had got into the habit of sitting still by the fire, pretending to read; or
to sew feebly, and hardly going out at all.
It was a blowy day soon after Hilda had gone, that Mrs Bolton said:
`Now why don't you go for a walk through the wood, and look at the daffs
behind the keeper's cottage? They're the prettiest sight you'd see in a
day's march. And you could put some in your room; wild daffs are always so
cheerful-looking, aren't they?'
Connie took it in good part, even daffs for daffodils. Wild daffodils!
After all, one could not stew in one's own juice. The spring came
back...`Seasons return, but not to me returns Day, or the sweet approach of
Ev'n or Morn.'
And the keeper, his thin, white body, like a lonely pistil of an
invisible flower! She had forgotten him in her unspeakable depression. But
now something roused...`Pale beyond porch and portal'...the thing to do was
to pass the porches and the portals.
She was stronger, she could walk better, and iii the wood the wind
would not be so tiring as it was across the bark, flatten against her. She
wanted to forget, to forget the world, and all the dreadful, carrion-bodied
people. `Ye must be born again! I believe in the resurrection of the body!
Except a grain of wheat fall into the earth and die, it shall by no means
bring forth. When the crocus cometh forth I too will emerge and see the
sun!' In the wind of March endless phrases swept through her consciousness.
Little gusts of sunshine blew, strangely bright, and lit up the
celandines at the wood's edge, under the hazel-rods, they spangled out
bright and yellow. And the wood was still, stiller, but yet gusty with
crossing sun. The first windflowers were out, and all the wood seemed pale
with the pallor of endless little anemones, sprinkling the shaken floor.
`The world has grown pale with thy breath.' But it was the breath of
Persephone, this time; she was out of hell on a cold morning. Cold breaths
of wind came, and overhead there was an anger of entangled wind caught among
the twigs. It, too, was caught and trying to tear itself free, the wind,
like Absalom. How cold the anemones looked, bobbing their naked white
shoulders over crinoline skirts of green. But they stood it. A few first
bleached little primroses too, by the path, and yellow buds unfolding
themselves.
The roaring and swaying was overhead, only cold currents came down
below. Connie was strangely excited in the wood, and the colour flew in her
cheeks, and burned blue in her eyes. She walked ploddingly, picking a few
primroses and the first violets, that smelled sweet and cold, sweet and
cold. And she drifted on without knowing where she was.
Till she came to the clearing, at the end of the wood, and saw the
green-stained stone cottage, looking almost rosy, like the flesh underneath
a mushroom, its stone warmed in a burst of sun. And there was a sparkle of
yellow jasmine by the door; the closed door. But no sound; no smoke from the
chimney; no dog barking.
She went quietly round to the back, where the bank rose up; she had an
excuse, to see the daffodils.
And they were there, the short-stemmed flowers, rustling and fluttering
and shivering, so bright and alive, but with nowhere to hide their faces, as
they turned them away from the wind.
They shook their bright, sunny little rags in bouts of distress. But
perhaps they liked it really; perhaps they really liked the tossing.
Constance sat down with her back to a young pine-tree, that wayed
against her with curious life, elastic, and powerful, rising up. The erect,
alive thing, with its top in the sun! And she watched the daffodils turn
golden, in a burst of sun that was warm on her hands and lap. Even she
caught the faint, tarry scent of the flowers. And then, being so still and
alone, she seemed to bet into the current of her own proper destiny. She had
been fastened by a rope, and jagging and snarring like a boat at its
moorings; now she was loose and adrift.
The sunshine gave way to chill; the daffodils were in shadow, dipping
silently. So they would dip through the day and the long cold night. So
strong in their frailty!
She rose, a little stiff, took a few daffodils, and went down. She
hated breaking the flowers, but she wanted just one or two to go with her.
She would have to go back to Wragby and its walls, and now she hated it,
especially its thick walls. Walls! Always walls! Yet one needed them in this
wind.
When she got home Clifford asked her:
`Where did you go?'
`Right across the wood! Look, aren't the little daffodils adorable? To
think they should come out of the earth!'
`Just as much out of air and sunshine,' he said.
`But modelled in the earth,' she retorted, with a prompt contradiction,
that surprised her a little.
The next afternoon she went to the wood again. She followed the broad
riding that swerved round and up through the larches to a spring called
John's Well. It was cold on this hillside, and not a flower in the darkness
of larches. But the icy little spring softly pressed upwards from its tiny
well-bed of pure, reddish-white pebbles. How icy and clear it was!
Brilliant! The new keeper had no doubt put in fresh pebbles. She heard the
faint tinkle of water, as the tiny overflow trickled over and downhill. Even
above the hissing boom of the larchwood, that spread its bristling,
leafless, wolfish darkness on the down-slope, she heard the tinkle as of
tiny water-bells.
This place was a little sinister, cold, damp. Yet the well must have
been a drinking-place for hundreds of years. Now no more. Its tiny cleared
space was lush and cold and dismal.
She rose and went slowly towards home. As she went she heard a faint
tapping away on the right, and stood still to listen. Was it hammering, or a
woodpecker? It was surely hammering.
She walked on, listening. And then she noticed a narrow track between
young fir-trees, a track that seemed to lead nowhere. But she felt it had
been used. She turned down it adventurously, between the thick young firs,
which gave way soon to the old oak wood. She followed the track, and the
hammering grew nearer, in the silence of the windy wood, for trees make a
silence even in their noise of wind.
She saw a secret little clearing, and a secret little hot made of
rustic poles. And she had never been here before! She realized it was the
quiet place where the growing pheasants were reared; the keeper in his
shirt-sleeves was kneeling, hammering. The dog trotted forward with a short,
sharp bark, and the keeper lifted his face suddenly and saw her. He had a
startled look in his eyes.
He straightened himself and saluted, watching her in silence, as she
came forward with weakening limbs. He resented the intrusion; he cherished
his solitude as his only and last freedom in life.
`I wondered what the hammering was,' she said, feeling weak and
breathless, and a little afraid of him, as he looked so straight at her.
`Ah'm gettin' th' coops ready for th' young bods,' he said, in broad
vernacular.
She did not know what to say, and she felt weak. `I should like to sit
down a bit,' she said.
`Come and sit 'ere i' th' 'ut,' he said, going in front of her to the
hut, pushing aside some timber and stuff, and drawing out a rustic chair,
made of hazel sticks.
`Am Ah t' light yer a little fire?' he asked, with the curious naоvetи
of the dialect.
`Oh, don't bother,' she replied.
But he looked at her hands; they were rather blue. So he quickly took
some larch twigs to the little brick fire-place in the corner, and in a
moment the yellow flame was running up the chimney. He made a place by the
brick hearth.
`Sit 'ere then a bit, and warm yer,' he said.
She obeyed him. He had that curious kind of protective authority she
obeyed at once. So she sat and warmed her hands at the blaze, and dropped
logs on the fire, whilst outside he was hammering again. She did not really
want to sit, poked in a corner by the fire; she would rather have watched
from the door, but she was being looked after, so she had to submit.
The hut was quite cosy, panelled with unvarnished deal, having a little
rustic table and stool beside her chair, and a carpenter's bench, then a big
box, tools, new boards, nails; and many things hung from pegs: axe, hatchet,
traps, things in sacks, his coat. It had no window, the light came in
through the open door. It was a jumble, but also it was a sort of little
sanctuary.
She listened to the tapping of the man's hammer; it was not so happy.
He was oppressed. Here was a trespass on his privacy, and a dangerous one! A
woman! He had reached the point where all he wanted on earth was to be
alone. And yet he was powerless to preserve his privacy; he was a hired man,
and these people were his masters.
Especially he did not want to come into contact with a woman again. He
feared it; for he had a big wound from old contacts. He felt if he could not
be alone, and if he could not be left alone, he would die. His recoil away
from the outer world was complete; his last refuge was this wood; to hide
himself there!
Connie grew warm by the fire, which she had made too big: then she grew
hot. She went and sat on the stool in the doorway, watching the man at work.
He seemed not to notice her, but he knew. Yet he worked on, as if
absorbedly, and his brown dog sat on her tail near him, and surveyed the
untrustworthy world.
Slender, quiet and quick, the man finished the coop he was making,
turned it over, tried the sliding door, then set it aside. Then he rose,
went for an old coop, and took it to the chopping log where he was working.
Crouching, he tried the bars; some broke in his hands; he began to draw the
nails. Then he turned the coop over and deliberated, and he gave absolutely
no sign of awareness of the woman's presence.
So Connie watched him fixedly. And the same solitary aloneness she had
seen in him naked, she now saw in him clothed: solitary, and intent, like an
animal that works alone, but also brooding, like a soul that recoils away,
away from all human contact. Silently, patiently, he was recoiling away from
her even now. It was the stillness, and the timeless sort of patience, in a
man impatient and passionate, that touched Connie's womb. She saw it in his
bent head, the quick quiet hands, the crouching of his slender, sensitive
loins; something patient and withdrawn. She felt his experience had been
deeper and wider than her own; much deeper and wider, and perhaps more
deadly. And this relieved her of herself; she felt almost irresponsible.
So she sat in the doorway of the hut in a dream, utterly unaware of
time and of particular circumstances. She was so drifted away that he
glanced up at her quickly, and saw the utterly still, waiting look on her
face. To him it was a look of waiting. And a little thin tongue of fire
suddenly flickered in his loins, at the root of his back, and he groaned in
spirit. He dreaded with a repulsion almost of death, any further close human
contact. He wished above all things she would go away, and leave him to his
own privacy. He dreaded her will, her female will, and her modern female
insistency. And above all he dreaded her cool, upper-class impudence of
having her own way. For after all he was only a hired man. He hated her
presence there.
