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_ In Beldover, there was both for Ursula and for Gudrun an interval. It
seemed to Ursula as if Birkin had gone out of her for the time, he had
lost his significance, he scarcely mattered in her world. She had her
own friends, her own activities, her own life. She turned back to the
old ways with zest, away from him.
And Gudrun, after feeling every moment in all her veins conscious of
Gerald Crich, connected even physically with him, was now almost
indifferent to the thought of him. She was nursing new schemes for
going away and trying a new form of life. All the time, there was
something in her urging her to avoid the final establishing of a
relationship with Gerald. She felt it would be wiser and better to have
no more than a casual acquaintance with him.
She had a scheme for going to St Petersburg, where she had a friend who
was a sculptor like herself, and who lived with a wealthy Russian whose
hobby was jewel-making. The emotional, rather rootless life of the
Russians appealed to her. She did not want to go to Paris. Paris was
dry, and essentially boring. She would like to go to Rome, Munich,
Vienna, or to St Petersburg or Moscow. She had a friend in St
Petersburg and a friend in Munich. To each of these she wrote, asking
about rooms.
She had a certain amount of money. She had come home partly to save,
and now she had sold several pieces of work, she had been praised in
various shows. She knew she could become quite the 'go' if she went to
London. But she knew London, she wanted something else. She had seventy
pounds, of which nobody knew anything. She would move soon, as soon as
she heard from her friends. Her nature, in spite of her apparent
placidity and calm, was profoundly restless.
The sisters happened to call in a cottage in Willey Green to buy honey.
Mrs Kirk, a stout, pale, sharp-nosed woman, sly, honied, with something
shrewish and cat-like beneath, asked the girls into her toocosy, too
tidy kitchen. There was a cat-like comfort and cleanliness everywhere.
'Yes, Miss Brangwen,' she said, in her slightly whining, insinuating
voice, 'and how do you like being back in the old place, then?'
Gudrun, whom she addressed, hated her at once.
'I don't care for it,' she replied abruptly.
'You don't? Ay, well, I suppose you found a difference from London. You
like life, and big, grand places. Some of us has to be content with
Willey Green and Beldover. And what do you think of our Grammar School,
as there's so much talk about?'
'What do I think of it?' Gudrun looked round at her slowly. 'Do you
mean, do I think it's a good school?'
'Yes. What is your opinion of it?'
'I DO think it's a good school.'
Gudrun was very cold and repelling. She knew the common people hated
the school.
'Ay, you do, then! I've heard so much, one way and the other. It's nice
to know what those that's in it feel. But opinions vary, don't they? Mr
Crich up at Highclose is all for it. Ay, poor man, I'm afraid he's not
long for this world. He's very poorly.'
'Is he worse?' asked Ursula.
'Eh, yes--since they lost Miss Diana. He's gone off to a shadow. Poor
man, he's had a world of trouble.'
'Has he?' asked Gudrun, faintly ironic.
'He has, a world of trouble. And as nice and kind a gentleman as ever
you could wish to meet. His children don't take after him.'
'I suppose they take after their mother?' said Ursula.
'In many ways.' Mrs Krik lowered her voice a little. 'She was a proud
haughty lady when she came into these parts--my word, she was that! She
mustn't be looked at, and it was worth your life to speak to her.' The
woman made a dry, sly face.
'Did you know her when she was first married?'
'Yes, I knew her. I nursed three of her children. And proper little
terrors they were, little fiends--that Gerald was a demon if ever there
was one, a proper demon, ay, at six months old.' A curious malicious,
sly tone came into the woman's voice.
'Really,' said Gudrun.
'That wilful, masterful--he'd mastered one nurse at six months. Kick,
and scream, and struggle like a demon. Many's the time I've pinched his
little bottom for him, when he was a child in arms. Ay, and he'd have
been better if he'd had it pinched oftener. But she wouldn't have them
corrected--no-o, wouldn't hear of it. I can remember the rows she had
with Mr Crich, my word. When he'd got worked up, properly worked up
till he could stand no more, he'd lock the study door and whip them.
But she paced up and down all the while like a tiger outside, like a
tiger, with very murder in her face. She had a face that could LOOK
death. And when the door was opened, she'd go in with her hands
lifted--"What have you been doing to MY children, you coward." She was
like one out of her mind. I believe he was frightened of her; he had to
be driven mad before he'd lift a finger. Didn't the servants have a
life of it! And didn't we used to be thankful when one of them caught
it. They were the torment of your life.'
'Really!' said Gudrun.
