‘But I care more about you than the child,’ she murmured in confession. ‘I want you, more than a child.’
He drew her a little closer, warmer, and softly kissed her hair as she clung to his breast.
‘Ay!’ he said. ‘Well, I can wait.’
‘But you love me?’ she said anxiously, looking up.
He bent and kissed her face, and her eyes.
‘Ay!’ he said, in the soft, low, free voice, that at last was without care.
She clung to him, and wept. He held her tighter, and could tell he was frightened.
‘I’m only crying because it feels better between us,’ she stammered between her sobs.
‘Kiss me then!’ he murmured, in a whisper.
She lifted her face, and he kissed her eyes and her wet cheeks, wiping her wet cheeks with his own cheeks, because his hands were fast, holding her. And she laughed with a sudden catch, because he wanted to dry her face with his.
He held her very close, and very still, covering her from flies with great fronds of bracken, that sheltered him too. And she clung to him in an intense and healing stillness, that was passion itself, in its pure silence. And so she seemed to sleep, and he too, in the silence of the wood, buried among the bracken, while the afternoon passed away.
At last she said to him suddenly:
‘And I’ll come to see you in Sheffield, shall I? Shall I come to Bill’s house? We can say we’re friends.’
‘I’ll ax ’em,’ he said slowly.
‘And you’ll write to me? Write to me to my sister Hilda, and she’ll send it to me. Will you?’
‘Ay! — I can ax Bill an’ his wife when they’d like you to come. An’ then I’ll write to you.’
‘You promise! And if anything goes wrong, you’ll tell me? — I should never forgive you if you didn’t trust me — if you let anything bad happen to what is between us. Promise me you won’t betray what is between us! I don’t mind what you do. I don’t even mind so very much if you go to other women, since you can’t have me — if only you won’t damage what is between you and me. Promise mc you won’t! Promise me you’ll be true to the feeling that is between you and me. And if you do ever go to other women, go nicely and gently, and be grateful to them. And don’t tell me. If you keep your heart gentle, I shall know I haven’t lost you. The other won’t matter, if you need it.’
‘I shan’t need it,’ he said, in a stifled, low voice.
‘I don’t want you to promise that I want you to promise, if ever you do go to another woman, to be gentle with her, and feel grateful to her, and to remember, it’s me you really want.’
He kissed her gently.
‘Nay-nay!’ he said. ‘Be still! I’m not a baby. I’ve done without women when I had no woman. I can wait. I can wait.’
‘You will, won’t you?’ she said, clinging to him. ‘You will wait for me
‘Yes-yes!’
‘But I don’t want you to promise to be faithful to me. If you do want another woman, then have her, never mind. But love me with your heart, won’t you?’
‘Ay! Be still! Be still! — Shall you love me with your heart?’
‘You know I shall,’ she said.
‘And lots besides,’ he said, smiling.
‘No! No! With the heart that loves you. I shall only love you — other things will be different — not such a warm heart. —And you won’t love anybody with the same heart you love me with, will you? I don’t mind if you love them with another heart.’
‘No,’ he laughed. ‘I doubt I shan’t love anybody, with any heart of any sort, warm nor cold.’
‘Yes you will!’ she said. ‘You love Bill a bit, don’t you?’
He pondered.’
‘Ay!’ he said. ‘If you may call it love.’
‘And perhaps you’ll love his children a bit — and his wife, just a bit. If you live with them, you ought to. Think how you loved Flossie! — too much, really.’
He winced.
‘Ay !’ he said. ‘Then she pays for it — an’ me.’
‘Love them a bit, but don’t love them too much, will you!’ she pleaded.
‘Shall you measure for me?’ he laughed.
‘Yes! Yes! I’ll measure for you, if you’ll let me. Now give me your pocket-book, and let me write Hilda’s address, and you write yours.’
He got his coat, and found the little memorandum book. Connie wrote Hilda’s address, and he read it. Then he wrote Bill Tewson’s address, and gave her the leaf.
‘And we won’t say goodbye!’ she said. ‘Because you love me, don’t you?’
‘Yes! I’ll say it again. Yes! Will that do?’
‘And you’ll write to me soon, won’t you?’
