She sat and watched him, with the faintest touch of a grim smile on her handsome mouth.
“How do you mean, live with you?” she said.
“Oh — I mean what it usually means,” he said, with a little puff of self-conscious laughter.
“You’re evidently not happy here. You’re evidently in the wrong circumstances altogether. You’re obviously not just an ordinary woman. Well, then, break away. When I say, Come and live with me, I mean just what I say. Come to London and live with me, as my wife, if you like, and then if we want to marry, when you get a divorce, why, we can do it.”
Jimmy made this speech more to himself than to the woman. That was how he was. He worked out all his things inside himself, as if it were all merely an interior problem of his own. And while he did so, he had an odd way of squinting his left eye and wagging his head loosely, like a man talking absolutely to himself, and turning his eyes inwards.
The woman watched him in a sort of wonder. This was something she was not used to. His extraordinary manner, and his extraordinary bald proposition, roused her from her own tense apathy.
“Well!” she said. “That’s got to be thought about. What about her?” — and again she jerked her head towards the round-eyed child in the corner. Jane sat with a completely expressionless face, her little red mouth fallen a little open. She seemed in a sort of trance: as if she understood like a grown-up person, but, as a child, sat in a trance, unconscious.
The mother wheeled round in her chair and stared at her child. The little girl stared back at her mother, with hot, troubled, almost guilty blue eyes. And neither said a word. Yet they seemed to exchange worlds of meaning.
“Why, of course,” said Jimmy, twisting his head again; “she’d come, too.”
The woman gave a last look at her child, then turned to him, and started watching him with that slow, straight stare.
“It’s not” — he began, stuttering — ”it’s not anything sudden and unconsidered on my part. I’ve been considering it for quite a long time — ever since I had the first poem, and your letter.”
He spoke still with his eyes turned inwards, talking to himself.” And the woman watched him unflinchingly.
“Before you ever saw me?” she asked, with a queer irony.
“Oh, of course. Of course before I ever saw you. Or else I never should have seen you. From the very first, I had a definite feeling — ”
He made odd, sharp gestures, like a drunken man, and he spoke like a drunken man, his eyes turned inward, talking to himself. The woman was no more than a ghost moving inside his own consciousness, and he was addressing her there.
The actual woman sat outside looking on in a sort of wonder. This was really something new to her.
“And now you see me, do you want me, really, to come to London?”
She spoke in a dull tone of incredulity. The thing was just a little preposterous to her. But why not? It would have to be something a little preposterous, to get her out of the tomb she was in.
“Of course I do!” he cried, with another scoop of his head and scoop of his hand. “Now I do actually want you, now I actually see you.” He never looked at her. His eyes were still turned in. He was still talking to himself, in a sort of drunkenness with himself.
To her, it was something extraordinary. But it roused her from apathy.
He became aware of the hot blue eyes of the hot-cheeked little girl fixed upon him from the distant corner. And he gave a queer little giggle.
“Why, it’s more than I could ever have hoped for,” he said, “to have you and Jane to live with me! Why, it will mean life to me.” He spoke in an odd, strained voice, slightly delirious. And for the first time he looked up at the woman and, apparently, straight at her. But, even as he seemed to look straight at her, the curious cast was in his eye, and he was only looking at himself, inside himself, at the shadows inside his own consciousness.
“And when would you like me to come?” she asked, rather coldly.
“Why, as soon as possible. Come back with me to-morrow, if you will. I’ve got a little house in St John’s Wood, waiting for you. Come with me to-morrow. That’s the simplest.”
She watched him for some time, as he sat with ducked head. He looked like a man who is drunk — drunk with himself. He was going bald at the crown, his rather curly black hair was thin.
“I couldn’t come to-morrow, I should need a few days,” she said.
She wanted to see his face again. It was as if she could not remember what his face was like, this strange man who had appeared out of nowhere, with such a strange proposition.
He lifted his face, his eyes still cast in that inturned, blind look. He looked now like a Mephistopheles who has gone blind. With his black brows cocked up, Mephistopheles, Mephistopheles blind and begging in the street.
