Connie called for a moment at Shipley. The park gates, at the back, opened just near the level crossing of the colliery railway; the Shipley colliery itself stood just beyond the trees. The gates stood open, because through the park was a right-of-way that the colliers used. They hung around the park.
The car passed the ornamental ponds, in which the colliers threw their newspapers, and took the private drive to the house. It stood above, aside, a very pleasant stucco building from the middle of the eighteenth century. It had a beautiful alley of yew trees, that had approached an older house, and the hall stood serenely spread out, winking its Georgian panes as if cheerfully. Behind, there were really beautiful gardens.
Connie liked the interior much better than Wragby. It was much lighter, more alive, shapen and elegant. The rooms were panelled with creamy-painted panelling, the ceilings were touched with gilt, and everything was kept in exquisite order, all the appointments were perfect, regardless of expense. Even the corridors managed to be ample and lovely, softly curved and full of life.
Leslie Winter was alone. He had adored his house. But his park was bordered by three of his own collieries. He had been a generous man in his ideas. He had almost welcomed the colliers in his park. Had the miners not made him rich! So, when he saw the gangs of unshapely men lounging by his ornamental waters—not on the private part of the park; no, he drew the line there—he would say: “The miners are perhaps not so ornamental as deer, but they are far more profitable.”
But that was in the golden—monetarily—latter half of Queen Victoria’s reign. Miners were then “good working men.”
Winter had made this speech, half apologetic, to his guest, the then Prince of Wales. And the Prince had replied, in his rather guttural English:
“You are quite right. If there were coal under Sandringham, I would open a mine on the lawns, and think it first-rate landscape gardening. Oh, I am quite willing to exchange roe-deer for colliers, at the price. Your men are good men, too, I hear.”
But then, the Prince had perhaps an exaggerated idea of the beauty of money, and the blessings of industrialism.
However, the Prince had been a King, and the King had died, and now there was another King, whose chief function seemed to be to open soup-kitchens.
And the good working men were somehow hemming Shipley in. New mining villages crowded on the park, and the squire felt somehow that the population was alien. He used to feel, in a good-natured but quite grand way, lord of his own domain and of his own colliers. Now, by a subtle pervasion of the new spirit, he had somehow been pushed out. It was he who did not belong any more. There was no mistaking it. The mines, the industry had a will of its own, and this will was against the gentleman-owner. All the colliers took part in the will, and it was hard to live up against it. It either shoved you out of the place, or out of life altogether.
Squire Winter, a soldier, had stood it out. But he no longer cared to walk in the park after dinner. He almost hid, indoors. Once he had walked, bare-headed, and in his patent-leather shoes and purple silk socks, with Connie down to the gate, talking to her in his well-bred rather haw-haw fashion. But when it came to passing the little gangs of colliers who stood and stared without either salute or anything else, Connie felt how the lean, well-bred old man winced, winced as an elegant antelope stag in a cage winces from the vulgar stare. The colliers were not personally hostile: not at all. But their spirit was cold, and shoving him out. And deep down, there was a profound grudge. They “worked for him.” And in their ugliness, they resented his elegant, well-groomed, well-bred existence. “Who’s he!” It was the difference they resented.
And somewhere, in his secret English heart, being a good deal of a soldier, he believed they were right to resent the difference. He felt himself a little in the wrong, for having all the advantages. Nevertheless he represented a system, and he would not be shoved out.
Except by death. Which came on him soon after Connie’s call, suddenly. And he remembered Clifford handsomely in his will.
The heirs at once gave out the order for the demolishing of Shipley. It cost too much to keep up. No one would live there. So it was broken up. The avenue of yews was cut down. The park was denuded of its timber, and divided into lots. It was near enough to Uthwaite. In the strange, bald desert of this still-one-more no-man’s-land, new little streets of semi-detacheds were run up, very desirable! The Shipley Hall Estate!
Within a year of Connie’s last call, it had happened. There stood Shipley Hall Estate, an array of red-brick semi-detached “villas” in new streets. No one would have dreamed that the stucco hall had stood there twelve months before.
