be a

controlling, central part, the masses of men were the parts variously

controlled. This was merely as it happened. As well get excited because

a central hub drives a hundred outer wheels or because the whole

universe wheels round the sun. After all, it would be mere silliness to

say that the moon and the earth and Saturn and Jupiter and Venus have

just as much right to be the centre of the universe, each of them

separately, as the sun. Such an assertion is made merely in the desire

of chaos.

Without bothering to THINK to a conclusion, Gerald jumped to a

conclusion. He abandoned the whole democratic-equality problem as a

problem of silliness. What mattered was the great social productive

machine. Let that work perfectly, let it produce a sufficiency of

everything, let every man be given a rational portion, greater or less

according to his functional degree or magnitude, and then, provision

made, let the devil supervene, let every man look after his own

amusements and appetites, so long as he interfered with nobody.

So Gerald set himself to work, to put the great industry in order. In

his travels, and in his accompanying readings, he had come to the

conclusion that the essential secret of life was harmony. He did not

define to himself at all clearly what harmony was. The word pleased

him, he felt he had come to his own conclusions. And he proceeded to

put his philosophy into practice by forcing order into the established

world, translating the mystic word harmony into the practical word

organisation.