第 54 页

"I suppose their lives are not really so bad," said Winifred

Inger, superior to the Zolaesque tragedy.

He turned with his polite, distant attention.

"Yes, they are pretty bad. The pits are very deep, and hot,

and in some places wet. The men die of consumption fairly often.

But they earn good wages."

"How gruesome!" said Winifred Inger.

"Yes," he replied gravely. It was his grave, solid,

self-contained manner which made him so much respected as a

colliery manager.

The servant came in to ask where they would have tea.

"Put it in the summer-house, Mrs. Smith," he said.

The fair-haired, good-looking young woman went out.

"Is she married and in service?" asked Ursula.

"She is a widow. Her husband died of consumption a little

while ago." Brangwen gave a sinister little laugh. "He lay there

in the house-place at her mother's, and five or six other people

in the house, and died very gradually. I asked her if his death

wasn't a great trouble to her. 'Well,' she said, 'he was very

fretful towards the last, never satisfied, never easy, always

fret-fretting, an' never knowing what would satisfy him. So in

one way it was a relief when it was over--for him and for

everybody.' They had only been married two years, and she has

one boy. I asked her if she hadn't been very happy. 'Oh, yes,

sir, we was very comfortable at first, till he took

bad--oh, we was very comfortable--oh, yes--but,

you see, you get used to it. I've had my father and two brothers

go off just the same. You get used to it'."

"It's a horrible thing to get used to," said Winifred Inger,

with a shudder.

"Yes," he said, still smiling. "But that's how they are.

She'll be getting married again directly. One man or

another--it does not matter very much. They're all

colliers."

"What do you mean?" asked Ursula. "They're all colliers?"

"It is with the women as with us," he replied. "Her husband

was John Smith, loader. We reckoned him as a loader, he reckoned

himself as a loader, and so she knew he represented his job.

Marriage and home is a little side-show.

"The women know it right enough, and take it for what it's

worth. One man or another, it doesn't matter all the world. The

pit matters. Round the pit there will always be the sideshows,

plenty of 'em."

He looked round at the red chaos, the rigid, amorphous

confusion of Wiggiston.

"Every man his own little side-show, his home, but the pit

owns every man. The women have what is left. What's left of this

man, or what is left of that--it doesn't matter altogether.

The pit takes all that really matters."

"It is the same everywhere," burst out Winifred. "It is the

office, or the shop, or the business that gets the man, the

woman gets the bit the shop can't digest. What is he at home, a

man? He is a meaningless lump--a standing machine, a

machine out of work."

"They know they are sold," said Tom Brangwen. "That's where

it is. They know they are sold to their job. If a woman talks

her throat out, what difference can it make? The man's sold to

his job. So the women don't bother. They take what they can

catch--and vogue la galere."

"Aren't they very strict here?" asked Miss Inger.

"Oh, no. Mrs. Smith has two sisters who have just changed

husbands. They're not very particular--neither are they

very interested. They go dragging along what is left from the

pits. They're not interested enough to be very immoral--it

all amounts to the same thing, moral or immoral--just a

question of pit-wages. The most moral duke in England makes two

hundred thousand a year out of these pits. He keeps the morality

end up."

Ursula sat black-souled and very bitter, hearing the two of

them talk. There seemed something ghoulish even in their very

deploring of the state of things. They seemed to take a ghoulish

satisfaction in it. The pit was the great mistress. Ursula

looked out of the window and saw the proud, demonlike colliery

with her wheels twinkling in the heavens, the formless, squalid

mass of the town lying aside. It was the squalid heap of

side-shows. The pit was the main show, the raison d'etre

of all.

How terrible it was! There was a horrible fascination

in it--human bodies and lives subjected in slavery to that

symmetric monster of the colliery. There was a swooning,

perverse satisfaction in it. For a moment she was dizzy.