‘Soon!’ he said.
‘If you don’t, I shall just come. And promise me you won’t be miserable.’
‘No no!’ he said, kissing her with sudden quickness. ‘Tha’s cured me! I’m a’ right!’
His voice was soft and grateful, and tears flew to her eyes.
‘So remember!’ she said, beginning to cry, and laughing at the same time, as she drew away. ‘I want to go now. I want you to stay there, till I’m gone. Don’t say goodbye!’ At each sentence, she drew a little further off, and sticks cracked under her feet. ‘But remember!’ she said, looking back again.
‘I shan’t forget,’ he said gently.’
And she hurried away into the hazel-thicket, crying her tears in a sort of relief.
He watched her go, till she was far gone. Then he sighed and put on his coat. After all, nothing mattered very much, if one kept peace in one’s heart, peace for the woman and peace for oneself. He realised this, and for the moment kept true to the peace, and let the circumstances wait.
CHAPTER XV
Connie found it hard to settle down again in Wragby. She could not get back inside the life. She realised she was outside and that to pretend she was inside didn’t work any more. Clifford recovered from his inertia, and had a certain access of energy. But he had ceased to be a man to her. He was a circumstance, not a man. He wasn’t even a creature: he was something circumstantial and not quite natural.
The whole place was like that: indeed, the whole of the Midlands. Since she was back, she could not get into it again. She stood mysteriously outside, looking at it all from the outside. And it gave her a sense of sadness more acute than anything she had ever known. It was a sense of doom. Doom, doom, impending, inevitable doom! This she saw in the Midlands’ sky, and on the Midlands’ earth. It looked at her out of all the faces, Clifford’s, Mrs Bolton’s, the colliers’, the rector’s — they all walked with unconscious and impending doom upon them It was worse than Aeschylus, worse than any House of Atreus. Even the fat, energetic Field, with his quick smile and his comfortable appearance, had a look of innocent apprehension, a furtive dread of something, in his small blue eyes that were like the eyes of a sprightly young pig, only not so hysterical.
It was as if the place had died, in some mysterious way. The-whole terrible region of the Midlands of England seemed to her like a heart that has stopped beating, in a body warm but dead. And especially the colliers seemed like ghosts, ghouls, not men. They were passing back into the strange life of elementals, the elementality of lemurs or of angels. Angels, thrones, ministers and powers! — She could not remember how the heavenly hierarchy was arranged. But there was an infernal hierarchy to correspond. And these people were part of the ‘infernal hierarchy, something that frightened her, as being elemental, and less than a created being.
Clifford seemed to her really weird. He now had Mrs Bolton behind him, as a man has his daimon or familiar spirit behind him. And he was quite unaware. He was quite unaware how he was no longer an individual, how he was part of a weird duality with Ivy Bolton. He thought he was the master, Sir Clifford, and she was the servant. But it was not so at all.
Mrs Bolton had in some way fused her strange, pale, revengeful soul with his. She was as unconscious of it, almost, as he was. And she
was certainly unconscious of the drive she lent him. A weird, but powerful impetus came out of the pair of them. It was an urge and a force and a direction derived from the unison of their two souls. And it drove Clifford into ‘business’, weirdly.
Connie held her breath to see the curious intensity with which, when he roused again from his depression, he entered into the serious business of rejuvenating the mines, to make them pay. He seemed to lose his consciousness of everything else. Even himself, his health, his own egoism, he lost in the strange intense raptus of ‘business’. He was gone, he was no longer a human being, but an elemental, caught up in a weird inspiration, a raptus. The exhausted mines were going to be made to pay. And his soul, fired by the strange pallid breath of Mrs Bolton, had passed into a permanent ecstasy, the long-enduring ecstasy of the struggle with uncanny Matter. It was as if he fused himself into the very existence of coal and sulphur and petroleum and rock, and lost his humanity, as the trolls have lost theirs, in iron. It was not the human mind triumphing over matter, as in real science. No, he had gone beyond that. It was the human soul worshipping in ecstasy at the mystery of Matter, to draw out the very blood of Matter, gold. It was an intense and ecstatic form of idolatry. A great portion of his consciousness seemed to have lapsed out, like a flame blown out. And what remained of him was this idolatrous ecstasy at the shrine of Matter.