But this is a later stage of King Edward’s landscape gardening, the sort that has an ornamental coal-mine on the lawn.
One England blots out another. The England of the Squire Winters and the Wragby Halls was gone, dead. The blotting out was only not yet complete.
What would come after? Connie could not imagine. She could only see the new brick streets spreading into the fields, the new erections rising at the collieries, the new girls in their silk stockings, the new collier lads lounging into the Pally or the Welfare. The younger generation were utterly unconscious of the Old England. There was a gap in the continuity of consciousness, almost American: but industrial really. What next?
Connie always felt there was no next. She wanted to hide her head in the sand: or at least, in the bosom of a living man.
The world was so complicated and weird and gruesome! The common people were so many, and really, so terrible. So she thought as she was going home, and saw the colliers trailing from the pits, grey-black, distorted, one shoulder higher than the other, slurring their heavy iron-shod boots. Underground grey faces, whites of eyes rolling, necks cringing from the pit roof, shoulders out of shape. Men! Men! Alas, in some way patient and good men. In other ways, non-existent. Something that men should have was bred and killed out of them. Yet they were men. They begot children. One might bear a child to them. Terrible, terrible thought! They were good and kindly. But they were only half, only the grey half of a human being. As yet, they were “good.” But even that was the goodness of their halfness. Supposing the dead in them ever rose up! But no, it was too terrible to think of. Connie was absolutely afraid of the industrial masses. They seemed so weird to her. A life with utterly no beauty in it, no intuition, always “in the pit.”
Children from such men. Oh, God! Oh, God!
Yet Mellors had come from such a father. Not quite. Forty years had made a difference, an appalling difference in manhood. The iron and the coal had eaten deep into the bodies and souls of the men.
Incarnate ugliness, and alive! What would become of them all? Perhaps with the passing of the coal they would disappear again, off the face of the earth. They had appeared out of nowhere in their thousands, when the coal had called for them. Perhaps they were only weird fauna of the coal-seams. Creatures of another reality, they were elementals, serving the elements of coal, as the metal-workers were elementals, serving the element of iron. Men not men, but animas of coal and iron and clay. Fauna of the elements, carbon, iron, silicon: elementals. They had perhaps some of the weird, inhuman beauty of minerals, the luster of coal, the weight and blueness and resistance of iron, the transparency of glass. Elemental creatures, weird and distorted, of the mineral world! They belonged to the coal, the iron, the clay, as fish belong to the sea and worms to dead wood. The anima of mineral disintegration!
Connie was glad to be home, to bury her head in the sand. She was glad even to babble to Clifford. For her fear of the mining and iron Midlands affected her with a queer feeling that went all over her, like influenza.
“Of course, I had to have tea in Miss Bentley’s shop,” she said.
“Really! Winter would have given you tea.”
“Oh, yes, but I daren’t disappoint Miss Bentley.”
Miss Bentley was a sallow old maid with a rather large nose and romantic disposition, who served tea with a careful
intensity worthy of a sacrament.
“Did she ask after me?” said Clifford.
“Of course!—May I ask your Ladyship how Sir Clifford is?—I believe she ranks you even higher than Nurse Cavell!”
“And I suppose you said I was blooming.”
“Yes! And she looked as rapt as if I had said the heavens had opened to you. I said if she ever came to Tevershall she was to come to see you.”
“Me! Whatever for! See me!”
“Why, yes, Clifford. You can’t be so adored without making some slight return. Saint George of Cappadocia was nothing to you, in her eyes.”
“And do you think she’ll come?”
“Oh, she blushed! and looked quite beautiful for a moment, poor thing! Why don’t men marry the women who would really adore them?”
“The women start adoring too late. But did she say she’d come?”
“Oh!” Connie imitated the breathless Miss Bentley, “your Ladyship, if ever I should dare to presume!”
“Dare to presume! how absurd! But I hope to God she won’t turn up. And how was her tea?”
“Oh, Lipton’s and very strong! But, Clifford, do you realize you are the Roman de la rose of Miss Bentley and lots like her?”
