Like bells, certain words and names rang out in signal—war-lords, wage slave, master class. Through the months with Hilary Wainwright Anne had heard them often and used them herself glibly. Now she felt that she would never again be able to utter them. As Hilda stripped the facts of birth and love to their biological skeletons, so these men and women stripped the words of their conventional acceptance, their usefulness as tags of common understanding, and released raging genii to perform their tasks. After such a meeting the surface of her body was covered with a clammy dampness.
But no torrent of unleashed hatred chilled Roger or made him cold and weak. Coming, at the end of May, from the largest meeting they had attended, Anne felt Roger throbbing with enthusiasm, even after they had walked blocks under the peaceful stars.
"Wasn't Tom great?" he demanded for the third time, unconscious that Anne had not answered. "When he talks as he did to-night he makes me think of Christ driving the money changers from the temple."
"The Bible would never have remained literature if Christ had ranted like that."
"It isn't ranting, Anne. He sees things like that, literally sees the workers slaves, just as bound and owned by capitalistic pressure as ever a black African savage was owned by a Southern cotton planter. He sees the 'masters' in their great Wall Street offices just as clearly as any master with the legal right to beat his slave." Roger tried to speak patiently, but sometimes the shadings of Anne's sensitiveness rasped him as much as this "ranting" rasped Anne. Was it really her dislike of Black Tom, what she insisted on calling the "coarseness of his moral fiber," that made her blind to the man's sincerity? Could not, or would not, Anne see above and beyond this single breach of the world's standard? Roger did not know. And, like Anne, fleeing before the definite revelation of the difference between herself and Roger, Roger, too, hurried away.
There was a pause and then Roger said:
"That was the biggest collection I've ever seen taken up at a meeting. Carson certainly can get the cash."
Anne saw, as if he had been there in the night before her, the thin, bowed shoulders of Robert Carson butted out over the edge of the platform in the final gesture he always took before defying the audience not to "give and give their all." His lank, black hair fell in a long side lock across his high forehead, his black eyes burned in his pale, thin face. She shivered.
"It's terrible to use hate like that, or pain, or any feeling, fan it to that white heat and then mint money from it."
Roger bit his lip. "It isn't hate or any pain. It's not a destroying force. It's the demand for universal justice and the right to Beauty that centuries of oppression have not been able to kill. It's love, Anne, not hate."