'In every possible way. If you wouldn't let them smash their pots on
the table, if you wouldn't let them drag the kitten about with a string
round its neck, if you wouldn't give them whatever they asked for,
every mortal thing--then there was a shine on, and their mother coming
in asking--"What's the matter with him? What have you done to him? What
is it, Darling?" And then she'd turn on you as if she'd trample you
under her feet. But she didn't trample on me. I was the only one that
could do anything with her demons--for she wasn't going to be bothered
with them herself. No, SHE took no trouble for them. But they must just
have their way, they mustn't be spoken to. And Master Gerald was the
beauty. I left when he was a year and a half, I could stand no more.
But I pinched his little bottom for him when he was in arms, I did,
when there was no holding him, and I'm not sorry I did--'
Gudrun went away in fury and loathing. The phrase, 'I pinched his
little bottom for him,' sent her into a white, stony fury. She could
not bear it, she wanted to have the woman taken out at once and
strangled. And yet there the phrase was lodged in her mind for ever,
beyond escape. She felt, one day, she would HAVE to tell him, to see
how he took it. And she loathed herself for the thought.
But at Shortlands the life-long struggle was coming to a close. The
father was ill and was going to die. He had bad internal pains, which
took away all his attentive life, and left him with only a vestige of
his consciousness. More and more a silence came over him, he was less
and less acutely aware of his surroundings. The pain seemed to absorb
his activity. He knew it was there, he knew it would come again. It was
like something lurking in the darkness within him. And he had not the
power, or the will, to seek it out and to know it. There it remained in
the darkness, the great pain, tearing him at times, and then being
silent. And when it tore him he crouched in silent subjection under it,
and when it left him alone again, he refused to know of it. It was
within the darkness, let it remain unknown. So he never admitted it,
except in a secret corner of himself, where all his never-revealed
fears and secrets were accumulated. For the rest, he had a pain, it
went away, it made no difference. It even stimulated him, excited him.
But it gradually absorbed his life. Gradually it drew away all his
potentiality, it bled him into the dark, it weaned him of life and drew
him away into the darkness. And in this twilight of his life little
remained visible to him. The business, his work, that was gone
entirely. His public interests had disappeared as if they had never
been. Even his family had become extraneous to him, he could only
remember, in some slight non-essential part of himself, that such and
such were his children. But it was historical fact, not vital to him.
He had to make an effort to know their relation to him. Even his wife
barely existed. She indeed was like the darkness, like the pain within
him. By some strange association, the darkness that contained the pain
and the darkness that contained his wife were identical. All his
thoughts and understandings became blurred and fused, and now his wife
and the consuming pain were the same dark secret power against him,
that he never faced. He never drove the dread out of its lair within
him. He only knew that there was a dark place, and something inhabiting
this darkness which issued from time to time and rent him. But he dared
not penetrate and drive the beast into the open. He had rather ignore
its existence. Only, in his vague way, the dread was his wife, the
destroyer, and it was the pain, the destruction, a darkness which was
one and both.
He very rarely saw his wife. She kept her room. Only occasionally she
came forth, with her head stretched forward, and in her low, possessed
voice, she asked him how he was. And he answered her, in the habit of
more than thirty years: 'Well, I don't think I'm any the worse, dear.'
But he was frightened of her, underneath this safeguard of habit,
frightened almost to the verge of death.
But all his life, he had been so constant to his lights, he had never
broken down. He would die even now without breaking down, without
knowing what his feelings were, towards her. All his life, he had said:
'Poor Christiana, she has such a strong temper.' With unbroken will, he
had stood by this position with regard to her, he had substituted pity
for all his hostility, pity had been his shield and his safeguard, and
his infallible weapon. And still, in his consciousness, he was sorry
for her, her nature was so violent and so impatient.
But now his pity, with his life, was wearing thin, and the dread almost
amounting to horror, was rising into being. But before the armour of
his pity really broke, he would die, as an insect when its shell is
cracked. This was his final resource. Others would live on, and know
the living death, the ensuing process of hopeless chaos. He would not.
He denied death its victory.
He had been so constant to his lights, so constant to charity, and to
his love for his neighbour. Perhaps he had loved his neighbour even
better than himself--which is going one further than the commandment.
Always, this flame had burned in his heart, sustaining him through
everything, the welfare of the people. He was a large employer of
labour, he was a great mine-owner. And he had never lost this from his
heart, that in Christ he was one with his workmen. Nay, he had felt
inferior to them, as if they through poverty and labour were nearer to
God than he. He had always the unacknowledged belief, that it was his
workmen, the miners, who held in their hands the means of salvation. To
move nearer to God, he must move towards his miners, his life must
gravitate towards theirs. They were, unconsciously, his idol, his God
made manifest. In them he worshipped the highest, the great,
sympathetic, mindless Godhead of humanity.
And all the while, his wife had opposed him like one of the great
demons of hell. Strange, like a bird of prey, with the fascinating
beauty and abstraction of a hawk, she had beat against the bars of his
philanthropy, and like a hawk in a cage, she had sunk into silence. By
force of circumstance, because all the world combined to make the cage
unbreakable, he had been too strong for her, he had kept her prisoner.