Connie suddenly understood the hatred of ‘inspiration’, in Plato. In the days of Socrates, men must have been very frequently in this state of awful intoxication, when they were not themselves, but mere instruments of the howling elements. Raving poets, raving orators, raving bacchanals, raving oracles, none of them in possession of themselves, but possessed by some mere raving force.
That had been the danger of the Greeks: to lose themselves, and be possessed of some raving force. They too had the mad egoism, and the insane love of money. And here it was again, after three thousand years of idealism, the same loss of self, the same ‘inspiration’, the lapsing into the possession of the raving materialist forces.
And yet one must not possess oneself either, too absolutely. There were these elemental forces which possessed people and made them weird, the infernal hierarchier. But there was also the God-mystery, the breeze of God, with which one must travel. One had to know the distinction, even here in the great invisible influences.
But Clifford had lost the power of distinguishing. He had gone over. He was in the intoxication of the material forces, the raptus of mechanical inspiration. He had launched into extensive business activities, raised large sums of money. Wragby was mortgaged as far as it could be: and the most elaborate, expensive, and ultra-modern plant was being set up not only at Tevershall pit, but at New England, High Park and Crosshill. The four pits were to be worked in conjunction, under an intense pressure. And they were going to pay. In this, their last lap, they would make Clifford’s fortune, a modern fortune. And after that, let the skies fall if they wanted to.
He was so sure of success, that he spent almost lavishly on himself and on the household. He bought a new car, and gave Connie the old one: which after all was only a few months old. He talked of hiring a second chauffeur, for Connie. But she wouldn’t have it. He had a man-servant to wait at table and do footman’s duties. He contemplated the repairs for Wragby. And he raised Mrs Bolton’s wage.
He was, in fact, carried away into business, as into a rapture. He spent many hours at the mines, and was gone for hours to Sheffield, Nottingham, even Leeds, on ‘business’, taking with him only the faithful Field, who served him as valet and nurse, gentle as any woman, but a little doomed in his willingness. — And when Clifford’s energy fell, and ‘business’ went out of him, then he would sit for hours, vacant as an empty whelk-shell, listening to the radio. With a blank, absorbed face, almost like a cretin who might have been a prophet, he would sit motionless, listening to the loud speaker. Connie refused to have the thing going at meal-times. So he would rush through his meal, no longer noticing what he ate, no longer anxious about ‘nourishment’, bolting his food in a blank absorption, to get back to the radio. And there he would sit, like an empty shell, with the noise of the thing rattling through him.
He would have bursts of talk: politics, especially politics which touched on property, wages, mines, and he talked with a weird inspiration, as if property itself was talking. If the pit could have uttered speech up its vast throat, and the great fan-wheels, like two lips, have softly, rushingly, spoken, they might have said what Clifford said. Property must be kept alive, men must adapt themselves. Men must adapt their very souls to coal; minds and souls as well as bodies, for coal is not adaptable except in a very small range.
Another change in him was that often, in the night, instead of gambling — though he and Mrs Bolton gambled a certain amount every day, or every night — he would have Mrs Bolton read aloud to him. The card games, foolish little gambling games like pontoon, were an old institution between them. It excited Mrs Bolton intensely. The red spots showed in her cheeks, and she would sit up till the small hours of the morning, in the dead silence of Wragby, exchanging sixpences with him, as they played the cards, he lying in bed. Pontoon is a quick game, and some evenings she would lose eighteen shillings, even more, to him. Which for a woman in her position was impossible.
‘You’re a lucky devil!’ she said fiercely, as she flung the money on the bed. For she would always pay up on the spot.
And he was not offended, so deep was he in the game, and in the night.
Indeed he was rather lucky than unlucky, so she was the loser. So he made a bargain with her.
‘Look here!’ he said. ‘You can’t afford to play pontoon and lose. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll give you twenty pounds every six months, for being my partner. And if I can win it back from you, I will.’
‘I shan’t have it,’ she said.
‘Then I shan’t play with you — I’ll play chess again.’