Connie came to herself with sudden uneasiness. She rose. The afternoon
was turning to evening, yet she could not go away. She went over to the man,
who stood up at attention, his worn face stiff and blank, his eyes watching
her.
`It is so nice here, so restful,' she said. `I have never been here
before.'
`No?'
`I think I shall come and sit here sometimes.
`Yes?'
`Do you lock the hut when you're not here?'
`Yes, your Ladyship.'
`Do you think I could have a key too, so that I could sit here
sometimes? Are there two keys?'
`Not as Ah know on, ther' isna.'
He had lapsed into the vernacular. Connie hesitated; he was putting up
an opposition. Was it his hut, after all?
`Couldn't we get another key?' she asked in her soft voice, that
underneath had the ring of a woman determined to get her way.
`Another!' he said, glancing at her with a flash of anger, touched with
derision.
`Yes, a duplicate,' she said, flushing.
`'Appen Sir Clifford 'ud know,' he said, putting her off.
`Yes!' she said, `he might have another. Otherwise we could have one
made from the one you have. It would only take a day or so, I suppose. You
could spare your key for so long.'
`Ah canna tell yer, m'Lady! Ah know nob'dy as ma'es keys round 'ere.'
Connie suddenly flushed with anger.
`Very well!' she said. `I'll see to it.'
`All right, your Ladyship.'
Their eyes met. His had a cold, ugly look of dislike and contempt, and
indifference to what would happen. Hers were hot with rebuff.
But her heart sank, she saw how utterly he disliked her, when she went
against him. And she saw him in a sort of desperation.
`Good afternoon!'
`Afternoon, my Lady!' He saluted and turned abruptly away. She had
wakened the sleeping dogs of old voracious anger in him, anger against the
self-willed female. And he was powerless, powerless. He knew it!
And she was angry against the self-willed male. A servant too! She
walked sullenly home.
She found Mrs Bolton under the great beech-tree on the knoll, looking
for her.
`I just wondered if you'd be coming, my Lady,' the woman said brightly.
`Am I late?' asked Connie.
`Oh only Sir Clifford was waiting for his tea.'
`Why didn't you make it then?'
`Oh, I don't think it's hardly my place. I don't think Sir Clifford
would like it at all, my Lady.'
`I don't see why not,' said Connie.
She went indoors to Clifford's study, where the old brass kettle was
simmering on the tray.
`Am I late, Clifford?' she said, putting down the few flowers and
taking up the tea-caddy, as she stood before the tray in her hat and scarf.
`I'm sorry! Why didn't you let Mrs Bolton make the tea?'
`I didn't think of it,' he said ironically. `I don't quite see her
presiding at the tea-table.'
`Oh, there's nothing sacrosanct about a silver tea-pot,' said Connie.
He glanced up at her curiously.
`What did you do all afternoon?' he said.
`Walked and sat in a sheltered place. Do you know there are still
berries on the big holly-tree?'
She took off her scarf, but not her hat, and sat down to make tea. The
toast would certainly be leathery. She put the tea-cosy over the tea-pot,
and rose to get a little glass for her violets. The poor flowers hung over,
limp on their stalks.
`They'll revive again!' she said, putting them before him in their
glass for him to smell.
`Sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes,' he quoted.
`I don't see a bit of connexion with the actual violets,' she said.
`The Elizabethans are rather upholstered.'
She poured him his tea.
`Do you think there is a second key to that little hut not far from
John's Well, where the pheasants are reared?' she said.
`There may be. Why?'
`I happened to find it today---and I'd never seen it before. I think
it's a darling place. I could sit there sometimes, couldn't I?'
`Was Mellors there?'
`Yes! That's how I found it: his hammering. He didn't seem to like my
intruding at all. In fact he was almost rude when I asked about a second
key.'
`What did he say?'
`Oh, nothing: just his manner; and he said he knew nothing about keys.'
`There may be one in Father's study. Betts knows them all, they're all
there. I'll get him to look.'
`Oh do!' she said.
`So Mellors was almost rude?'
`Oh, nothing, really! But I don't think he wanted me to have the
freedom of the castle, quite.'
`I don't suppose he did.'
`Still, I don't see why he should mind. It's not his home, after all!
It's not his private abode. I don't see why I shouldn't sit there if I want
to.'
`Quite!' said Clifford. `He thinks too much of himself, that man.'
`Do you think he does?'
`Oh, decidedly! He thinks he's something exceptional. You know he had a
wife he didn't get on with, so he joined up in 1915 and was sent to India, I
believe. Anyhow he was blacksmith to the cavalry in Egypt for a time; always
was connected with horses, a clever fellow that way. Then some Indian
colonel took a fancy to him, and he was made a lieutenant. Yes, they gave
him a commission. I believe he went back to India with his colonel, and up
to the north-west frontier. He was ill; he was a pension. He didn't come out
of the army till last year, I believe, and then, naturally, it isn't easy
for a man like that to get back to his own level. He's bound to flounder.
But he does his duty all right, as far as I'm concerned. Only I'm not having
any of the Lieutenant Mellors touch.'
`How could they make him an officer when he speaks broad Derbyshire?'
`He doesn't...except by fits and starts. He can speak perfectly well,
for him. I suppose he has an idea if he's come down to the ranks again, he'd
better speak as the ranks speak.'
`Why didn't you tell me about him before?'
`Oh, I've no patience with these romances. They're the ruin of all
order. It's a thousand pities they ever happened.'
Connie was inclined to agree. What was the good of discontented people
who fitted in nowhere?
In the spell of fine weather Clifford, too, decided to go to the wood.
The wind was cold, but not so tiresome, and the sunshine was like life
itself, warm and full.
`It's amazing,' said Connie, `how different one feels when there's a
really fresh fine day. Usually one feels the very air is half dead. People
are killing the very air.'
`Do you think people are doing it?' he asked.
`I do. The steam of so much boredom, and discontent and anger out of
all the people, just kills the vitality in the air. I'm sure of it.'
`Perhaps some condition of the atmosphere lowers the vitality of the
people?' he said.
`No, it's man that poisons the universe,' she asserted.
`Fouls his own nest,' remarked Clifford.
The chair puffed on. In the hazel copse catkins were hanging pale gold,
and in sunny places the wood-anemones were wide open, as if exclaiming with
the joy of life, just as good as in past days, when people could exclaim
along with them. They had a faint scent of apple-blossom. Connie gathered a
few for Clifford.
He took them and looked at them curiously.
`Thou still unravished bride of quietness,' he quoted. `It seems to fit
flowers so much better than Greek vases.'
`Ravished is such a horrid word!' she said. `It's only people who
ravish things.'
`Oh, I don't know...snails and things,' he said.
`Even snails only eat them, and bees don't ravish.'
She was angry with him, turning everything into words. Violets were
Juno's eyelids, and windflowers were on ravished brides. How she hated
words, always coming between her and life: they did the ravishing, if
anything did: ready-made words and phrases, sucking all the life-sap out of
living things.
The walk with Clifford was not quite a success. Between him and Connie
there was a tension that each pretended not to notice, but there it was.
Suddenly, with all the force of her female instinct, she was shoving him
off. She wanted to be clear of him, and especially of his consciousness, his
words, his obsession with himself, his endless treadmill obsession with
himself, and his own words.
The weather came rainy again. But after a day or two she went out in
the rain, and she went to the wood. And once there, she went towards the
hut. It was raining, but not so cold, and the wood felt so silent and
remote, inaccessible in the dusk of rain.
She came to the clearing. No one there! The hut was locked. But she sat
on the log doorstep, under the rustic porch, and snuggled into her own
warmth. So she sat, looking at the rain, listening to the many noiseless
noises of it, and to the strange soughings of wind in upper branches, when
there seemed to be no wind. Old oak-trees stood around, grey, powerful
trunks, rain-blackened, round and vital, throwing off reckless limbs. The
ground was fairly free of undergrowth, the anemones sprinkled, there was a
bush or two, elder, or guelder-rose, and a purplish tangle of bramble: the
old russet of bracken almost vanished under green anemone ruffs. Perhaps
this was one of the unravished places. Unravished! The whole world was
ravished.
Some things can't be ravished. You can't ravish a tin of sardines. And
so many women are like that; and men. But the earth...!
The rain was abating. It was hardly making darkness among the oaks any
more. Connie wanted to go; yet she sat on. But she was getting cold; yet the
overwhelming inertia of her inner resentment kept her there as if paralysed.
Ravished! How ravished one could be without ever being touched.
Ravished by dead words become obscene, and dead ideas become obsessions.
A wet brown dog came running and did not bark, lifting a wet feather of
a tail. The man followed in a wet black oilskin jacket, like a chauffeur,
and face flushed a little. She felt him recoil in his quick walk, when he
saw her. She stood up in the handbreadth of dryness under the rustic porch.
He saluted without speaking, coming slowly near. She began to withdraw.
`I'm just going,' she said.
`Was yer waitin' to get in?' he asked, looking at the hut, not at her.
`No, I only sat a few minutes in the shelter,' she said, with quiet
dignity.
He looked at her. She looked cold.
`Sir Clifford 'adn't got no other key then?' he asked.
`No, but it doesn't matter. I can sit perfectly dry under this porch.
Good afternoon!' She hated the excess of vernacular in his speech.
He watched her closely, as she was moving away. Then he hitched up his
jacket, and put his hand in his breeches pocket, taking out the key of the
hut.
`'Appen yer'd better 'ave this key, an' Ah min fend for t' bods some
other road.'
She looked at him.
`What do you mean?' she asked.
`I mean as 'appen Ah can find anuther pleece as'll du for rearin' th'
pheasants. If yer want ter be 'ere, yo'll non want me messin' abaht a' th'
time.'