And because she was his prisoner, his passion for her had always
remained keen as death. He had always loved her, loved her with
intensity. Within the cage, she was denied nothing, she was given all
licence.
But she had gone almost mad. Of wild and overweening temper, she could
not bear the humiliation of her husband's soft, half-appealing kindness
to everybody. He was not deceived by the poor. He knew they came and
sponged on him, and whined to him, the worse sort; the majority,
luckily for him, were much too proud to ask for anything, much too
independent to come knocking at his door. But in Beldover, as
everywhere else, there were the whining, parasitic, foul human beings
who come crawling after charity, and feeding on the living body of the
public like lice. A kind of fire would go over Christiana Crich's
brain, as she saw two more pale-faced, creeping women in objectionable
black clothes, cringing lugubriously up the drive to the door. She
wanted to set the dogs on them, 'Hi Rip! Hi Ring! Ranger! At 'em boys,
set 'em off.' But Crowther, the butler, with all the rest of the
servants, was Mr Crich's man. Nevertheless, when her husband was away,
she would come down like a wolf on the crawling supplicants;
'What do you people want? There is nothing for you here. You have no
business on the drive at all. Simpson, drive them away and let no more
of them through the gate.'
The servants had to obey her. And she would stand watching with an eye
like the eagle's, whilst the groom in clumsy confusion drove the
lugubrious persons down the drive, as if they were rusty fowls,
scuttling before him.
But they learned to know, from the lodge-keeper, when Mrs Crich was
away, and they timed their visits. How many times, in the first years,
would Crowther knock softly at the door: 'Person to see you, sir.'
'What name?'
'Grocock, sir.'
'What do they want?' The question was half impatient, half gratified.
He liked hearing appeals to his charity.
'About a child, sir.'
'Show them into the library, and tell them they shouldn't come after
eleven o'clock in the morning.'
'Why do you get up from dinner?--send them off,' his wife would say
abruptly.
'Oh, I can't do that. It's no trouble just to hear what they have to
say.'
'How many more have been here today? Why don't you establish open house
for them? They would soon oust me and the children.'
'You know dear, it doesn't hurt me to hear what they have to say. And
if they really are in trouble--well, it is my duty to help them out of
it.'
'It's your duty to invite all the rats in the world to gnaw at your
bones.'
'Come, Christiana, it isn't like that. Don't be uncharitable.'
But she suddenly swept out of the room, and out to the study. There sat
the meagre charity-seekers, looking as if they were at the doctor's.
'Mr Crich can't see you. He can't see you at this hour. Do you think he
is your property, that you can come whenever you like? You must go
away, there is nothing for you here.'
The poor people rose in confusion. But Mr Crich, pale and black-bearded
and deprecating, came behind her, saying:
'Yes, I don't like you coming as late as this. I'll hear any of you in
the morning part of the day, but I can't really do with you after.
What's amiss then, Gittens. How is your Missis?'
'Why, she's sunk very low, Mester Crich, she's a'most gone, she is--'
Sometimes, it seemed to Mrs Crich as if her husband were some subtle
funeral bird, feeding on the miseries of the people. It seemed to her
he was never satisfied unless there was some sordid tale being poured
out to him, which he drank in with a sort of mournful, sympathetic
satisfaction. He would have no RAISON D'ETRE if there were no
lugubrious miseries in the world, as an undertaker would have no
meaning if there were no funerals.
Mrs Crich recoiled back upon herself, she recoiled away from this world
of creeping democracy. A band of tight, baleful exclusion fastened
round her heart, her isolation was fierce and hard, her antagonism was
passive but terribly pure, like that of a hawk in a cage. As the years
went on, she lost more and more count of the world, she seemed rapt in
some glittering abstraction, almost purely unconscious. She would
wander about the house and about the surrounding country, staring
keenly and seeing nothing. She rarely spoke, she had no connection with
the world. And she did not even think. She was consumed in a fierce
tension of opposition, like the negative pole of a magnet.
And she bore many children. For, as time went on, she never opposed her
husband in word or deed. She took no notice of him, externally. She
submitted to him, let him take what he wanted and do as he wanted with
her. She was like a hawk that sullenly submits to everything. The
relation between her and her husband was wordless and unknown, but it
was deep, awful, a relation of utter inter-destruction. And he, who
triumphed in the world, he became more and more hollow in his vitality,
the vitality was bled from within him, as by some haemorrhage. She was
hulked like a hawk in a cage, but her heart was fierce and undiminished
within her, though her mind was destroyed.