Then she recovered, felt herself in a great loneliness,

where-in she was sad but free. She had departed. No more would

she subscribe to the great colliery, to the great machine which

has taken us all captives. In her soul, she was against it, she

disowned even its power. It had only to be forsaken to be inane,

meaningless. And she knew it was meaningless. But it needed a

great, passionate effort of will on her part, seeing the

colliery, still to maintain her knowledge that it was

meaningless.

But her Uncle Tom and her mistress remained there among the

horde, cynically reviling the monstrous state and yet adhering

to it, like a man who reviles his mistress, yet who is in love

with her. She knew her Uncle Tom perceived what was going on.

But she knew moreover that in spite of his criticism and

condemnation, he still wanted the great machine. His only happy

moments, his only moments of pure freedom were when he was

serving the machine. Then, and then only, when the machine

caught him up, was he free from the hatred of himself, could he

act wholely, without cynicism and unreality.

His real mistress was the machine, and the real mistress of

Winifred was the machine. She too, Winifred, worshipped the

impure abstraction, the mechanisms of matter. There, there, in

the machine, in service of the machine, was she free from the

clog and degradation of human feeling. There, in the monstrous

mechanism that held all matter, living or dead, in its service,

did she achieve her consummation and her perfect unison, her

immortality.

Hatred sprang up in Ursula's heart. If she could she would

smash the machine. Her soul's action should be the smashing of

the great machine. If she could destroy the colliery, and make

all the men of Wiggiston out of work, she would do it. Let them

starve and grub in the earth for roots, rather than serve such a

Moloch as this.

She hated her Uncle Tom, she hated Winifred Inger. They went

down to the summer-house for tea. It was a pleasant place among

a few trees, at the end of a tiny garden, on the edge of a

field. Her Uncle Tom and Winifred seemed to jeer at her, to

cheapen her. She was miserable and desolate. But she would never

give way.

Her coldness for Winifred should never cease. She knew it was

over between them. She saw gross, ugly movements in her

mistress, she saw a clayey, inert, unquickened flesh, that

reminded her of the great prehistoric lizards. One day her Uncle

Tom came in out of the broiling sunshine heated from walking.

Then the perspiration stood out upon his head and brow, his hand

was wet and hot and suffocating in its clasp. He too had

something marshy about him--the succulent moistness and

turgidity, and the same brackish, nauseating effect of a marsh,

where life and decaying are one.

He was repellent to her, who was so dry and fine in her fire.

Her very bones seemed to bid him keep his distance from her.

It was in these weeks that Ursula grew up. She stayed two

weeks at Wiggiston, and she hated it. All was grey, dry ash,

cold and dead and ugly. But she stayed. She stayed also to get

rid of Winifred. The girl's hatred and her sense of

repulsiveness in her mistress and in her uncle seemed to throw

the other two together. They drew together as if against

her.

In hardness and bitterness of soul, Ursula knew that Winifred

was become her uncle's lover. She was glad. She had loved them

both. Now she wanted to be rid of them both. Their marshy,

bitter-sweet corruption came sick and unwholesome in her

nostrils. Anything, to get out of the foetid air. She would

leave them both for ever, leave for ever their strange, soft,

half-corrupt element. Anything to get away.

One night Winifred came all burning into Ursula's bed, and

put her arms round the girl, holding her to herself in spite of

unwillingness, and said,

"Dear, my dear--shall I marry Mr. Brangwen--shall

I?"

The clinging, heavy, muddy question weighed on Ursula

intolerably.

"Has he asked you?" she said, using all her might of hard

resistance.

"He's asked me," said Winifred. "Do you want me to marry him,

Ursula?"

"Yes," said Ursula.

The arms tightened more on her.

"I knew you did, my sweet--and I will marry him. You're

fond of him, aren't you?"

"I've been awfully fond of him--ever since I was

a child."

"I know--I know. I can see what you like in him. He is a

man by himself, he has something apart from the rest."

"Yes," said Ursula.

