Chapter IX

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 often, 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 was 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 Eliotand 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 vanloads. 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 every race. And football! But even football’s not what it was, not by a long chalk. It’s too much like hard work, they say. No, they’d rather be off on motor-bikes to Sheffield or Nottingham, Saturday afternoons.”

“But what do they do when they get there?”

“Oh, hang around – and have tea in some fine tea-place like the Mikado – and go to the Pally or the pictures or the Empire, with some girl. The girls are as free as the lads. They do just what they like.”

“And what do they do when they haven’t the money for these things?”

“They seem to get it, somehow. And they begin talking nasty then. But I don’t see how you’re going to get bolshevism, when all the lads want is just money to enjoy themselves, and the girls the same, with fine clothes: and they don’t care about another thing. They haven’t the brains to be socialists. They haven’t enough seriousness to take anything really serious, and they never will have.”

Connie thought, how extremely like all the rest of the classes the lower classes sounded. Just the same thing over again, Tevershall or Mayfair or Kensington. There was only one class nowadays: moneyboys. The moneyboy and the moneygirl, the only difference was how much you’d got, and how much you wanted.

Under Mrs Bolton’s influence, Clifford began to take a new interest in the mines. He began to feel he belonged. A new sort of self-assertion came into him. After all, he was the real boss in Tevershall, he was really the pits. It was a new sense of power, something he had till now shrunk from with dread.

Tevershall pits were running thin. There were only two collieries: Tevershall itself, and New London. Tevershall had once been a famous mine, and had made famous money. But its best days were over. New London was never very rich, and in ordinary times just got along decently. But now times were bad, and it was pits like New London that got left.

“There’s a lot of Tevershall men left and gone to Stacks Gate and Whiteover,” said Mrs Bolton. “You’ve not seen the new works at Stacks Gate, opened after the war, have you, Sir Clifford? Oh, you must go one day, they’re something quite new: great big chemical works at the pit-head, doesn’t look a bit like a colliery. They say they get more money out of the chemical by-products than out of the coal – I forget what it is. And the grand new houses for the men, fair mansions! of course it’s brought a lot of riff-raff from all over the country. But a lot of Tevershall men got on there, and doin’ well, a lot better than our own men. They say Tevershall’s done, finished: only a question of a few more years, and it’ll have to shut down. And New London’ll go first. My word, won’t it be funny when there’s no Tevershall pit working. It’s bad enough during a strike, but my word, if it closes for good, it’ll be like the end of the world. Even when I was a girl it was the best pit in the country, and a man counted himself lucky if he could on here. Oh, there’s been some money made in Tevershall. And now the men say it’s a sinking ship, and it’s time they all got out. Doesn’t it sound awful! But of course there’s a lot as’ll never go till they have to. They don’t like these new fangled mines, such a depth, and all machinery to work them. Some of them simply dreads those iron men, as they call them, those machines for hewing the coal, where men always did it before. And they say it’s wasteful as well. But what goes in waste is saved in wages, and a lot more. It seems soon there’ll be no use for men on the face of the earth, it’ll be all machines. But they say that’s what folks said when they had to give up the old stocking frames. I can remember one or two. But my word, the more machines, the more people, that’s what it looks like! They say you can’t get the same chemicals out of Tevershall coal as you can out of Stacks Gate, and that’s funny, they’re not three miles apart. But they say so. But everybody says it’s a shame something can’t be started, to keep the men going a bit better, and employ the girls. All the girls traipsing off to Sheffield every day! My word, it would be something to talk about if Tevershall Collieries took a new lease of life, after everybody saying they’re finished, and a sinking ship, and the men ought to leave them like rats leave a sinking ship. But folks talk so much, of course there was a boom during the war. When Sir Geoffrey made a trust of himself and got the money safe for ever, somehow. So they say! But they say even the masters and the owners don’t get much out of it now. You can hardly believe it, can you! Why I always thought the pits would go on for ever and ever. Who’d have thought, when I was a girl! But New England’s shut down, so is Colwick Wood: yes, it’s fair haunting to go through that coppy and see Colwick Wood standing there deserted among the trees, and bushes growing up all over the pit-head, and the lines red rusty. It’s like death itself, a dead colliery. Why, whatever should we do if Tevershall shut down – ? It doesn’t bear thinking of. Always that throng it’s been, except at strikes, and even then the fan-wheels didn’t stand, except when they fetched the ponies up. I’m sure it’s a funny world, you don’t know where you are from year to year, you really don’t.”

It was Mrs Bolton’s talk that really put a new fight into Clifford. His income, as she pointed out to him, was secure, from his father’s trust, even though it was not large. The pits did not really concern him. It was the other world he wanted to capture, the world of literature and fame; the popular world, not the working world.