She looked at him, getting his meaning through the fog of the dialect.
`Why don't you speak ordinary English?' she said coldly.
`Me! Ah thowt it wor ordinary.'
She was silent for a few moments in anger.
`So if yer want t' key, yer'd better tacit. Or 'appen Ah'd better gi'e
't yer termorrer, an' clear all t' stuff aht fust. Would that du for yer?'
She became more angry.
`I didn't want your key,' she said. `I don't want you to clear anything
out at all. I don't in the least want to turn you out of your hut, thank
you! I only wanted to be able to sit here sometimes, like today. But I can
sit perfectly well under the porch, so please say no more about it.'
He looked at her again, with his wicked blue eyes.
`Why,' he began, in the broad slow dialect. `Your Ladyship's as welcome
as Christmas ter th' hut an' th' key an' iverythink as is. On'y this time O'
th' year ther's bods ter set, an' Ah've got ter be potterin' abaht a good
bit, seein' after 'em, an' a'. Winter time Ah ned 'ardly come nigh th'
pleece. But what wi' spring, an' Sir Clifford wantin' ter start th'
pheasants...An' your Ladyship'd non want me tinkerin' around an' about when
she was 'ere, all the time.'
She listened with a dim kind of amazement.
`Why should I mind your being here?' she asked.
He looked at her curiously.
`T'nuisance on me!' he said briefly, but significantly. She flushed.
`Very well!' she said finally. `I won't trouble you. But I don't think I
should have minded at all sitting and seeing you look after the birds. I
should have liked it. But since you think it interferes with you, I won't
disturb you, don't be afraid. You are Sir Clifford's keeper, not mine.'
The phrase sounded queer, she didn't know why. But she let it pass.
`Nay, your Ladyship. It's your Ladyship's own 'ut. It's as your
Ladyship likes an' pleases, every time. Yer can turn me off at a wik's
notice. It wor only...'
`Only what?' she asked, baffled.
He pushed back his hat in an odd comic way.
`On'y as 'appen yo'd like the place ter yersen, when yer did come, an'
not me messin' abaht.'
`But why?' she said, angry. `Aren't you a civilized human being? Do you
think I ought to be afraid of you? Why should I take any notice of you and
your being here or not? Why is it important?'
He looked at her, all his face glimmering with wicked laughter.
`It's not, your Ladyship. Not in the very least,' he said.
`Well, why then?' she asked.
`Shall I get your Ladyship another key then?'
`No thank you! I don't want it.'
`Ah'll get it anyhow. We'd best 'ave two keys ter th' place.'
`And I consider you are insolent,' said Connie, with her colour up,
panting a little.
`Nay, nay!' he said quickly. `Dunna yer say that! Nay, nay! I niver
meant nuthink. Ah on'y thought as if yo' come 'ere, Ah s'd ave ter clear
out, an' it'd mean a lot of work, settin' up somewheres else. But if your
Ladyship isn't going ter take no notice O' me, then...it's Sir Clifford's
'ut, an' everythink is as your Ladyship likes, everythink is as your
Ladyship likes an' pleases, barrin' yer take no notice O' me, doin' th' bits
of jobs as Ah've got ter do.'
Connie went away completely bewildered. She was not sure whether she
had been insulted and mortally of fended, or not. Perhaps the man really
only meant what he said; that he thought she would expect him to keep away.
As if she would dream of it! And as if he could possibly be so important, he
and his stupid presence.
She went home in confusion, not knowing what she thought or felt.
Chapters 9
Connie was surprised at her own feeling of aversion from Clifford. What
is more, she felt she had always really disliked him. Not hate: there was no
passion in it. But a profound physical dislike. Almost, it seemed to her,
she had married him because she disliked him, in a secret, physical sort of
way. But of course, she had married him really because in a mental way he
attracted her and excited her. He had seemed, in some way, her master,
beyond her.
Now the mental excitement had worn itself out and collapsed, and she
was aware only of the physical aversion. It rose up in her from her depths:
and she realized how it had been eating her life away.
She felt weak and utterly forlorn. She wished some help would come from
outside. But in the whole world there was no help. Society was terrible
because it was insane. Civilized society is insane. Money and so-called love
are its two great manias; money a long way first. The individual asserts
himself in his disconnected insanity in these two modes: money and love.
Look at Michaelis! His life and activity were just insanity. His love was a
sort of insanity.
And Clifford the same. All that talk! All that writing! All that wild
struggling to push himself forwards! It was just insanity. And it was
getting worse, really maniacal.
Connie felt washed-out with fear. But at least, Clifford was shifting
his grip from her on to Mrs Bolton. He did not know it. Like many insane
people, his insanity might be measured by the things he was not aware of the
great desert tracts in his consciousness.
Mrs Bolton was admirable in many ways. But she had that queer sort of
bossiness, endless assertion of her own will, which is one of the signs of
insanity in modern woman. She thought she was utterly subservient and living
for others. Clifford fascinated her because he always, or so of ten,
frustrated her will, as if by a finer instinct. He had a finer, subtler will
of self-assertion than herself. This was his charm for her.
Perhaps that had been his charm, too, for Connie.
`It's a lovely day, today!' Mrs Bolton would say in her caressive,
persuasive voice. `I should think you'd enjoy a little run in your chair
today, the sun's just lovely.'
`Yes? Will you give me that book---there, that yellow one. And I think
I'll have those hyacinths taken out.'
`Why they're so beautiful!' She pronounced it with the `y' sound:
be-yutiful! `And the scent is simply gorgeous.'
`The scent is what I object to,' he said. `It's a little funereal.'
`Do you think so!' she exclaimed in surprise, just a little offended,
but impressed. And she carried the hyacinths out of the room, impressed by
his higher fastidiousness.
`Shall I shave you this morning, or would you rather do it yourself?'
Always the same soft, caressive, subservient, yet managing voice.
`I don't know. Do you mind waiting a while. I'll ring when I'm ready.'
`Very good, Sir Clifford!' she replied, so soft and submissive,
withdrawing quietly. But every rebuff stored up new energy of will in her.
When he rang, after a time, she would appear at once. And then he would
say:
`I think I'd rather you shaved me this morning.'
Her heart gave a little thrill, and she replied with extra softness:
`Very good, Sir Clifford!'
She was very deft, with a soft, lingering touch, a little slow. At
first he had resented the infinitely soft touch of her lingers on his face.
But now he liked it, with a growing voluptuousness. He let her shave him
nearly every day: her face near his, her eyes so very concentrated, watching
that she did it right. And gradually her fingertips knew his cheeks and
lips, his jaw and chin and throat perfectly. He was well-fed and
well-liking, his face and throat were handsome enough and he was a
gentleman.
She was handsome too, pale, her face rather long and absolutely still,
her eyes bright, but revealing nothing. Gradually, with infinite softness,
almost with love, she was getting him by the throat, and he was yielding to
her.
She now did almost everything for him, and he felt more at home with
her, less ashamed of accepting her menial offices, than with Connie. She
liked handling him. She loved having his body in her charge, absolutely, to
the last menial offices. She said to Connie one day: `All men are babies,
when you come to the bottom of them. Why, I've handled some of the toughest
customers as ever went down Tevershall pit. But let anything ail them so
that you have to do for them, and they're babies, just big babies. Oh,
there's not much difference in men!'
At first Mrs Bolton had thought there really was something different in
a gentleman, a real gentleman, like Sir Clifford. So Clifford had got a good
start of her. But gradually, as she came to the bottom of him, to use her
own term, she found he was like the rest, a baby grown to man's proportions:
but a baby with a queer temper and a fine manner and power in its control,
and all sorts of odd knowledge that she had never dreamed of, with which he
could still bully her.
Connie was sometimes tempted to say to him:
`For God's sake, don't sink so horribly into the hands of that woman!'
But she found she didn't care for him enough to say it, in the long run.
It was still their habit to spend the evening together, till ten
o'clock. Then they would talk, or read together, or go over his manuscript.
But the thrill had gone out of it. She was bored by his manuscripts. But she
still dutifully typed them out for him. But in time Mrs Bolton would do even
that.
For Connie had suggested to Mrs Bolton that she should learn to use a
typewriter. And Mrs Bolton, always ready, had begun at once, and practised
assiduously. So now Clifford would sometimes dictate a letter to her, and
she would take it down rather slowly, but correctly. And he was very
patient, spelling for her the difficult words, or the occasional phrases in
French. She was so thrilled, it was almost a pleasure to instruct her.
Now Connie would sometimes plead a headache as an excuse for going up
to her room after dinner.
`Perhaps Mrs Bolton will play piquet with you,' she said to Clifford.
`Oh, I shall be perfectly all right. You go to your own room and rest,
darling.'
But no sooner had she gone, than he rang for Mrs Bolton, and asked her
to take a hand at piquet or bezique, or even chess. He had taught her all
these games. And Connie found it curiously objectionable to see Mrs Bolton,
flushed and tremulous like a little girl, touching her queen or her knight
with uncertain fingers, then drawing away again. And Clifford, faintly
smiling with a half-teasing superiority, saying to her:
`You must say j'adoube!'
She looked up at him with bright, startled eyes, then murmured shyly,
obediently:
`J'adoube!'
Yes, he was educating her. And he enjoyed it, it gave him a sense of
power. And she was thrilled. She was coming bit by bit into possession of
all that the gentry knew, all that made them upper class: apart from the
money. That thrilled her. And at the same time, she was making him want to
have her there with him. It was a subtle deep flattery to him, her genuine
thrill.