So to the last he would go to her and hold her in his arms sometimes,
before his strength was all gone. The terrible white, destructive light
that burned in her eyes only excited and roused him. Till he was bled
to death, and then he dreaded her more than anything. But he always
said to himself, how happy he had been, how he had loved her with a
pure and consuming love ever since he had known her. And he thought of
her as pure, chaste; the white flame which was known to him alone, the
flame of her sex, was a white flower of snow to his mind. She was a
wonderful white snow-flower, which he had desired infinitely. And now
he was dying with all his ideas and interpretations intact. They would
only collapse when the breath left his body. Till then they would be
pure truths for him. Only death would show the perfect completeness of
the lie. Till death, she was his white snow-flower. He had subdued her,
and her subjugation was to him an infinite chastity in her, a virginity
which he could never break, and which dominated him as by a spell.
She had let go the outer world, but within herself she was unbroken and
unimpaired. She only sat in her room like a moping, dishevelled hawk,
motionless, mindless. Her children, for whom she had been so fierce in
her youth, now meant scarcely anything to her. She had lost all that,
she was quite by herself. Only Gerald, the gleaming, had some existence
for her. But of late years, since he had become head of the business,
he too was forgotten. Whereas the father, now he was dying, turned for
compassion to Gerald. There had always been opposition between the two
of them. Gerald had feared and despised his father, and to a great
extent had avoided him all through boyhood and young manhood. And the
father had felt very often a real dislike of his eldest son, which,
never wanting to give way to, he had refused to acknowledge. He had
ignored Gerald as much as possible, leaving him alone.
Since, however, Gerald had come home and assumed responsibility in the
firm, and had proved such a wonderful director, the father, tired and
weary of all outside concerns, had put all his trust of these things in
his son, implicitly, leaving everything to him, and assuming a rather
touching dependence on the young enemy. This immediately roused a
poignant pity and allegiance in Gerald's heart, always shadowed by
contempt and by unadmitted enmity. For Gerald was in reaction against
Charity; and yet he was dominated by it, it assumed supremacy in the
inner life, and he could not confute it. So he was partly subject to
that which his father stood for, but he was in reaction against it. Now
he could not save himself. A certain pity and grief and tenderness for
his father overcame him, in spite of the deeper, more sullen hostility.
The father won shelter from Gerald through compassion. But for love he
had Winifred. She was his youngest child, she was the only one of his
children whom he had ever closely loved. And her he loved with all the
great, overweening, sheltering love of a dying man. He wanted to
shelter her infinitely, infinitely, to wrap her in warmth and love and
shelter, perfectly. If he could save her she should never know one
pain, one grief, one hurt. He had been so right all his life, so
constant in his kindness and his goodness. And this was his last
passionate righteousness, his love for the child Winifred. Some things
troubled him yet. The world had passed away from him, as his strength
ebbed. There were no more poor and injured and humble to protect and
succour. These were all lost to him. There were no more sons and
daughters to trouble him, and to weigh on him as an unnatural
responsibility. These too had faded out of reality All these things had
fallen out of his hands, and left him free.
There remained the covert fear and horror of his wife, as she sat
mindless and strange in her room, or as she came forth with slow,
prowling step, her head bent forward. But this he put away. Even his
life-long righteousness, however, would not quite deliver him from the
inner horror. Still, he could keep it sufficiently at bay. It would
never break forth openly. Death would come first.
Then there was Winifred! If only he could be sure about her, if only he
could be sure. Since the death of Diana, and the development of his
illness, his craving for surety with regard to Winifred amounted almost
to obsession. It was as if, even dying, he must have some anxiety, some
responsibility of love, of Charity, upon his heart.
She was an odd, sensitive, inflammable child, having her father's dark
hair and quiet bearing, but being quite detached, momentaneous. She was
like a changeling indeed, as if her feelings did not matter to her,
really. She often seemed to be talking and playing like the gayest and
most childish of children, she was full of the warmest, most delightful
affection for a few things--for her father, and for her animals in
particular. But if she heard that her beloved kitten Leo had been run
over by the motor-car she put her head on one side, and replied, with a
faint contraction like resentment on her face: 'Has he?' Then she took
no more notice. She only disliked the servant who would force bad news
on her, and wanted her to be sorry. She wished not to know, and that
seemed her chief motive. She avoided her mother, and most of the
members of her family. She LOVED her Daddy, because he wanted her
always to be happy, and because he seemed to become young again, and
irresponsible in her presence. She liked Gerald, because he was so
self-contained. She loved people who would make life a game for her.
She had an amazing instinctive critical faculty, and was a pure
anarchist, a pure aristocrat at once. For she accepted her equals
wherever she found them, and she ignored with blithe indifference her
inferiors, whether they were her brothers and sisters, or whether they
were wealthy guests of the house, or whether they were the common
people or the servants. She was quite single and by herself, deriving
from nobody. It was as if she were cut off from all purpose or
continuity, and existed simply moment by moment.