“Why, of course it’s wonderful that it’s happened like this for me,” he said, with odd pouting emphasis, pushing out his lips. “I was finished, absolutely finished. I was finished while Clarissa was with me. But after she’d gone, I was absolutely finished. And I thought there was no chance for me in the world again. It seems to me perfectly marvellous that this has happened — that I’ve come across you — ” he lifted his face sightlessly — ”and Jane — Jane — why she’s really too good to be true.” He gave a slight hysterical laugh. “She really is.”
The woman, and Jane, watched him with some embarrassment.
“I shall have to settle up here, with Mr Pinnegar,” she said, rather coldly musing. “Do you want to see him?”
“Oh, I — ” he said, with a deprecating gesture, “I don’t care. But if you think I’d better — why, certainly — ”
“I do think you’d better,” she said.
“Very well, then, I will. I’ll see him whenever you like.”
“He comes in soon after nine,” she said.
“All right, I’ll see him then. Much better. But I suppose I’d better see about finding a place to sleep first. Better not leave it too late.”
“I’ll come with you and ask for you.”
“Oh, you’d better not, really. If you tell me where to go — ”
He had taken on a protective tone: he was protecting her against herself and against scandal. It was his manner, his rather Oxfordy manner, more than anything else, that went beyond her. She wasn’t used to it.
Jimmy plunged out into the gulfing blackness of the Northern night, feeling how horrible it was, but pressing his hat on his brow in a sense of strong adventure. He was going through with it.
At the baker’s shop, where she had suggested he should ask for a bed, they would have none of him. Absolutely they didn’t like the looks of him. At the Pub, too, they shook their heads: didn’t want to have anything to do with him. But, in a voice more expostulatingly Oxford than ever, he said:
“But look here — you can’t ask a man to sleep under one of these hedges. Can’t I see the landlady?”
He persuaded the landlady to promise to let him sleep on the big, soft settee in the parlour, where the fire was burning brightly. Then, saying he would be back about ten, he returned through mud and drizzle up New London Lane.
The child was in bed, a saucepan was boiling by the fire. Already the lines had softened a little in the woman’s face.
She spread a cloth on the table. Jimmy sat in silence, feeling that she was hardly aware of his presence. She was absorbed, no doubt, in the coming of her husband. The stranger merely sat on the sofa, and waited. He felt himself wound up tight. And once he was really wound up, he could go through with anything.
They heard the nine-o’clock whistle at the mine. The woman then took the saucepan from the fire and went into the scullery. Jimmy could smell the smell of potatoes being strained. He sat quite still. There was nothing for him to do or to say. He was wearing his big black-rimmed spectacles, and his face, blank and expressionless in the suspense of waiting, looked like the death-mask of some sceptical philosopher, who could wait through
the ages, and who could hardly distinguish life from death at any time.
Came the heavy-shod tread up the house entry, and the man entered, rather like a blast of wind. The fair moustache stuck out from the blackish, mottled face, and the fierce blue eyes rolled their whites in the coal-blackened sockets.
“This gentleman is Mr Frith,” said Emily Pinnegar.
Jimmy got up, with a bit of an Oxford wriggle, and held out his hand, saying: “How do you do?”
His grey eyes, behind the spectacles, had an uncanny whitish gleam.
“My hand’s not fit to shake hands,” said the miner. “Take a seat.”
“Oh, nobody minds coal-dust,” said Jimmy, subsiding on to the sofa. “It’s clean dirt.”
“They say so,” said Pinnegar.
He was a man of medium height, thin, but energetic in build.
Mrs Pinnegar was running hot water into a pail from the bright brass tap of the stove, which had a boiler to balance the oven. Pinnegar dropped heavily into a wooden armchair, and stooped to pull off his ponderous grey pit-boots. He smelled of the strange, stale underground. In silence he pulled on his slippers, then rose, taking his boots into the scullery. His wife followed with the pail of hot water. She returned and spread a coarse roller-towel on the steel fender. The man could be heard washing in the scullery, in the semi-dark. Nobody said anything. Mrs Pinnegar attended to her husband’s dinner.