To Connie, Clifford seemed to be coming out in his true colours: a
little vulgar, a little common, and uninspired; rather fat. Ivy Bolton's
tricks and humble bossiness were also only too transparent. But Connie did
wonder at the genuine thrill which the woman got out of Clifford. To say she
was in love with him would be putting it wrongly. She was thrilled by her
contact with a man of the upper class, this titled gentleman, this author
who could write books and poems, and whose photograph appeared in the
illustrated newspapers. She was thrilled to a weird passion. And his
`educating' her roused in her a passion of excitement and response much
deeper than any love affair could have done. In truth, the very fact that
there could be no love affair left her free to thrill to her very marrow
with this other passion, the peculiar passion of knowing, knowing as he
knew.
There was no mistake that the woman was in some way in love with him:
whatever force we give to the word love. She looked so handsome and so
young, and her grey eyes were sometimes marvellous. At the same time, there
was a lurking soft satisfaction about her, even of triumph, and private
satisfaction. Ugh, that private satisfaction. How Connie loathed it!
But no wonder Clifford was caught by the woman! She absolutely adored
him, in her persistent fashion, and put herself absolutely at his service,
for him to use as he liked. No wonder he was flattered!
Connie heard long conversations going on between the two. Or rather, it
bas mostly Mrs Bolton talking. She had unloosed to him the stream of gossip
about Tevershall village. It was more than gossip. It was Mrs Gaskell and
George Eliot and Miss Mitford all rolled in one, with a great deal more,
that these women left out.' Once started, Mrs Bolton was better than any
book, about the lives of the people. She knew them all so intimately, and
had such a peculiar, flamey zest in all their affairs, it was wonderful, if
just a trifle humiliating to listen to her. At first she had not ventured to
`talk Tevershall', as she called it, to Clifford. But once started, it went
on. Clifford was listening for `material', and he found it in plenty. Connie
realized that his so-called genius was just this: a perspicuous talent for
personal gossip, clever and apparently detached. Mrs Bolton, of course, was
very warm when she `talked Tevershall'. Carried away, in fact. And it was
marvellous, the things that happened and that she knew about. She would have
run to dozens of volumes.
Connie was fascinated, listening to her. But afterwards always a little
ashamed. She ought not to listen with this queer rabid curiosity. After all,
one may hear the most private affairs of other people, but only in a spirit
of respect for the struggling, battered thing which any human soul is, and
in a spirit of fine, discriminative sympathy. For even satire is a form of
sympathy. It is the way our sympathy flows and recoils that really
determines our lives. And here lies the vast importance of the novel,
properly handled. It can inform and lead into new places the flow of our
sympathetic consciousness, and it can lead our sympathy away in recoil from
things gone dead. Therefore, the novel, properly handled, can reveal the
most secret places of life: for it is in the passional secret places of
life, above all, that the tide of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and flow,
cleansing and freshening.
But the novel, like gossip, can also excite spurious sympathies and
recoils, mechanical and deadening to the psyche. The novel can glorify the
most corrupt feelings, so long as they are conventionally `pure'. Then the
novel, like gossip, becomes at last vicious, and, like gossip, all the more
vicious because it is always ostensibly on the side of the angels. Mrs
Bolton's gossip was always on the side of the angels. `And he was such a bad
fellow, and she was such a nice woman.' Whereas, as Connie could see even
from Mrs Bolton's gossip, the woman had been merely a mealy-mouthed sort,
and the man angrily honest. But angry honesty made a `bad man' of him, and
mealy-mouthedness made a `nice woman' of her, in the vicious, conventional
channelling of sympathy by Mrs Bolton.
For this reason, the gossip was humiliating. And for the same reason,
most novels, especially popular ones, are humiliating too. The public
responds now only to an appeal to its vices.
Nevertheless, one got a new vision of Tevershall village from Mrs
Bolton's talk. A terrible, seething welter of ugly life it seemed: not at
all the flat drabness it looked from outside. Clifford of course knew by
sight most of the people mentioned, Connie knew only one or two. But it
sounded really more like a Central African jungle than an English village.
`I suppose you heard as Miss Allsopp was married last week! Would you
ever! Miss Allsopp, old James' daughter, the boot-and-shoe Allsopp. You know
they built a house up at Pye Croft. The old man died last year from a fall;
eighty-three, he was, an' nimble as a lad. An' then he slipped on Bestwood
Hill, on a slide as the lads 'ad made last winter, an' broke his thigh, and
that finished him, poor old man, it did seem a shame. Well, he left all his
money to Tattie: didn't leave the boys a penny. An' Tattie, I know, is five
years---yes, she's fifty-three last autumn. And you know they were such
Chapel people, my word! She taught Sunday school for thirty years, till her
father died. And then she started carrying on with a fellow from Kinbrook, I
don't know if you know him, an oldish fellow with a red nose, rather
dandified, Willcock, as works in Harrison's woodyard. Well he's sixty-five,
if he's a day, yet you'd have thought they were a pair of young
turtle-doves, to see them, arm in arm, and kissing at the gate: yes, an' she
sitting on his knee right in the bay window on Pye Croft Road, for anybody
to see. And he's got sons over forty: only lost his wife two years ago. If
old James Allsopp hasn't risen from his grave, it's because there is no
rising: for he kept her that strict! Now they're married and gone to live
down at Kinbrook, and they say she goes round in a dressing-gown from
morning to night, a veritable sight. I'm sure it's awful, the way the old
ones go on! Why they're a lot worse than the young, and a sight more
disgusting. I lay it down to the pictures, myself. But you can't keep them
away. I was always saying: go to a good instructive film, but do for
goodness sake keep away from these melodramas and love films. Anyhow keep
the children away! But there you are, grown-ups are worse than the children:
and the old ones beat the band. Talk about morality! Nobody cares a thing.
Folks does as they like, and much better off they are for it, I must say.
But they're having to draw their horns in nowadays, now th' pits are working
so bad, and they haven't got the money. And the grumbling they do, it's
awful, especially the women. The men are so good and patient! What can they
do, poor chaps! But the women, oh, they do carry on! They go and show off,
giving contributions for a wedding present for Princess Mary, and then when
they see all the grand things that's been given, they simply rave: who's
she, any better than anybody else! Why doesn't Swan & Edgar give me one fur
coat, instead of giving her six. I wish I'd kept my ten shillings! What's
she going to give me, I should like to know? Here I can't get a new spring
coat, my dad's working that bad, and she gets van-loads. It's time as poor
folks had some money to spend, rich ones 'as 'ad it long enough. I want a
new spring coat, I do, an' wheer am I going to get it? I say to them, be
thankful you're well fed and well clothed, without all the new finery you
want! And they fly back at me: "Why isn't Princess Mary thankful to go about
in her old rags, then, an' have nothing! Folks like her get van-loads, an' I
can't have a new spring coat. It's a damned shame. Princess! Bloomin' rot
about Princess! It's munney as matters, an' cos she's got lots, they give
her more! Nobody's givin' me any, an' I've as much right as anybody else.
Don't talk to me about education. It's munney as matters. I want a new
spring coat, I do, an' I shan't get it, cos there's no munney..." That's all
they care about, clothes. They think nothing of giving seven or eight
guineas for a winter coat---colliers' daughters, mind you---and two guineas
for a child's summer hat. And then they go to the Primitive Chapel in their
two-guinea hat, girls as would have been proud of a three-and-sixpenny one
in my day. I heard that at the Primitive Methodist anniversary this year,
when they have a built-up platform for the Sunday School children, like a
grandstand going almost up to th' ceiling, I heard Miss Thompson, who has
the first class of girls in the Sunday School, say there'd be over a
thousand pounds in new Sunday clothes sitting on that platform! And times
are what they are! But you can't stop them. They're mad for clothes. And
boys the same. The lads spend every penny on themselves, clothes, smoking,
drinking in the Miners' Welfare, jaunting off to Sheffield two or three
times a week. Why, it's another world. And they fear nothing, and they
respect nothing, the young don't. The older men are that patient and good,
really, they let the women take everything. And this is what it leads to.
The women are positive demons. But the lads aren't like their dads. They're
sacrificing nothing, they aren't: they're all for self. If you tell them
they ought to be putting a bit by, for a home, they say: That'll keep, that
will, I'm goin' t' enjoy myself while I can. Owt else'll keep! Oh, they're
rough an' selfish, if you like. Everything falls on the older men, an' it's
a bad outlook all round.'
Clifford began to get a new idea of his own village. The place had
always frightened him, but he had thought it more or less stable. Now---?
`Is there much Socialism, Bolshevism, among the people?' he asked.
`Oh!' said Mrs Bolton, `you hear a few loud-mouthed ones. But they're
mostly women who've got into debt. The men take no notice. I don't believe
you'll ever turn our Tevershall men into reds. They're too decent for that.
But the young ones blether sometimes. Not that they care for it really. They
only want a bit of money in their pocket, to spend at the Welfare, or go
gadding to Sheffield. That's all they care. When they've got no money,
they'll listen to the reds spouting. But nobody believes in it, really.'
`So you think there's no danger?'
`Oh no! Not if trade was good, there wouldn't be. But if things were
bad for a long spell, the young ones might go funny. I tell you, they're a
selfish, spoilt lot. But I don't see how they'd ever do anything. They
aren't ever serious about anything, except showing off on motor-bikes and
dancing at the Palais-de-danse in Sheffield. You can't make them serious.
The serious ones dress up in evening clothes and go off to the Pally to show
off before a lot of girls and dance these new Charlestons and what not. I'm
sure sometimes the bus'll be full of young fellows in evening suits, collier
lads, off to the Pally: let alone those that have gone with their girls in
motors or on motor-bikes. They don't give a serious thought to a
thing---save Doncaster races, and the Derby: for they all of them bet on
to sew feebly, and hardly going out at all.