“I’m not flattered, even then.”
“They treasure up every one of your pictures in the illustrated papers, and probably pray for you every night. It’s rather wonderful.”
She went upstairs to change.
That evening he said to her:
“You do think, don’t you, that there is something eternal in marriage?”
She looked at him.
“But Clifford, you make eternity sound like a lid or a long, long chain that trailed after one, no matter how far one went.”
He looked at her, annoyed.
“What I mean,” he said, “is that if you go to Venice, you won’t go in the hopes of some love affair that you can take au grand sérieux, will you?”
“A love affair in Venice au grand sérieux? No, I assure you! No, I’d never take a love affair in Venice more than au très petit sérieux.”
She spoke with a queer kind of contempt. He knitted his brows, looking at her.
Coming downstairs in the morning, she found the keeper’s dog Flossie sitting in the corridor outside Clifford’s room, and whimpering very faintly.
“Why, Flossie!” she said softly. “What are you doing here?”
And she quietly opened Clifford’s door. Clifford was sitting up in bed, with the bed-table and typewriter pushed aside, and the keeper was standing attention at the foot of the bed. Flossie ran in. With a faint gesture of head and eyes, Mellors ordered her to the door again, and she slunk out.
“Oh, good morning, Clifford!” Connie said. “I didn’t know you were so busy.” Then she looked at the keeper, saying good morning to him. He murmured his reply, looking at her as if vaguely. But she felt a whiff of passion touch her, from his mere presence.
“Did I interrupt you, Clifford? I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s nothing of any importance.”
She slipped out of the room again, and up to the blue boudoir on the first floor. She sat in the window, and saw him go down the drive, with his curious, silent motion, effaced. He had a natural sort of quiet distinction, an aloof pride, and also a certain look of frailty. A hireling! One of Clifford’s hirelings! “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.”
Was he an underling? Was he? What did he think of her?
It was a sunny day, and Connie was working in the garden, and Mrs. Bolton was helping her. For some reason, the two women had drawn together, in one of the unaccountable flows and ebbs of sympathy that exist between people. They were pegging down carnations, and putting in small plants for the summer. It was work they both liked. Connie especially felt a delight in putting the soft roots of young plants into a soft black puddle, and cradling them down. On this spring morning she felt a quiver in her womb, too, as if the sunshine had touched it and made it happy.
“It is many years since you lost your husband?” she said to Mrs. Bolton, as she took up another little plant and laid it in its hole.
“Twenty-three!” said Mrs. Bolton, as she carefully separated the young columbines into single plants. “Twenty-three years since they brought him home.”
Connie’s heart gave a lurch, at the terrible finality of it. “Brought him home!”
“Why did he get killed, do you think?” she asked. “He was happy with you?”
It was a woman’s question to a woman. Mrs. Bolton put aside a strand of hair from her face, with the back of her hand.
“I don’t know, my Lady! He sort of wouldn’t give in to things: he wouldn’t really go with the rest. And then he hated ducking his head for anything on earth. A sort of obstinacy, that gets itself killed. You see, he didn’t really care. I lay it down to the pit. He ought never to have been down the pit. But his dad made him go down, as a lad; and then, when you’re over twenty, it’s not very easy to come out.”
“Did he say he hated it?”
“Oh, no! Never! He never said he hated anything. He just made a funny face. He was one of those who wouldn’t take care: like some of the first lads as went off so blithe to the war and got killed right away. He wasn’t really wezzle-brained. But he wouldn’t care. I used to say to him: ‘You care for nought nor nobody!’ But he did! The way he sat when my first baby was born, motionless, and the sort of fatal eyes he looked at me with, when it was over! I had a bad time, but I had to comfort him. ‘It’s all right, lad, it’s all right!’ I said to him. And he gave me a look, and that funny sort of smile. He never said anything. But I don’t believe he had any right pleasure with me at nights after; he’d never really let himself go. I used to say to him: ‘Oh, let thysen go, lad!’—I’d talk broad to him sometimes. And he said nothing. But he wouldn’t let himself go, or he couldn’t. He didn’t want me to have any more children. I always blamed his mother, for letting him in th’ room. He’d no right t’ave been there. Men makes so much more of things than they should, once they start brooding.”