She loved the gamble as much as he did, so she gave way, and the two gamblers went at it with renewed zest.
But then, as a variation, he got her to read to him. And she would read such books as Jane Eyre, or Wuthering Heights, or a best-seller like The Steadfast Sylph. And he, his critical faculty entirely in abeyance, would lie and listen with the same blank-absorbed face as when he listened to the loud speaker. Constance saw him once: though usually the pair neither played cards nor read aloud while she was about. But once she saw him, with the extraordinary, vacant, unconscious look on his face, as he unconsciously listened, and fear overcame her again. He looked a mixture of an idiot and a corpse: something essentially dead, yet idiotically alive. And it shocked her so much, she had to hide the memory from herself.
In the past, a book like Jane Eyre had just seemed to him ridiculous, and Wuthering Heights just a morbid affair with not an idea in it. But now he listened with a kind of babyish relaxation, and in a queer, absent way was tickled, or thrilled. He was not really interested. It was more like a pleasant tickling, that enervated rather than stimulated him. He could not bear to be stimulated. He could not bear to have to pull himself together. He wanted to relax and relax and relax, and then to be carried away in the weird rapture of ‘business’. That was orgiastic to him.
And now, he was afraid of Connie, of her criticism, of her look. So he was either vacantly humble or irritably sulky with her. He was terribly conscious of her. He always wanted to know where she was. ‘Where’s her ladyship?’ was his first question, when he had been out, or anyone had called. And Mrs Bolton had to tell him. As soon as he knew, he was content. But he had to know that Connie was somewhere about.
He did not want her actually present. In fact, he preferred it now when she was not actually with him. She strung him up, and he didn’t want to be strung up. He wanted to relax, and relax, and relax, under the influence of Mrs Bolton and of Field: and then gather himself up, like some sudden boneless octopus, to grapple deep underseas with ‘business’. So he was always uneasy when Connie
was actually there, for fear she should ‘say something to him’. He didn’t want to have anything said to him.
Yet when she was out of the house, and he didn’t know where she was, he was tortured with anxiety. She saw now, it was even the torturing anxiety of her absence which had made him risk the going on crutches. He had done it, he said, for her sake. And Mrs Bolton likewise had urged him to do it, because ‘her ladyship would be so pleased’. Even this ecstasy of business, he had gone into it for Connie’s sake. And Mrs Bolton stimulated him by saying: ‘It will be nice for her ladyship when she isn’t quite so tied for money! It will be nice for her when she can have her own car and driver! — It will be nice when she can travel with her own maid again! — It will be nice when she can keep up all the style in Wragby that she’d be so clever at!’
Poor Connie! All this, the last thing on earth that she really wanted, was for her sake. Mrs Bolton and Clifford were like a couple of fiendish conspirators, conspiring to throw the golden net of Mammon over her, and hold her down. At first she was puzzled, and touched. It did seem unselfish of them. And when Mrs Bolton said: ‘It’s a different house when your ladyship is away. The soul seems fair gone out of the place when you’re not there, and as if there was nothing to live for —’ then Connie knew that the woman was sincere. She was not putting it on. Both Clifford and Mrs Bolton needed Connie in the house.
They were both alike, both were best pleased when she was safe in bed, or safe in her room up two flights of stairs. They didn’t want her actually with them, But she must be in the house. That made them feel safe, and free to play their own little game. They felt a sort of nakedness, and a sort of helplessness, like shell-fish that have lost their shells. But when she was there, they were as happy as molluscs covered by the sea.
She had at first been caught, and had felt grateful to them. But then a deep depression, a sense of deathliness and ghoulish despair had come over her, and she had reacted. She reacted in revulsion, and found both Clifford and Mrs Bolton deeply repulsive to her. And she knew she would have to depart, to leave Wragby for good. They wanted to prostitute her very soul, drag down her real woman’s soul and choke it with a slime of money. She would have to go. The atmosphere of the place was awful and obscene. She must go, for her own sake, the sake of her own decency. Parkin or no Parkin, child or no child, she must go. If she were penniless, and had to go and be a servant or a waitress in a tea-shop, she must go. She knew it, and gradually, in silence, began to free herself.
John Thomas and Lady Jane Page 39