After a while, Pinnegar came running in, naked to the waist, and squatted plumb in front of the big red fire, on his heels. His head and face and the front part of his body were all wet. His back was grey and unwashed. He seized the towel from the fender and began to rub his face and head with a sort of brutal vigour, while his wife brought a bowl, and with a soapy flannel silently washed his back, right down to the loins, where the trousers were rolled back. The man was entirely oblivious of the stranger — this washing was part of the collier’s ritual, and nobody existed for the moment. The woman, washing her husband’s back, stooping there as he kneeled with knees wide apart, squatting on his heels on the rag hearthrug, had a peculiar look on her strong, handsome face, a look sinister and derisive. She was deriding something or somebody; but Jimmy could not make out whom or what.
It was a new experience for him to sit completely and brutally excluded, from a personal ritual. The collier vigorously rubbed his own fair short hair, till it all stood on end, then he stared into the red-hot fire, oblivious, while the red colour burned in his cheeks. Then again he rubbed his breast and his body with the rough towel, brutally, as if his body were some machine he was cleaning, while his wife, with a peculiar slow movement, dried his back with another towel.
She took away the towel and bowl. The man was dry. He still squatted with his hands on his knees, gazing abstractedly, blankly into the fire. That, too, seemed part of his daily ritual. The colour flushed in his cheeks, his fair moustache was rubbed on end. But his hot blue eyes stared hot and vague into the red coals, while the red glare of the coal fell on his breast and naked body.
He was a man of about thirty-five, in his prime, with a pure smooth skin and no fat on his body. His muscles were not large, but quick, alive with energy. And as he squatted bathing abstractedly in the glow of the fire, he seemed like some pure-moulded engine that sleeps between its motions, with incomprehensible eyes of dark iron-blue.
He looked round, always averting his face from the stranger on the sofa, shutting him out of consciousness. The wife took out a bundle from the dresser-cupboard, and handed it to the out-stretched, work-scarred hand of the man on the hearth. Curious, that big, horny, work-battered clean hand, at the end of the suave, thin naked arm.
Pinnegar unrolled his shirt and undervest in front of the fire, warmed them for a moment in the glow, vaguely, sleepily, then pulled them over his head. And then at last he rose, with his shirt hanging over his trousers, and in the same abstract, sleepy way, shutting the world out of his consciousness, he went out again to the scullery, pausing at the same dresser-cupboard to take out his rolled-up day trousers.
Mrs Pinnegar took away the towels and set the dinner on the table — rich, oniony stew out of a hissing brown stew-jar, boiled potatoes, and a cup of tea. The man returned from the scullery, in his clean flannelette shirt and black trousers, his fair hair neatly brushed. He planked his wooden armchair beside the table, and sat heavily down, to eat.
Then he looked at Jimmy, as one wary, probably hostile man looks at another.
“You’re a stranger in these parts, I gather?” he said. There was something slightly formal, even a bit pompous, in his speech.
“An absolute stranger,” replied Jimmy, with a slight aside grin.
The man dabbed some mustard on his plate, and glanced at his food to see if he would like it.
“Come from a distance, do you?” he asked, as he began to eat. As he ate, he seemed to become oblivious again of Jimmy, bent his head over his plate, and ate. But probably he was ruminating something all the time, with barbaric wariness.
“From London,” said Jimmy, warily.
“London!” said Pinnegar, without looking from his plate.
Mrs Pinnegar came and sat, in ritualistic silence, in her tail-backed rocking-chair under the light.
“What brings you this way, then?” asked Pinnegar, stirring his tea.
“Oh!” Jimmy writhed a little on the sofa. “I came to see Mrs Pinnegar.”
The miner took a hasty gulp of tea.
“You’re acquainted then, are you?” he said, still without looking round. He sat with his side-face to Jimmy.