“Did he mind so much?” said Connie in wonder.
“Yes, he sort of couldn’t take it for natural, all that pain. And it spoilt his pleasure in his bit of married love. I said to him: If I don’t care, why should you? It’s my look-out!—But all he’d ever say was: It’s not right!”
“Perhaps he was too sensitive,” said Connie.
“That’s it! When you come to know men, that’s how they are: too sensitive in the wrong place. And I believe, unbeknown to himself, he hated the pit, just hated it. He looked so quiet when he was dead, as if he’d got free. He was such a nice-looking lad. It just broke my heart to see him, so still and pure looking, as if he’d wanted to die. Oh, it broke my heart, that did. But it was the pit.”
She wept a few bitter tears, and Connie wept more. It was a warm spring day, with a perfume of earth and of yellow flowers, many things rising to bud, and the garden still with the very sap of sunshine.
“It must have been terrible for you!” said Connie.
“Oh, my Lady! I never realized at first. I could only say: Oh, my lad, what did you want to leave me for!—That was all my cry. But somehow I felt he’d come back.”
“But he didn’t want to leave you,” said Connie.
“Oh, no, my Lady! That was only my silly cry. And I kept expecting him back. Especially at nights. I kept waking up, thinking: Why, he’s not here with me!—It was as if my feelings wouldn’t believe he’d gone. I just felt he’d have to come back and talk to me, so I could feel him with me. That was all I wanted, to feel him there with me, warm. And it took me a thousand shocks before I knew he wouldn’t come back, it took me years.”
“The touch of him,” said Connie.
“That’s it, my Lady, the touch of him! I’ve never got over it to this day, and never shall. And if there’s a heaven above, he’ll be there, and warm up against me so I can sleep.�
��
Connie glanced at the handsome, brooding face in fear. Another passionate one out of Tevershall! The touch of him! For the bonds of love are ill to loose!
“It’s terrible, once you’ve got a man into your blood!” she said.
“Oh, my Lady! And that’s what makes you feel so bitter. You feel folks wanted him killed. You feel the pit fair wanted to kill him. Oh, I felt, if it hadn’t been for the pit, an’ them as runs the pit, there’d have been no leaving me. But they all want to separate a woman and a man, if they’re together.”
“If they’re physically together,” said Connie.
“That’s right, my Lady! There’s a lot of hard-hearted folks in the world. And every morning when he got up and went to th’ pit, I felt it was wrong, wrong. But what else could he do? What can a man do?”
A queer hate flared in the woman.
“But can a touch last so long?” Connie asked suddenly. “That you could feel him so long?”
“Oh, my Lady, what else is there to last? Children grows away from you. But the man, well—! But even that they’d like to kill in you, the very thought of the touch of him. Even your own children! Ah, well! We might have drifted apart, who knows. But the feeling’s something different. It’s ‘appen better never to care. But there, when I look at women who’s never really been warmed through by a man, well, they seem to me poor dool-owls after all, no matter how they may dress up and gad. No, I’ll abide by my own. I’ve not much respect for people.”
Chapter Twelve
Connie went to the wood directly after lunch. It was really a lovely day, the first dandelions making suns, the first daisies so white. The hazel thicket was a lace-work of half-open leaves, and the last dusty perpendicular of the catkins. Yellow celandines now were in crowds, flat open, pressed back in urgency, and the yellow glitter of themselves. It was the yellow, the powerful yellow of early summer. And primroses were broad, and full of pale abandon, thick-clustered primroses no longer shy. The lush, dark green of hyacinths was a sea, with buds rising like pale corn, while in the riding the forget-me-nots were fluffing up, and columbines were unfolding their ink-purple riches, and there were bits of blue bird’s eggshell under a bush. Everywhere the bud-knots and the leap of life!
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