It was a blowy day soon after Hilda had gone, that Mrs Bolton said:
`Now why don't you go for a walk through the wood, and look at the daffs
behind the keeper's cottage? They're the prettiest sight you'd see in a
day's march. And you could put some in your room; wild daffs are always so
cheerful-looking, aren't they?'
Connie took it in good part, even daffs for daffodils. Wild daffodils!
After all, one could not stew in one's own juice. The spring came
back...`Seasons return, but not to me returns Day, or the sweet approach of
Ev'n or Morn.'
And the keeper, his thin, white body, like a lonely pistil of an
invisible flower! She had forgotten him in her unspeakable depression. But
now something roused...`Pale beyond porch and portal'...the thing to do was
to pass the porches and the portals.
She was stronger, she could walk better, and iii the wood the wind
would not be so tiring as it was across the bark, flatten against her. She
wanted to forget, to forget the world, and all the dreadful, carrion-bodied
people. `Ye must be born again! I believe in the resurrection of the body!
Except a grain of wheat fall into the earth and die, it shall by no means
bring forth. When the crocus cometh forth I too will emerge and see the
sun!' In the wind of March endless phrases swept through her consciousness.
Little gusts of sunshine blew, strangely bright, and lit up the
celandines at the wood's edge, under the hazel-rods, they spangled out
bright and yellow. And the wood was still, stiller, but yet gusty with
crossing sun. The first windflowers were out, and all the wood seemed pale
with the pallor of endless little anemones, sprinkling the shaken floor.
`The world has grown pale with thy breath.' But it was the breath of
Persephone, this time; she was out of hell on a cold morning. Cold breaths
of wind came, and overhead there was an anger of entangled wind caught among
the twigs. It, too, was caught and trying to tear itself free, the wind,
like Absalom. How cold the anemones looked, bobbing their naked white
shoulders over crinoline skirts of green. But they stood it. A few first
bleached little primroses too, by the path, and yellow buds unfolding
themselves.
The roaring and swaying was overhead, only cold currents came down
below. Connie was strangely excited in the wood, and the colour flew in her
cheeks, and burned blue in her eyes. She walked ploddingly, picking a few
primroses and the first violets, that smelled sweet and cold, sweet and
cold. And she drifted on without knowing where she was.
Till she came to the clearing, at the end of the wood, and saw the
green-stained stone cottage, looking almost rosy, like the flesh underneath
a mushroom, its stone warmed in a burst of sun. And there was a sparkle of
yellow jasmine by the door; the closed door. But no sound; no smoke from the
chimney; no dog barking.
She went quietly round to the back, where the bank rose up; she had an
excuse, to see the daffodils.
And they were there, the short-stemmed flowers, rustling and fluttering
and shivering, so bright and alive, but with nowhere to hide their faces, as
they turned them away from the wind.
They shook their bright, sunny little rags in bouts of distress. But
perhaps they liked it really; perhaps they really liked the tossing.
Constance sat down with her back to a young pine-tree, that wayed
against her with curious life, elastic, and powerful, rising up. The erect,
alive thing, with its top in the sun! And she watched the daffodils turn
golden, in a burst of sun that was warm on her hands and lap. Even she
caught the faint, tarry scent of the flowers. And then, being so still and
alone, she seemed to bet into the current of her own proper destiny. She had
been fastened by a rope, and jagging and snarring like a boat at its
moorings; now she was loose and adrift.
The sunshine gave way to chill; the daffodils were in shadow, dipping
silently. So they would dip through the day and the long cold night. So
strong in their frailty!
She rose, a little stiff, took a few daffodils, and went down. She
hated breaking the flowers, but she wanted just one or two to go with her.
She would have to go back to Wragby and its walls, and now she hated it,
especially its thick walls. Walls! Always walls! Yet one needed them in this
wind.
When she got home Clifford asked her:
`Where did you go?'
`Right across the wood! Look, aren't the little daffodils adorable? To
think they should come out of the earth!'
`Just as much out of air and sunshine,' he said.
`But modelled in the earth,' she retorted, with a prompt contradiction,
that surprised her a little.
The next afternoon she went to the wood again. She followed the broad
riding that swerved round and up through the larches to a spring called
John's Well. It was cold on this hillside, and not a flower in the darkness
of larches. But the icy little spring softly pressed upwards from its tiny
well-bed of pure, reddish-white pebbles. How icy and clear it was!
Brilliant! The new keeper had no doubt put in fresh pebbles. She heard the
faint tinkle of water, as the tiny overflow trickled over and downhill. Even
above the hissing boom of the larchwood, that spread its bristling,
leafless, wolfish darkness on the down-slope, she heard the tinkle as of
tiny water-bells.
This place was a little sinister, cold, damp. Yet the well must have
been a drinking-place for hundreds of years. Now no more. Its tiny cleared
space was lush and cold and dismal.
She rose and went slowly towards home. As she went she heard a faint
tapping away on the right, and stood still to listen. Was it hammering, or a
woodpecker? It was surely hammering.
She walked on, listening. And then she noticed a narrow track between
young fir-trees, a track that seemed to lead nowhere. But she felt it had
been used. She turned down it adventurously, between the thick young firs,
which gave way soon to the old oak wood. She followed the track, and the
hammering grew nearer, in the silence of the windy wood, for trees make a
silence even in their noise of wind.
She saw a secret little clearing, and a secret little hot made of
rustic poles. And she had never been here before! She realized it was the
quiet place where the growing pheasants were reared; the keeper in his
shirt-sleeves was kneeling, hammering. The dog trotted forward with a short,
sharp bark, and the keeper lifted his face suddenly and saw her. He had a
startled look in his eyes.
He straightened himself and saluted, watching her in silence, as she
came forward with weakening limbs. He resented the intrusion; he cherished
his solitude as his only and last freedom in life.
`I wondered what the hammering was,' she said, feeling weak and
breathless, and a little afraid of him, as he looked so straight at her.
`Ah'm gettin' th' coops ready for th' young bods,' he said, in broad
vernacular.
She did not know what to say, and she felt weak. `I should like to sit
down a bit,' she said.
`Come and sit 'ere i' th' 'ut,' he said, going in front of her to the
hut, pushing aside some timber and stuff, and drawing out a rustic chair,
made of hazel sticks.
`Am Ah t' light yer a little fire?' he asked, with the curious naоvetи
of the dialect.
`Oh, don't bother,' she replied.
But he looked at her hands; they were rather blue. So he quickly took
some larch twigs to the little brick fire-place in the corner, and in a
moment the yellow flame was running up the chimney. He made a place by the
brick hearth.
`Sit 'ere then a bit, and warm yer,' he said.
She obeyed him. He had that curious kind of protective authority she
obeyed at once. So she sat and warmed her hands at the blaze, and dropped
logs on the fire, whilst outside he was hammering again. She did not really
want to sit, poked in a corner by the fire; she would rather have watched
from the door, but she was being looked after, so she had to submit.
The hut was quite cosy, panelled with unvarnished deal, having a little
rustic table and stool beside her chair, and a carpenter's bench, then a big
box, tools, new boards, nails; and many things hung from pegs: axe, hatchet,
traps, things in sacks, his coat. It had no window, the light came in
through the open door. It was a jumble, but also it was a sort of little
sanctuary.
She listened to the tapping of the man's hammer; it was not so happy.
He was oppressed. Here was a trespass on his privacy, and a dangerous one! A
woman! He had reached the point where all he wanted on earth was to be
alone. And yet he was powerless to preserve his privacy; he was a hired man,
and these people were his masters.
Especially he did not want to come into contact with a woman again. He
feared it; for he had a big wound from old contacts. He felt if he could not
be alone, and if he could not be left alone, he would die. His recoil away
from the outer world was complete; his last refuge was this wood; to hide
himself there!
Connie grew warm by the fire, which she had made too big: then she grew
hot. She went and sat on the stool in the doorway, watching the man at work.
He seemed not to notice her, but he knew. Yet he worked on, as if
absorbedly, and his brown dog sat on her tail near him, and surveyed the
untrustworthy world.
Slender, quiet and quick, the man finished the coop he was making,
turned it over, tried the sliding door, then set it aside. Then he rose,
went for an old coop, and took it to the chopping log where he was working.
Crouching, he tried the bars; some broke in his hands; he began to draw the
nails. Then he turned the coop over and deliberated, and he gave absolutely
no sign of awareness of the woman's presence.
So Connie watched him fixedly. And the same solitary aloneness she had
seen in him naked, she now saw in him clothed: solitary, and intent, like an
animal that works alone, but also brooding, like a soul that recoils away,
away from all human contact. Silently, patiently, he was recoiling away from
her even now. It was the stillness, and the timeless sort of patience, in a
man impatient and passionate, that touched Connie's womb. She saw it in his
bent head, the quick quiet hands, the crouching of his slender, sensitive
loins; something patient and withdrawn. She felt his experience had been
deeper and wider than her own; much deeper and wider, and perhaps more
deadly. And this relieved her of herself; she felt almost irresponsible.
So she sat in the doorway of the hut in a dream, utterly unaware of
time and of particular circumstances. She was so drifted away that he
glanced up at her quickly, and saw the utterly still, waiting look on her
face. To him it was a look of waiting. And a little thin tongue of fire
suddenly flickered in his loins, at the root of his back, and he groaned in
spirit. He dreaded with a repulsion almost of death, any further close human
contact. He wished above all things she would go away, and leave him to his
own privacy. He dreaded her will, her female will, and her modern female
insistency. And above all he dreaded her cool, upper-class impudence of
having her own way. For after all he was only a hired man. He hated her
presence there.