The father, as by some strange final illusion, felt as if all his fate
depended on his ensuring to Winifred her happiness. She who could never
suffer, because she never formed vital connections, she who could lose
the dearest things of her life and be just the same the next day, the
whole memory dropped out, as if deliberately, she whose will was so
strangely and easily free, anarchistic, almost nihilistic, who like a
soulless bird flits on its own will, without attachment or
responsibility beyond the moment, who in her every motion snapped the
threads of serious relationship with blithe, free hands, really
nihilistic, because never troubled, she must be the object of her
father's final passionate solicitude.
When Mr Crich heard that Gudrun Brangwen might come to help Winifred
with her drawing and modelling he saw a road to salvation for his
child. He believed that Winifred had talent, he had seen Gudrun, he
knew that she was an exceptional person. He could give Winifred into
her hands as into the hands of a right being. Here was a direction and
a positive force to be lent to his child, he need not leave her
directionless and defenceless. If he could but graft the girl on to
some tree of utterance before he died, he would have fulfilled his
responsibility. And here it could be done. He did not hesitate to
appeal to Gudrun.
Meanwhile, as the father drifted more and more out of life, Gerald
experienced more and more a sense of exposure. His father after all had
stood for the living world to him. Whilst his father lived Gerald was
not responsible for the world. But now his father was passing away,
Gerald found himself left exposed and unready before the storm of
living, like the mutinous first mate of a ship that has lost his
captain, and who sees only a terrible chaos in front of him. He did not
inherit an established order and a living idea. The whole unifying idea
of mankind seemed to be dying with his father, the centralising force
that had held the whole together seemed to collapse with his father,
the parts were ready to go asunder in terrible disintegration. Gerald
was as if left on board of a ship that was going asunder beneath his
feet, he was in charge of a vessel whose timbers were all coming apart.
He knew that all his life he had been wrenching at the frame of life to
break it apart. And now, with something of the terror of a destructive
child, he saw himself on the point of inheriting his own destruction.
And during the last months, under the influence of death, and of
Birkin's talk, and of Gudrun's penetrating being, he had lost entirely
that mechanical certainty that had been his triumph. Sometimes spasms
of hatred came over him, against Birkin and Gudrun and that whole set.
He wanted to go back to the dullest conservatism, to the most stupid of
conventional people. He wanted to revert to the strictest Toryism. But
the desire did not last long enough to carry him into action.
During his childhood and his boyhood he had wanted a sort of savagedom.
The days of Homer were his ideal, when a man was chief of an army of
heroes, or spent his years in wonderful Odyssey. He hated remorselessly
the circumstances of his own life, so much that he never really saw
Beldover and the colliery valley. He turned his face entirely away from
the blackened mining region that stretched away on the right hand of
Shortlands, he turned entirely to the country and the woods beyond
Willey Water. It was true that the panting and rattling of the coal
mines could always be heard at Shortlands. But from his earliest
childhood, Gerald had paid no heed to this. He had ignored the whole of
the industrial sea which surged in coal-blackened tides against the
grounds of the house. The world was really a wilderness where one
hunted and swam and rode. He rebelled against all authority. Life was a
condition of savage freedom.
Then he had been sent away to school, which was so much death to him.
He refused to go to Oxford, choosing a German university. He had spent
a certain time at Bonn, at Berlin, and at Frankfurt. There, a curiosity
had been aroused in his mind. He wanted to see and to know, in a
curious objective fashion, as if it were an amusement to him. Then he
must try war. Then he must travel into the savage regions that had so
attracted him.
The result was, he found humanity very much alike everywhere, and to a
mind like his, curious and cold, the savage was duller, less exciting
than the European. So he took hold of all kinds of sociological ideas,
and ideas of reform. But they never went more than skin-deep, they were
never more than a mental amusement. Their interest lay chiefly in the
reaction against the positive order, the destructive reaction.
He discovered at last a real adventure in the coal-mines. His father
asked him to help in the firm. Gerald had been educated in the science
of mining, and it had never interested him. Now, suddenly, with a sort
of exultation, he laid hold of the world.
There was impressed photographically on his consciousness the great
industry. Suddenly, it was real, he was part of it. Down the valley ran
the colliery railway, linking mine with mine. Down the railway ran the
trains, short trains of heavily laden trucks, long trains of empty
wagons, each one bearing in big white letters the initials:
'C.B.&Co.'
These white letters on all the wagons he had seen since his first
childhood, and it was as if he had never seen them, they were so
familiar, and so ignored. Now at last he saw his own name written on
the wall. Now he had a vision of power.