Now he realized the distinction between popular success and working success: the populace of pleasure and the populace of work. He, as a private individual, had been catering with his stories for the populace of pleasure. And he had caught on. But beneath the populace of pleasure lay the populace of work, grim, grimy, and rather terrible. They too had to have their providers. And it was a much grimmer business, providing for the populace of work, than for the populace of pleasure. While he was doing his stories, and “getting on” in the world, Tevershall was going to the wall.

He realized now that the bitch-goddess of Success had two main appetites: one for flattery, adulation, stroking and tickling such as writers and artists gave her; but the other a grimmer appetite for meat and bones. And the meat and bones for the bitch-goddess were provided by the men who made money in industry.

Yes, there were two great groups of dogs wrangling for the bitch-goddess: the group of the flatterers, those who offered her amusement, stories, films, plays: and the other, much less showy, much more savage breed, those who gave her meat, the real substance of money. The well-groomed showy dogs of amusement wrangled and snarled among themselves for the favours of the bitch-goddess. But it was nothing to the silent fight-to-the-death that went on among the indispensables, the bone-bringers.

But under Mrs Bolton’s influence, Clifford was tempted to enter this other fight, to capture the bitch-goddess by brute means of industrial production. Somehow, he got his pecker up.

In one way, Mrs Bolton made a man of him, as Connie never did. Connie kept him apart, and made him sensitive and conscious of himself and his own states. Mrs Bolton made hint aware only of outside things. Inwardly he began to go soft as pulp. But outwardly he began to be effective.

He even roused himself to go to the mines once more: and when he was there, he went down in a tub, and in a tub he was hauled out into the workings. Things he had learned before the war, and seemed utterly to have forgotten, now came back to him. He sat there, crippled, in a tub, with the underground manager showing him the seam with a powerful torch. And he said little. But his mind began to work.

He began to read again his technical works on the coalmining industry, he studied the government reports, and he read with care the latest things on mining and the chemistry of coal and of shale which were written in German. Of course the most valuable discoveries were kept secret as far as possible. But once you started a sort of research in the field of coalmining, a study of methods and means, a study of by-products and the chemical possibilities of coal, it was astounding the ingenuity and the almost uncanny cleverness of the modern technical mind, as if really the devil himself had lent fiend’s wits to the technical scientists of industry. It was far more interesting than art, than literature, poor emotional half-witted stuff, was this technical science of industry. In this field, men were like gods, or demons, inspired to discoveries, and fighting to carry them out. In this activity, men were beyond atty mental age calculable. But Clifford knew that when it did come to the emotional and human life, these self-made men were of a mental age of about thirteen, feeble boys. The discrepancy was enormous and appalling.

But let that be. Let man slide down to general idiocy in the emotional and “human” mind, Clifford did not care. Let all that go hang. He was interested in the technicalities of modern coal-mining, and in pulling Tevershall out of the hole.

He went down to the pit day after day, he studied, he put the general manager, and the overhead manager, and the underground manager, and the engineers through a mill they had never dreamed of. Power! He felt a new sense of power flowing through him: power over all these men, over the hundreds and hundreds of colliers. He was finding out: and he was getting things into his grip.

And he seemed verily to be re-born. Now life came into him! He had been gradually dying, with Connie, in the isolated private life of the artist and the conscious being. Now let all that go. Let it sleep. He simply felt life rush into him out of the coal, out of the pit. The very stale air of the colliery was better than oxygen to him. It gave him a sense of power, power. He was doing something: and he was going to do something. He was going to win, to win: not as he had won with his stories, mere publicity, amid a whole sapping of energy and malice. But a man’s victory.

At first he thought the solution lay in electricity: convert the coal into electric power. Then a new idea came. The Germans invented a new locomotive engine with a self feeder, that did not need a fireman. And it was to be fed with a new fuel, that burnt in small quantities at a great heat, under peculiar conditions.

The idea of a new concentrated fuel that burnt with a hard slowness at a fierce heat was what first attracted Clifford. There must be some sort of external stimulus of the burning of such fuel, not merely air supply. He began to experiment, and got a clever young fellow, who had proved brilliant in chemistry, to help him.

And he felt triumphant. He had at last got out of himself. He had fulfilled his life-long secret yearning to get out of himself. Art had not done it for him. Art had only made it worse. But now, now he had done it.

He was not aware how much Mrs Bolton was behind him. He did not know how much he depended on her. But for all that, it was evident that when he was with her his voice dropped to an easy rhythm of intimacy, almost a trifle vulgar.

With Connie, he was a little stiff. He felt he owed her everything, and he showed her the utmost respect and consideration, so long as she gave him mere outward respect. But it was obvious he had a secret dread of her. The new Achilles in hint had a heel, and in this heel the woman, the woman like Connie, his wife, could lame him fatally. He went in a certain half-subservient dread of her, and was extremely nice to her. But his voice was a little tense when he spoke to her, and he began to be silent whenever she was present.

Only when he was alone with Mrs Bolton did he really feel a lord and a master, and his voice ran on with her almost as easily and garrulously as her own could run. And he let her shave him or sponge all his body as if he were a child, really as if he were a child.