Connie came to herself with sudden uneasiness. She rose. The afternoon
was turning to evening, yet she could not go away. She went over to the man,
who stood up at attention, his worn face stiff and blank, his eyes watching
her.
`It is so nice here, so restful,' she said. `I have never been here
before.'
`No?'
`I think I shall come and sit here sometimes.
`Yes?'
`Do you lock the hut when you're not here?'
`Yes, your Ladyship.'
`Do you think I could have a key too, so that I could sit here
sometimes? Are there two keys?'
`Not as Ah know on, ther' isna.'
He had lapsed into the vernacular. Connie hesitated; he was putting up
an opposition. Was it his hut, after all?
`Couldn't we get another key?' she asked in her soft voice, that
underneath had the ring of a woman determined to get her way.
`Another!' he said, glancing at her with a flash of anger, touched with
derision.
`Yes, a duplicate,' she said, flushing.
`'Appen Sir Clifford 'ud know,' he said, putting her off.
`Yes!' she said, `he might have another. Otherwise we could have one
made from the one you have. It would only take a day or so, I suppose. You
could spare your key for so long.'
`Ah canna tell yer, m'Lady! Ah know nob'dy as ma'es keys round 'ere.'
Connie suddenly flushed with anger.
`Very well!' she said. `I'll see to it.'
`All right, your Ladyship.'
Their eyes met. His had a cold, ugly look of dislike and contempt, and
indifference to what would happen. Hers were hot with rebuff.
But her heart sank, she saw how utterly he disliked her, when she went
against him. And she saw him in a sort of desperation.
`Good afternoon!'
`Afternoon, my Lady!' He saluted and turned abruptly away. She had
wakened the sleeping dogs of old voracious anger in him, anger against the
self-willed female. And he was powerless, powerless. He knew it!
And she was angry against the self-willed male. A servant too! She
walked sullenly home.
She found Mrs Bolton under the great beech-tree on the knoll, looking
for her.
`I just wondered if you'd be coming, my Lady,' the woman said brightly.
`Am I late?' asked Connie.
`Oh only Sir Clifford was waiting for his tea.'
`Why didn't you make it then?'
`Oh, I don't think it's hardly my place. I don't think Sir Clifford
would like it at all, my Lady.'
`I don't see why not,' said Connie.
She went indoors to Clifford's study, where the old brass kettle was
simmering on the tray.
`Am I late, Clifford?' she said, putting down the few flowers and
taking up the tea-caddy, as she stood before the tray in her hat and scarf.
`I'm sorry! Why didn't you let Mrs Bolton make the tea?'
`I didn't think of it,' he said ironically. `I don't quite see her
presiding at the tea-table.'
`Oh, there's nothing sacrosanct about a silver tea-pot,' said Connie.
He glanced up at her curiously.
`What did you do all afternoon?' he said.
`Walked and sat in a sheltered place. Do you know there are still
berries on the big holly-tree?'
She took off her scarf, but not her hat, and sat down to make tea. The
toast would certainly be leathery. She put the tea-cosy over the tea-pot,
and rose to get a little glass for her violets. The poor flowers hung over,
limp on their stalks.
`They'll revive again!' she said, putting them before him in their
glass for him to smell.
`Sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes,' he quoted.
`I don't see a bit of connexion with the actual violets,' she said.
`The Elizabethans are rather upholstered.'
She poured him his tea.
`Do you think there is a second key to that little hut not far from
John's Well, where the pheasants are reared?' she said.
`There may be. Why?'
`I happened to find it today---and I'd never seen it before. I think
it's a darling place. I could sit there sometimes, couldn't I?'
`Was Mellors there?'
`Yes! That's how I found it: his hammering. He didn't seem to like my
intruding at all. In fact he was almost rude when I asked about a second
key.'
`What did he say?'
`Oh, nothing: just his manner; and he said he knew nothing about keys.'
`There may be one in Father's study. Betts knows them all, they're all
there. I'll get him to look.'
`Oh do!' she said.
`So Mellors was almost rude?'
`Oh, nothing, really! But I don't think he wanted me to have the
freedom of the castle, quite.'
`I don't suppose he did.'
`Still, I don't see why he should mind. It's not his home, after all!
It's not his private abode. I don't see why I shouldn't sit there if I want
to.'
`Quite!' said Clifford. `He thinks too much of himself, that man.'
`Do you think he does?'
`Oh, decidedly! He thinks he's something exceptional. You know he had a
wife he didn't get on with, so he joined up in 1915 and was sent to India, I
believe. Anyhow he was blacksmith to the cavalry in Egypt for a time; always
was connected with horses, a clever fellow that way. Then some Indian
colonel took a fancy to him, and he was made a lieutenant. Yes, they gave
him a commission. I believe he went back to India with his colonel, and up
to the north-west frontier. He was ill; he was a pension. He didn't come out
of the army till last year, I believe, and then, naturally, it isn't easy
for a man like that to get back to his own level. He's bound to flounder.
But he does his duty all right, as far as I'm concerned. Only I'm not having
any of the Lieutenant Mellors touch.'
`How could they make him an officer when he speaks broad Derbyshire?'
`He doesn't...except by fits and starts. He can speak perfectly well,
for him. I suppose he has an idea if he's come down to the ranks again, he'd
better speak as the ranks speak.'
`Why didn't you tell me about him before?'
`Oh, I've no patience with these romances. They're the ruin of all
order. It's a thousand pities they ever happened.'
Connie was inclined to agree. What was the good of discontented people
who fitted in nowhere?
In the spell of fine weather Clifford, too, decided to go to the wood.
The wind was cold, but not so tiresome, and the sunshine was like life
itself, warm and full.
`It's amazing,' said Connie, `how different one feels when there's a
really fresh fine day. Usually one feels the very air is half dead. People
are killing the very air.'
`Do you think people are doing it?' he asked.
`I do. The steam of so much boredom, and discontent and anger out of
all the people, just kills the vitality in the air. I'm sure of it.'
`Perhaps some condition of the atmosphere lowers the vitality of the
people?' he said.
`No, it's man that poisons the universe,' she asserted.
`Fouls his own nest,' remarked Clifford.
The chair puffed on. In the hazel copse catkins were hanging pale gold,
and in sunny places the wood-anemones were wide open, as if exclaiming with
the joy of life, just as good as in past days, when people could exclaim
along with them. They had a faint scent of apple-blossom. Connie gathered a
few for Clifford.
He took them and looked at them curiously.
`Thou still unravished bride of quietness,' he quoted. `It seems to fit
flowers so much better than Greek vases.'
`Ravished is such a horrid word!' she said. `It's only people who
ravish things.'
`Oh, I don't know...snails and things,' he said.
`Even snails only eat them, and bees don't ravish.'
She was angry with him, turning everything into words. Violets were
Juno's eyelids, and windflowers were on ravished brides. How she hated
words, always coming between her and life: they did the ravishing, if
anything did: ready-made words and phrases, sucking all the life-sap out of
living things.
The walk with Clifford was not quite a success. Between him and Connie
there was a tension that each pretended not to notice, but there it was.
Suddenly, with all the force of her female instinct, she was shoving him
off. She wanted to be clear of him, and especially of his consciousness, his
words, his obsession with himself, his endless treadmill obsession with
himself, and his own words.
The weather came rainy again. But after a day or two she went out in
the rain, and she went to the wood. And once there, she went towards the
hut. It was raining, but not so cold, and the wood felt so silent and
remote, inaccessible in the dusk of rain.
She came to the clearing. No one there! The hut was locked. But she sat
on the log doorstep, under the rustic porch, and snuggled into her own
warmth. So she sat, looking at the rain, listening to the many noiseless
noises of it, and to the strange soughings of wind in upper branches, when
there seemed to be no wind. Old oak-trees stood around, grey, powerful
trunks, rain-blackened, round and vital, throwing off reckless limbs. The
ground was fairly free of undergrowth, the anemones sprinkled, there was a
bush or two, elder, or guelder-rose, and a purplish tangle of bramble: the
old russet of bracken almost vanished under green anemone ruffs. Perhaps
this was one of the unravished places. Unravished! The whole world was
ravished.
Some things can't be ravished. You can't ravish a tin of sardines. And
so many women are like that; and men. But the earth...!
The rain was abating. It was hardly making darkness among the oaks any
more. Connie wanted to go; yet she sat on. But she was getting cold; yet the
overwhelming inertia of her inner resentment kept her there as if paralysed.
Ravished! How ravished one could be without ever being touched.
Ravished by dead words become obscene, and dead ideas become obsessions.
A wet brown dog came running and did not bark, lifting a wet feather of
a tail. The man followed in a wet black oilskin jacket, like a chauffeur,
and face flushed a little. She felt him recoil in his quick walk, when he
saw her. She stood up in the handbreadth of dryness under the rustic porch.
He saluted without speaking, coming slowly near. She began to withdraw.
`I'm just going,' she said.
`Was yer waitin' to get in?' he asked, looking at the hut, not at her.
`No, I only sat a few minutes in the shelter,' she said, with quiet
dignity.
He looked at her. She looked cold.
`Sir Clifford 'adn't got no other key then?' he asked.
`No, but it doesn't matter. I can sit perfectly dry under this porch.
Good afternoon!' She hated the excess of vernacular in his speech.
He watched her closely, as she was moving away. Then he hitched up his
jacket, and put his hand in his breeches pocket, taking out the key of the
hut.
`'Appen yer'd better 'ave this key, an' Ah min fend for t' bods some
other road.'
She looked at him.
`What do you mean?' she asked.
`I mean as 'appen Ah can find anuther pleece as'll du for rearin' th'
pheasants. If yer want ter be 'ere, yo'll non want me messin' abaht a' th'
time.'