So many wagons, bearing his initial, running all over the country. He
saw them as he entered London in the train, he saw them at Dover. So
far his power ramified. He looked at Beldover, at Selby, at Whatmore,
at Lethley Bank, the great colliery villages which depended entirely on
his mines. They were hideous and sordid, during his childhood they had
been sores in his consciousness. And now he saw them with pride. Four
raw new towns, and many ugly industrial hamlets were crowded under his
dependence. He saw the stream of miners flowing along the causeways
from the mines at the end of the afternoon, thousands of blackened,
slightly distorted human beings with red mouths, all moving subjugate
to his will. He pushed slowly in his motor-car through the little
market-top on Friday nights in Beldover, through a solid mass of human
beings that were making their purchases and doing their weekly
spending. They were all subordinate to him. They were ugly and uncouth,
but they were his instruments. He was the God of the machine. They made
way for his motor-car automatically, slowly.
He did not care whether they made way with alacrity, or grudgingly. He
did not care what they thought of him. His vision had suddenly
crystallised. Suddenly he had conceived the pure instrumentality of
mankind. There had been so much humanitarianism, so much talk of
sufferings and feelings. It was ridiculous. The sufferings and feelings
of individuals did not matter in the least. They were mere conditions,
like the weather. What mattered was the pure instrumentality of the
individual. As a man as of a knife: does it cut well? Nothing else
mattered.
Everything in the world has its function, and is good or not good in so
far as it fulfils this function more or less perfectly. Was a miner a
good miner? Then he was complete. Was a manager a good manager? That
was enough. Gerald himself, who was responsible for all this industry,
was he a good director? If he were, he had fulfilled his life. The rest
was by-play.
The mines were there, they were old. They were giving out, it did not
pay to work the seams. There was talk of closing down two of them. It
was at this point that Gerald arrived on the scene.
He looked around. There lay the mines. They were old, obsolete. They
were like old lions, no more good. He looked again. Pah! the mines were
nothing but the clumsy efforts of impure minds. There they lay,
abortions of a half-trained mind. Let the idea of them be swept away.
He cleared his brain of them, and thought only of the coal in the under
earth. How much was there?
There was plenty of coal. The old workings could not get at it, that
was all. Then break the neck of the old workings. The coal lay there in
its seams, even though the seams were thin. There it lay, inert matter,
as it had always lain, since the beginning of time, subject to the will
of man. The will of man was the determining factor. Man was the archgod
of earth. His mind was obedient to serve his will. Man's will was the
absolute, the only absolute.
And it was his will to subjugate Matter to his own ends. The
subjugation itself was the point, the fight was the be-all, the fruits
of victory were mere results. It was not for the sake of money that
Gerald took over the mines. He did not care about money, fundamentally.
He was neither ostentatious nor luxurious, neither did he care about
social position, not finally. What he wanted was the pure fulfilment of
his own will in the struggle with the natural conditions. His will was
now, to take the coal out of the earth, profitably. The profit was
merely the condition of victory, but the victory itself lay in the feat
achieved. He vibrated with zest before the challenge. Every day he was
in the mines, examining, testing, he consulted experts, he gradually
gathered the whole situation into his mind, as a general grasps the
plan of his campaign.
Then there was need for a complete break. The mines were run on an old
system, an obsolete idea. The initial idea had been, to obtain as much
money from the earth as would make the owners comfortably rich, would
allow the workmen sufficient wages and good conditions, and would
increase the wealth of the country altogether. Gerald's father,
following in the second generation, having a sufficient fortune, had
thought only of the men. The mines, for him, were primarily great
fields to produce bread and plenty for all the hundreds of human beings
gathered about them. He had lived and striven with his fellow owners to
benefit the men every time. And the men had been benefited in their
fashion. There were few poor, and few needy. All was plenty, because
the mines were good and easy to work. And the miners, in those days,
finding themselves richer than they might have expected, felt glad and
triumphant. They thought themselves well-off, they congratulated
themselves on their good-fortune, they remembered how their fathers had
starved and suffered, and they felt that better times had come. They
were grateful to those others, the pioneers, the new owners, who had
opened out the pits, and let forth this stream of plenty.
But man is never satisfied, and so the miners, from gratitude to their
owners, passed on to murmuring. Their sufficiency decreased with
knowledge, they wanted more. Why should the master be so
out-of-all-proportion rich?
There was a crisis when Gerald was a boy, when the Masters' Federation
closed down the mines because the men would not accept a reduction.
This lock-out had forced home the new conditions to Thomas Crich.
Belonging to the Federation, he had been compelled by his honour to
close the pits against his men. He, the father, the Patriarch, was
forced to deny the means of life to his sons, his people. He, the rich
man who would hardly enter heaven because of his possessions, must now
turn upon the poor, upon those who were nearer Christ than himself,
those who were humble and despised and closer to perfection, those who
were manly and noble in their labours, and must say to them: 'Ye shall
neither labour nor eat bread.'
