“And you told Sir Robert at Nagasaki. Have you forgotten that?”
This seemed to sting him. “How do you know I did?” he asked sharply.
“He told me. We talked you over. I asked him about the legal possibility of placing you under some sort of restraint.”
Curiously, this didn't anger him. He merely looked puzzled. I wonder if I am doomed to remain ineffectual to the last—an odd, scientific little person, to be humored by the practical men of this rough-and-ready world, even in their least practical moments.
“I don't get you, Eckhart,” said he. “What have you to do with my affairs?”
“At this moment—everything,” I answered him, feeling suddenly very sad.
Sad, because it came to me that you can not talk intelligently with another human being without a common language. And this, I knew all at once, Crocker and I did not have. I had thought of many things that I should say to him; now I had lost confidence in all of them, for I realized that the word which means one thought to me would mean another and different thought to him. Each of us would have to interpret words and phrases in the light of his own mental images. And the mental images of each were outgrowths of his individual philosophy of life.
Yes, my arguments, that had, on the way over, seemed so potent, would not do now. In order to reach that mind of his, I must think in his terms and not in my own. And I tried, desperately, to piece together something like his code, as I sat there.... That man is a free and dominant creature, half god, half beast; that a small, sheltered section of womankind is of superior, almost divine stuff, designed to comfort and elevate man on his god side, to bear his children and, under his own general government, “keep his house,” while the other and greater section of this same womankind is mysteriously of poorer stuff, and is worthy only to do his rougher work at such a wage as can be wrung from him or (in a pitifully matter-of-fact way) to cater to the vices of his beast side—something like this was surely Crocker's sort of philosophy.
I tried to bring myself to realize what this meant. Holding so curious a faith, it was surely natural enough that he should have tried to force poor Heloise's life into his own hard mold of thought and habit. Nor is it unnatural that he should have been outraged when this lovely possession turned in despair from the atmosphere of suppression and inactivity in which he had been so determined to keep her and tried, blunderingly, all wrong, to find an outlet for the fine spirit stirring in the depths of her being.
For this was rebellion. And Crocker, I can see, hates rebellion. His sort always do. He is profoundly a conventional man, even in his vices.