"But he's not like you, my dear--ha, he's not as good as

you. There's something even objectionable in him--his thick

thighs--"

Ursula was silent.

"But I'll marry him, my dear--it will be best. Now say

you love me."

A sort of profession was extorted out of the girl.

Nevertheless her mistress went away sighing, to weep in her own

chamber.

In two days' time Ursula left Wiggiston. Miss Inger went to

Nottingham. There was an engagement between her and Tom

Brangwen, which the uncle seemed to vaunt as if it were an

assurance of his validity.

Brangwen and Winifred Inger continued engaged for another

term. Then they married. Brangwen had reached the age when he

wanted children. He wanted children. Neither marriage nor the

domestic establishment meant anything to him. He wanted to

propagate himself. He knew what he was doing. He had the

instinct of a growing inertia, of a thing that chooses its place

of rest in which to lapse into apathy, complete, profound

indifference. He would let the machinery carry him; husband,

father, pit-manager, warm clay lifted through the recurrent

action of day after day by the great machine from which it

derived its motion. As for Winifred, she was an educated woman,

and of the same sort as himself. She would make a good

companion. She was his mate.

CHAPTER XIII

THE MAN'S WORLD

Ursula came back to Cossethay to fight with her mother. Her

schooldays were over. She had passed the matriculation

examination. Now she came home to face that empty period between

school and possible marriage.

At first she thought it would be just like holidays all the

time, she would feel just free. Her soul was in chaos, blinded

suffering, maimed. She had no will left to think about herself.

For a time she must just lapse.

But very shortly she found herself up against her mother. Her

mother had, at this time, the power to irritate and madden the

girl continuously. There were already seven children, yet Mrs.

Brangwen was again with child, the ninth she had borne. One had

died of diphtheria in infancy.

Even this fact of her mother's pregnancy enraged the eldest

girl. Mrs. Brangwen was so complacent, so utterly fulfilled in

her breeding. She would not have the existence at all of

anything but the immediate, physical, common things. Ursula

inflamed in soul, was suffering all the anguish of youth's

reaching for some unknown ordeal, that it can't grasp, can't

even distinguish or conceive. Maddened, she was fighting all the

darkness she was up against. And part of this darkness was her

mother. To limit, as her mother did, everything to the ring of

physical considerations, and complacently to reject the reality

of anything else, was horrible. Not a thing did Mrs. Brangwen

care about, but the children, the house, and a little local

gossip. And she would not be touched, she would let

nothing else live near her. She went about, big with child,

slovenly, easy, having a certain lax dignity, taking her own

time, pleasing herself, always, always doing things for the

children, and feeling that she thereby fulfilled the whole of

womanhood.

This long trance of complacent child-bearing had kept her

young and undeveloped. She was scarcely a day older than when

Gudrun was born. All these years nothing had happened save the

coming of the children, nothing had mattered but the bodies of

her babies. As her children came into consciousness, as they

began to suffer their own fulfilment, she cast them off. But she

remained dominant in the house. Brangwen continued in a kind of

rich drowse of physical heat, in connection with his wife. They

were neither of them quite personal, quite defined as

individuals, so much were they pervaded by the physical heat of

breeding and rearing their young.

How Ursula resented it, how she fought against the close,

physical, limited life of herded domesticity! Calm, placid,

unshakeable as ever, Mrs. Brangwen went about in her dominance

of physical maternity.

There were battles. Ursula would fight for things that

mattered to her. She would have the children less rude and

tyrannical, she would have a place in the house. But her

mother pulled her down, pulled her down. With all the cunning

instinct of a breeding animal, Mrs. Brangwen ridiculed and held

cheap Ursula's passions, her ideas, her pronunciations. Ursula

would try to insist, in her own home, on the right of women to

take equal place with men in the field of action and work.

"Ay," said the mother, "there's a good crop of stockings

lying ripe for mending. Let that be your field of action."

Ursula disliked mending stockings, and this retort maddened