It was this recognition of the state of war which really broke his
heart. He wanted his industry to be run on love. Oh, he wanted love to
be the directing power even of the mines. And now, from under the cloak
of love, the sword was cynically drawn, the sword of mechanical
necessity.
This really broke his heart. He must have the illusion and now the
illusion was destroyed. The men were not against HIM, but they were
against the masters. It was war, and willy nilly he found himself on
the wrong side, in his own conscience. Seething masses of miners met
daily, carried away by a new religious impulse. The idea flew through
them: 'All men are equal on earth,' and they would carry the idea to
its material fulfilment. After all, is it not the teaching of Christ?
And what is an idea, if not the germ of action in the material world.
'All men are equal in spirit, they are all sons of God. Whence then
this obvious DISQUALITY?' It was a religious creed pushed to its
material conclusion. Thomas Crich at least had no answer. He could but
admit, according to his sincere tenets, that the disquality was wrong.
But he could not give up his goods, which were the stuff of disquality.
So the men would fight for their rights. The last impulses of the last
religious passion left on earth, the passion for equality, inspired
them.
Seething mobs of men marched about, their faces lighted up as for holy
war, with a smoke of cupidity. How disentangle the passion for equality
from the passion of cupidity, when begins the fight for equality of
possessions? But the God was the machine. Each man claimed equality in
the Godhead of the great productive machine. Every man equally was part
of this Godhead. But somehow, somewhere, Thomas Crich knew this was
false. When the machine is the Godhead, and production or work is
worship, then the most mechanical mind is purest and highest, the
representative of God on earth. And the rest are subordinate, each
according to his degree.
Riots broke out, Whatmore pit-head was in flames. This was the pit
furthest in the country, near the woods. Soldiers came. From the
windows of Shortlands, on that fatal day, could be seen the flare of
fire in the sky not far off, and now the little colliery train, with
the workmen's carriages which were used to convey the miners to the
distant Whatmore, was crossing the valley full of soldiers, full of
redcoats. Then there was the far-off sound of firing, then the later
news that the mob was dispersed, one man was shot dead, the fire was
put out.
Gerald, who was a boy, was filled with the wildest excitement and
delight. He longed to go with the soldiers to shoot the men. But he was
not allowed to go out of the lodge gates. At the gates were stationed
sentries with guns. Gerald stood near them in delight, whilst gangs of
derisive miners strolled up and down the lanes, calling and jeering:
'Now then, three ha'porth o'coppers, let's see thee shoot thy gun.'
Insults were chalked on the walls and the fences, the servants left.
And all this while Thomas Crich was breaking his heart, and giving away
hundreds of pounds in charity. Everywhere there was free food, a
surfeit of free food. Anybody could have bread for asking, and a loaf
cost only three-ha'pence. Every day there was a free tea somewhere, the
children had never had so many treats in their lives. On Friday
afternoon great basketfuls of buns and cakes were taken into the
schools, and great pitchers of milk, the school children had what they
wanted. They were sick with eating too much cake and milk.
And then it came to an end, and the men went back to work. But it was
never the same as before. There was a new situation created, a new idea
reigned. Even in the machine, there should be equality. No part should
be subordinate to any other part: all should be equal. The instinct for
chaos had entered. Mystic equality lies in abstraction, not in having
or in doing, which are processes. In function and process, one man, one
part, must of necessity be subordinate to another. It is a condition of
being. But the desire for chaos had risen, and the idea of mechanical
equality was the weapon of disruption which should execute the will of
man, the will for chaos.
Gerald was a boy at the time of the strike, but he longed to be a man,
to fight the colliers. The father however was trapped between two
halftruths, and broken. He wanted to be a pure Christian, one and equal
with all men. He even wanted to give away all he had, to the poor. Yet
he was a great promoter of industry, and he knew perfectly that he must
keep his goods and keep his authority. This was as divine a necessity
in him, as the need to give away all he possessed--more divine, even,
since this was the necessity he acted upon. Yet because he did NOT act
on the other ideal, it dominated him, he was dying of chagrin because
he must forfeit it. He wanted to be a father of loving kindness and
sacrificial benevolence. The colliers shouted to him about his
thousands a year. They would not be deceived.
When Gerald grew up in the ways of the world, he shifted the position.
He did not care about the equality. The whole Christian attitude of
love and self-sacrifice was old hat. He knew that position and
authority were the right thing in the world, and it was useless to cant
about it. They were the right thing, for the simple reason that they
were functionally necessary. They were not the be-all and the end-all.
It was like being part of a machine. He himself happened to be a
controlling, central part, the masses of men were the parts variously
controlled. This was merely as it happened. As well get excited because
a central hub drives a hundred outer wheels or because the whole
universe wheels round the sun. After all, it would be mere silliness to
say that the moon and the earth and Saturn and Jupiter and Venus have
just as much right to be the centre of the universe, each of them
separately, as the sun. Such an assertion is made merely in the desire
of chaos.