She looked at him, getting his meaning through the fog of the dialect.
`Why don't you speak ordinary English?' she said coldly.
`Me! Ah thowt it wor ordinary.'
She was silent for a few moments in anger.
`So if yer want t' key, yer'd better tacit. Or 'appen Ah'd better gi'e
't yer termorrer, an' clear all t' stuff aht fust. Would that du for yer?'
She became more angry.
`I didn't want your key,' she said. `I don't want you to clear anything
out at all. I don't in the least want to turn you out of your hut, thank
you! I only wanted to be able to sit here sometimes, like today. But I can
sit perfectly well under the porch, so please say no more about it.'
He looked at her again, with his wicked blue eyes.
`Why,' he began, in the broad slow dialect. `Your Ladyship's as welcome
as Christmas ter th' hut an' th' key an' iverythink as is. On'y this time O'
th' year ther's bods ter set, an' Ah've got ter be potterin' abaht a good
bit, seein' after 'em, an' a'. Winter time Ah ned 'ardly come nigh th'
pleece. But what wi' spring, an' Sir Clifford wantin' ter start th'
pheasants...An' your Ladyship'd non want me tinkerin' around an' about when
she was 'ere, all the time.'
She listened with a dim kind of amazement.
`Why should I mind your being here?' she asked.
He looked at her curiously.
`T'nuisance on me!' he said briefly, but significantly. She flushed.
`Very well!' she said finally. `I won't trouble you. But I don't think I
should have minded at all sitting and seeing you look after the birds. I
should have liked it. But since you think it interferes with you, I won't
disturb you, don't be afraid. You are Sir Clifford's keeper, not mine.'
The phrase sounded queer, she didn't know why. But she let it pass.
`Nay, your Ladyship. It's your Ladyship's own 'ut. It's as your
Ladyship likes an' pleases, every time. Yer can turn me off at a wik's
notice. It wor only...'
`Only what?' she asked, baffled.
He pushed back his hat in an odd comic way.
`On'y as 'appen yo'd like the place ter yersen, when yer did come, an'
not me messin' abaht.'
`But why?' she said, angry. `Aren't you a civilized human being? Do you
think I ought to be afraid of you? Why should I take any notice of you and
your being here or not? Why is it important?'
He looked at her, all his face glimmering with wicked laughter.
`It's not, your Ladyship. Not in the very least,' he said.
`Well, why then?' she asked.
`Shall I get your Ladyship another key then?'
`No thank you! I don't want it.'
`Ah'll get it anyhow. We'd best 'ave two keys ter th' place.'
`And I consider you are insolent,' said Connie, with her colour up,
panting a little.
`Nay, nay!' he said quickly. `Dunna yer say that! Nay, nay! I niver
meant nuthink. Ah on'y thought as if yo' come 'ere, Ah s'd ave ter clear
out, an' it'd mean a lot of work, settin' up somewheres else. But if your
Ladyship isn't going ter take no notice O' me, then...it's Sir Clifford's
'ut, an' everythink is as your Ladyship likes, everythink is as your
Ladyship likes an' pleases, barrin' yer take no notice O' me, doin' th' bits
of jobs as Ah've got ter do.'
Connie went away completely bewildered. She was not sure whether she
had been insulted and mortally of fended, or not. Perhaps the man really
only meant what he said; that he thought she would expect him to keep away.
As if she would dream of it! And as if he could possibly be so important, he
and his stupid presence.
She went home in confusion, not knowing what she thought or felt.
Chapters 9
Connie was surprised at her own feeling of aversion from Clifford. What
is more, she felt she had always really disliked him. Not hate: there was no
passion in it. But a profound physical dislike. Almost, it seemed to her,
she had married him because she disliked him, in a secret, physical sort of
way. But of course, she had married him really because in a mental way he
attracted her and excited her. He had seemed, in some way, her master,
beyond her.
Now the mental excitement had worn itself out and collapsed, and she
was aware only of the physical aversion. It rose up in her from her depths:
and she realized how it had been eating her life away.
She felt weak and utterly forlorn. She wished some help would come from
outside. But in the whole world there was no help. Society was terrible
because it was insane. Civilized society is insane. Money and so-called love
are its two great manias; money a long way first. The individual asserts
himself in his disconnected insanity in these two modes: money and love.
Look at Michaelis! His life and activity were just insanity. His love was a
sort of insanity.
And Clifford the same. All that talk! All that writing! All that wild
struggling to push himself forwards! It was just insanity. And it was
getting worse, really maniacal.
Connie felt washed-out with fear. But at least, Clifford was shifting
his grip from her on to Mrs Bolton. He did not know it. Like many insane
people, his insanity might be measured by the things he was not aware of the
great desert tracts in his consciousness.
Mrs Bolton was admirable in many ways. But she had that queer sort of
bossiness, endless assertion of her own will, which is one of the signs of
insanity in modern woman. She thought she was utterly subservient and living
for others. Clifford fascinated her because he always, or so of ten,
frustrated her will, as if by a finer instinct. He had a finer, subtler will
of self-assertion than herself. This was his charm for her.
Perhaps that had been his charm, too, for Connie.
`It's a lovely day, today!' Mrs Bolton would say in her caressive,
persuasive voice. `I should think you'd enjoy a little run in your chair
today, the sun's just lovely.'
`Yes? Will you give me that book---there, that yellow one. And I think
I'll have those hyacinths taken out.'
`Why they're so beautiful!' She pronounced it with the `y' sound:
be-yutiful! `And the scent is simply gorgeous.'
`The scent is what I object to,' he said. `It's a little funereal.'
`Do you think so!' she exclaimed in surprise, just a little offended,
but impressed. And she carried the hyacinths out of the room, impressed by
his higher fastidiousness.
`Shall I shave you this morning, or would you rather do it yourself?'
Always the same soft, caressive, subservient, yet managing voice.
`I don't know. Do you mind waiting a while. I'll ring when I'm ready.'
`Very good, Sir Clifford!' she replied, so soft and submissive,
withdrawing quietly. But every rebuff stored up new energy of will in her.
When he rang, after a time, she would appear at once. And then he would
say:
`I think I'd rather you shaved me this morning.'
Her heart gave a little thrill, and she replied with extra softness:
`Very good, Sir Clifford!'
She was very deft, with a soft, lingering touch, a little slow. At
first he had resented the infinitely soft touch of her lingers on his face.
But now he liked it, with a growing voluptuousness. He let her shave him
nearly every day: her face near his, her eyes so very concentrated, watching
that she did it right. And gradually her fingertips knew his cheeks and
lips, his jaw and chin and throat perfectly. He was well-fed and
well-liking, his face and throat were handsome enough and he was a
gentleman.
She was handsome too, pale, her face rather long and absolutely still,
her eyes bright, but revealing nothing. Gradually, with infinite softness,
almost with love, she was getting him by the throat, and he was yielding to
her.
She now did almost everything for him, and he felt more at home with
her, less ashamed of accepting her menial offices, than with Connie. She
liked handling him. She loved having his body in her charge, absolutely, to
the last menial offices. She said to Connie one day: `All men are babies,
when you come to the bottom of them. Why, I've handled some of the toughest
customers as ever went down Tevershall pit. But let anything ail them so
that you have to do for them, and they're babies, just big babies. Oh,
there's not much difference in men!'
At first Mrs Bolton had thought there really was something different in
a gentleman, a real gentleman, like Sir Clifford. So Clifford had got a good
start of her. But gradually, as she came to the bottom of him, to use her
own term, she found he was like the rest, a baby grown to man's proportions:
but a baby with a queer temper and a fine manner and power in its control,
and all sorts of odd knowledge that she had never dreamed of, with which he
could still bully her.
Connie was sometimes tempted to say to him:
`For God's sake, don't sink so horribly into the hands of that woman!'
But she found she didn't care for him enough to say it, in the long run.
It was still their habit to spend the evening together, till ten
o'clock. Then they would talk, or read together, or go over his manuscript.
But the thrill had gone out of it. She was bored by his manuscripts. But she
still dutifully typed them out for him. But in time Mrs Bolton would do even
that.
For Connie had suggested to Mrs Bolton that she should learn to use a
typewriter. And Mrs Bolton, always ready, had begun at once, and practised
assiduously. So now Clifford would sometimes dictate a letter to her, and
she would take it down rather slowly, but correctly. And he was very
patient, spelling for her the difficult words, or the occasional phrases in
French. She was so thrilled, it was almost a pleasure to instruct her.
Now Connie would sometimes plead a headache as an excuse for going up
to her room after dinner.
`Perhaps Mrs Bolton will play piquet with you,' she said to Clifford.
`Oh, I shall be perfectly all right. You go to your own room and rest,
darling.'
But no sooner had she gone, than he rang for Mrs Bolton, and asked her
to take a hand at piquet or bezique, or even chess. He had taught her all
these games. And Connie found it curiously objectionable to see Mrs Bolton,
flushed and tremulous like a little girl, touching her queen or her knight
with uncertain fingers, then drawing away again. And Clifford, faintly
smiling with a half-teasing superiority, saying to her:
`You must say j'adoube!'
She looked up at him with bright, startled eyes, then murmured shyly,
obediently:
`J'adoube!'
Yes, he was educating her. And he enjoyed it, it gave him a sense of
power. And she was thrilled. She was coming bit by bit into possession of
all that the gentry knew, all that made them upper class: apart from the
money. That thrilled her. And at the same time, she was making him want to
have her there with him. It was a subtle deep flattery to him, her genuine
thrill.