“Yes, we are now,” explained Jimmy. “I didn’t know Mrs Pinnegar till this evening. As a matter of fact, she sent me some poems for the Commentator — I’m the editor — and I thought they were good, so I wrote and told her so. Then I felt I wanted to come and see her, and she was willing, so I came.”
The man reached out, cut himself a piece of bread, and swallowed a large mouthful.
“You thought her poetry was good?” he said, turning at last to Jimmy and looking straight at him, with a stare something like the child’s, but aggressive. “Are you going to put it in your magazine?”
“Yes, I think I am,” said Jimmy.
“I never read but one of her poems — something about a collier she knew all about, because she’d married him,” he said, in his peculiar harsh voice, that had a certain jeering clang in it, and a certain indomitableness.
Jimmy was silent. The other man’s harsh fighting-voice made him shrink.
“I could never get on with the Commentator myself,” said Pinnegar, looking round for his pudding, pushing his meat-plate aside. “Seems to me to go a long way round to get nowhere.”
“Well, probably it does,” said Jimmy, squirming a little. “But so long as the way is interesting! I don’t see that anything gets anywhere at present — certainly no periodical.”
“I don’t know,” said Pinnegar. “There’s some facts in the Liberator — and there’s some ideas in the Janus. I can’t see the use myself, of all these feelings folk say they have. They get you nowhere.”
“But,” said Jimmy, with a slight pouf of laughter, “where do you want to get? It’s all very well talking about getting somewhere, but where, where in the world to-day do you want to get? In general, I mean. If you want a better job in the mine — all right, go ahead and get it. But when you begin to talk about getting somewhere in life — why, you’ve got to know what you’re talking about.”
“I’m a man, aren’t I?” said the miner, going very still and hard.
“But what do you mean, when you say you’re a man?” snarled Jimmy, really exasperated. “What do you mean? Yes, you are a man. But what about it?”
“Haven’t I the right to say I won’t be made use of?” said the collier, slow, harsh, and heavy.
“You’ve got a right to say it,” retorted Jimmy, with a pouf of laughter. “But it doesn’t mean anything. We’re all made use of, from King George downwards. We have to be. Wh
en you eat your pudding you’re making use of hundreds of people — including your wife.”
“I know it. I know it. It makes no difference, though. I’m not going to be made use of.”
Jimmy shrugged his shoulders.
“Oh, all right!” he said. “That’s just a phrase, like any other.”
The miner sat very still in his chair, his face going hard and remote. He was evidently thinking over something that was stuck like a barb in his consciousness, something he was trying to harden over, as the skin sometimes hardens over a steel splinter in the flesh.
“I’m nothing but made use of,” he said, now talking hard and final, to himself, and staring out into space. “Down the pit, I’m made use of, and they give me a wage, such as it is. At the house, I’m made use of, and my wife sets the dinner on the table as if I was a customer in a shop.”
“But what do you expect?” cried Jimmy, writhing in his chair.
“Me? What do I expect? I expect nothing. But I tell you what — ” he turned, and looked straight and hard into Jimmy’s eyes — ”I’m not going to put up with anything, either.”
Jimmy saw the hard finality in the other man’s eyes, and squirmed away from it.
“If you know what you’re not going to put up with — ” he said.
“I don’t want my wife writing poetry! And sending it to a parcel of men she’s never seen. I don’t want my wife sitting like Queen Boadicea, when I come home, and a face like a stone wall with holes is it. I don’t know what’s wrong with her. She doesn’t know herself. But she does as she likes. Only, mark you, I do the same.”
“Of course!” cried Jimmy, though there was no of course about it.
“She’s told you I’ve got another woman?”
“Yes.”
“And I’ll tell you for why. If I give in to the coal face, and go down the mine every day to eight hours’ slavery, more or less, somebody’s got to give in to me.”
“Then,” said Jimmy, after a pause, “if you mean you want your wife to submit to you — well, that’s the problem. You have to marry the woman who will submit.”
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence (Illustrated) Page 654