To Connie, Clifford seemed to be coming out in his true colours: a
little vulgar, a little common, and uninspired; rather fat. Ivy Bolton's
tricks and humble bossiness were also only too transparent. But Connie did
wonder at the genuine thrill which the woman got out of Clifford. To say she
was in love with him would be putting it wrongly. She was thrilled by her
contact with a man of the upper class, this titled gentleman, this author
who could write books and poems, and whose photograph appeared in the
illustrated newspapers. She was thrilled to a weird passion. And his
`educating' her roused in her a passion of excitement and response much
deeper than any love affair could have done. In truth, the very fact that
there could be no love affair left her free to thrill to her very marrow
with this other passion, the peculiar passion of knowing, knowing as he
knew.
There was no mistake that the woman was in some way in love with him:
whatever force we give to the word love. She looked so handsome and so
young, and her grey eyes were sometimes marvellous. At the same time, there
was a lurking soft satisfaction about her, even of triumph, and private
satisfaction. Ugh, that private satisfaction. How Connie loathed it!
But no wonder Clifford was caught by the woman! She absolutely adored
him, in her persistent fashion, and put herself absolutely at his service,
for him to use as he liked. No wonder he was flattered!
Connie heard long conversations going on between the two. Or rather, it
bas mostly Mrs Bolton talking. She had unloosed to him the stream of gossip
about Tevershall village. It was more than gossip. It was Mrs Gaskell and
George Eliot and Miss Mitford all rolled in one, with a great deal more,
that these women left out.' Once started, Mrs Bolton was better than any
book, about the lives of the people. She knew them all so intimately, and
had such a peculiar, flamey zest in all their affairs, it was wonderful, if
just a trifle humiliating to listen to her. At first she had not ventured to
`talk Tevershall', as she called it, to Clifford. But once started, it went
on. Clifford was listening for `material', and he found it in plenty. Connie
realized that his so-called genius was just this: a perspicuous talent for
personal gossip, clever and apparently detached. Mrs Bolton, of course, was
very warm when she `talked Tevershall'. Carried away, in fact. And it was
marvellous, the things that happened and that she knew about. She would have
run to dozens of volumes.
Connie was fascinated, listening to her. But afterwards always a little
ashamed. She ought not to listen with this queer rabid curiosity. After all,
one may hear the most private affairs of other people, but only in a spirit
of respect for the struggling, battered thing which any human soul is, and
in a spirit of fine, discriminative sympathy. For even satire is a form of
sympathy. It is the way our sympathy flows and recoils that really
determines our lives. And here lies the vast importance of the novel,
properly handled. It can inform and lead into new places the flow of our
sympathetic consciousness, and it can lead our sympathy away in recoil from
things gone dead. Therefore, the novel, properly handled, can reveal the
most secret places of life: for it is in the passional secret places of
life, above all, that the tide of sensitive awareness needs to ebb and flow,
cleansing and freshening.
But the novel, like gossip, can also excite spurious sympathies and
recoils, mechanical and deadening to the psyche. The novel can glorify the
most corrupt feelings, so long as they are conventionally `pure'. Then the
novel, like gossip, becomes at last vicious, and, like gossip, all the more
vicious because it is always ostensibly on the side of the angels. Mrs
Bolton's gossip was always on the side of the angels. `And he was such a bad
fellow, and she was such a nice woman.' Whereas, as Connie could see even
from Mrs Bolton's gossip, the woman had been merely a mealy-mouthed sort,
and the man angrily honest. But angry honesty made a `bad man' of him, and
mealy-mouthedness made a `nice woman' of her, in the vicious, conventional
channelling of sympathy by Mrs Bolton.
For this reason, the gossip was humiliating. And for the same reason,
most novels, especially popular ones, are humiliating too. The public
responds now only to an appeal to its vices.
Nevertheless, one got a new vision of Tevershall village from Mrs
Bolton's talk. A terrible, seething welter of ugly life it seemed: not at
all the flat drabness it looked from outside. Clifford of course knew by
sight most of the people mentioned, Connie knew only one or two. But it
sounded really more like a Central African jungle than an English village.
`I suppose you heard as Miss Allsopp was married last week! Would you
ever! Miss Allsopp, old James' daughter, the boot-and-shoe Allsopp. You know
they built a house up at Pye Croft. The old man died last year from a fall;
eighty-three, he was, an' nimble as a lad. An' then he slipped on Bestwood
Hill, on a slide as the lads 'ad made last winter, an' broke his thigh, and
that finished him, poor old man, it did seem a shame. Well, he left all his
money to Tattie: didn't leave the boys a penny. An' Tattie, I know, is five
years---yes, she's fifty-three last autumn. And you know they were such
Chapel people, my word! She taught Sunday school for thirty years, till her
father died. And then she started carrying on with a fellow from Kinbrook, I
don't know if you know him, an oldish fellow with a red nose, rather
dandified, Willcock, as works in Harrison's woodyard. Well he's sixty-five,
if he's a day, yet you'd have thought they were a pair of young
turtle-doves, to see them, arm in arm, and kissing at the gate: yes, an' she
sitting on his knee right in the bay window on Pye Croft Road, for anybody
to see. And he's got sons over forty: only lost his wife two years ago. If
old James Allsopp hasn't risen from his grave, it's because there is no
rising: for he kept her that strict! Now they're married and gone to live
down at Kinbrook, and they say she goes round in a dressing-gown from
morning to night, a veritable sight. I'm sure it's awful, the way the old
ones go on! Why they're a lot worse than the young, and a sight more
disgusting. I lay it down to the pictures, myself. But you can't keep them
away. I was always saying: go to a good instructive film, but do for
goodness sake keep away from these melodramas and love films. Anyhow keep
the children away! But there you are, grown-ups are worse than the children:
and the old ones beat the band. Talk about morality! Nobody cares a thing.
Folks does as they like, and much better off they are for it, I must say.
But they're having to draw their horns in nowadays, now th' pits are working
so bad, and they haven't got the money. And the grumbling they do, it's
awful, especially the women. The men are so good and patient! What can they
do, poor chaps! But the women, oh, they do carry on! They go and show off,
giving contributions for a wedding present for Princess Mary, and then when
they see all the grand things that's been given, they simply rave: who's
she, any better than anybody else! Why doesn't Swan & Edgar give me one fur
coat, instead of giving her six. I wish I'd kept my ten shillings! What's
she going to give me, I should like to know? Here I can't get a new spring
coat, my dad's working that bad, and she gets van-loads. It's time as poor
folks had some money to spend, rich ones 'as 'ad it long enough. I want a
new spring coat, I do, an' wheer am I going to get it? I say to them, be
thankful you're well fed and well clothed, without all the new finery you
want! And they fly back at me: "Why isn't Princess Mary thankful to go about
in her old rags, then, an' have nothing! Folks like her get van-loads, an' I
can't have a new spring coat. It's a damned shame. Princess! Bloomin' rot
about Princess! It's munney as matters, an' cos she's got lots, they give
her more! Nobody's givin' me any, an' I've as much right as anybody else.
Don't talk to me about education. It's munney as matters. I want a new
spring coat, I do, an' I shan't get it, cos there's no munney..." That's all
they care about, clothes. They think nothing of giving seven or eight
guineas for a winter coat---colliers' daughters, mind you---and two guineas
for a child's summer hat. And then they go to the Primitive Chapel in their
two-guinea hat, girls as would have been proud of a three-and-sixpenny one
in my day. I heard that at the Primitive Methodist anniversary this year,
when they have a built-up platform for the Sunday School children, like a
grandstand going almost up to th' ceiling, I heard Miss Thompson, who has
the first class of girls in the Sunday School, say there'd be over a
thousand pounds in new Sunday clothes sitting on that platform! And times
are what they are! But you can't stop them. They're mad for clothes. And
boys the same. The lads spend every penny on themselves, clothes, smoking,
drinking in the Miners' Welfare, jaunting off to Sheffield two or three
times a week. Why, it's another world. And they fear nothing, and they
respect nothing, the young don't. The older men are that patient and good,
really, they let the women take everything. And this is what it leads to.
The women are positive demons. But the lads aren't like their dads. They're
sacrificing nothing, they aren't: they're all for self. If you tell them
they ought to be putting a bit by, for a home, they say: That'll keep, that
will, I'm goin' t' enjoy myself while I can. Owt else'll keep! Oh, they're
rough an' selfish, if you like. Everything falls on the older men, an' it's
a bad outlook all round.'
Clifford began to get a new idea of his own village. The place had
always frightened him, but he had thought it more or less stable. Now---?
`Is there much Socialism, Bolshevism, among the people?' he asked.
`Oh!' said Mrs Bolton, `you hear a few loud-mouthed ones. But they're
mostly women who've got into debt. The men take no notice. I don't believe
you'll ever turn our Tevershall men into reds. They're too decent for that.
But the young ones blether sometimes. Not that they care for it really. They
only want a bit of money in their pocket, to spend at the Welfare, or go
gadding to Sheffield. That's all they care. When they've got no money,
they'll listen to the reds spouting. But nobody believes in it, really.'
`So you think there's no danger?'
`Oh no! Not if trade was good, there wouldn't be. But if things were
bad for a long spell, the young ones might go funny. I tell you, they're a
selfish, spoilt lot. But I don't see how they'd ever do anything. They
aren't ever serious about anything, except showing off on motor-bikes and
dancing at the Palais-de-danse in Sheffield. You can't make them serious.
The serious ones dress up in evening clothes and go off to the Pally to show
off before a lot of girls and dance these new Charlestons and what not. I'm
sure sometimes the bus'll be full of young fellows in evening suits, collier
lads, off to the Pally: let alone those that have gone with their girls in
motors or on motor-bikes. They don't give a serious thought to a
thing---save Doncaster races, and the Derby: for they all of them bet on