Without bothering to THINK to a conclusion, Gerald jumped to a
conclusion. He abandoned the whole democratic-equality problem as a
problem of silliness. What mattered was the great social productive
machine. Let that work perfectly, let it produce a sufficiency of
everything, let every man be given a rational portion, greater or less
according to his functional degree or magnitude, and then, provision
made, let the devil supervene, let every man look after his own
amusements and appetites, so long as he interfered with nobody.
So Gerald set himself to work, to put the great industry in order. In
his travels, and in his accompanying readings, he had come to the
conclusion that the essential secret of life was harmony. He did not
define to himself at all clearly what harmony was. The word pleased
him, he felt he had come to his own conclusions. And he proceeded to
put his philosophy into practice by forcing order into the established
world, translating the mystic word harmony into the practical word
organisation.
Immediately he SAW the firm, he realised what he could do. He had a
fight to fight with Matter, with the earth and the coal it enclosed.
This was the sole idea, to turn upon the inanimate matter of the
underground, and reduce it to his will. And for this fight with matter,
one must have perfect instruments in perfect organisation, a mechanism
so subtle and harmonious in its workings that it represents the single
mind of man, and by its relentless repetition of given movement, will
accomplish a purpose irresistibly, inhumanly. It was this inhuman
principle in the mechanism he wanted to construct that inspired Gerald
with an almost religious exaltation. He, the man, could interpose a
perfect, changeless, godlike medium between himself and the Matter he
had to subjugate. There were two opposites, his will and the resistant
Matter of the earth. And between these he could establish the very
expression of his will, the incarnation of his power, a great and
perfect machine, a system, an activity of pure order, pure mechanical
repetition, repetition ad infinitum, hence eternal and infinite. He
found his eternal and his infinite in the pure machine-principle of
perfect co-ordination into one pure, complex, infinitely repeated
motion, like the spinning of a wheel; but a productive spinning, as the
revolving of the universe may be called a productive spinning, a
productive repetition through eternity, to infinity. And this is the
Godmotion, this productive repetition ad infinitum. And Gerald was the
God of the machine, Deus ex Machina. And the whole productive will of
man was the Godhead.
He had his life-work now, to extend over the earth a great and perfect
system in which the will of man ran smooth and unthwarted, timeless, a
Godhead in process. He had to begin with the mines. The terms were
given: first the resistant Matter of the underground; then the
instruments of its subjugation, instruments human and metallic; and
finally his own pure will, his own mind. It would need a marvellous
adjustment of myriad instruments, human, animal, metallic, kinetic,
dynamic, a marvellous casting of myriad tiny wholes into one great
perfect entirety. And then, in this case there was perfection attained,
the will of the highest was perfectly fulfilled, the will of mankind
was perfectly enacted; for was not mankind mystically
contra-distinguished against inanimate Matter, was not the history of
mankind just the history of the conquest of the one by the other?
The miners were overreached. While they were still in the toils of
divine equality of man, Gerald had passed on, granted essentially their
case, and proceeded in his quality of human being to fulfil the will of
mankind as a whole. He merely represented the miners in a higher sense
when he perceived that the only way to fulfil perfectly the will of man
was to establish the perfect, inhuman machine. But he represented them
very essentially, they were far behind, out of date, squabbling for
their material equality. The desire had already transmuted into this
new and greater desire, for a perfect intervening mechanism between man
and Matter, the desire to translate the Godhead into pure mechanism.
As soon as Gerald entered the firm, the convulsion of death ran through
the old system. He had all his life been tortured by a furious and
destructive demon, which possessed him sometimes like an insanity. This
temper now entered like a virus into the firm, and there were cruel
eruptions. Terrible and inhuman were his examinations into every
detail; there was no privacy he would spare, no old sentiment but he
would turn it over. The old grey managers, the old grey clerks, the
doddering old pensioners, he looked at them, and removed them as so
much lumber. The whole concern seemed like a hospital of invalid
employees. He had no emotional qualms. He arranged what pensions were
necessary, he looked for efficient substitutes, and when these were
found, he substituted them for the old hands.
'I've a pitiful letter here from Letherington,' his father would say,
in a tone of deprecation and appeal. 'Don't you think the poor fellow
might keep on a little longer. I always fancied he did very well.'
'I've got a man in his place now, father. He'll be happier out of it,
believe me. You think his allowance is plenty, don't you?'
'It is not the allowance that he wants, poor man. He feels it very
much, that he is superannuated. Says he thought he had twenty more
years of work in him yet.'
'Not of this kind of work I want. He doesn't understand.'
The father sighed. He wanted not to know any more. He believed the pits
would have to be overhauled if they were to go on working. And after
all, it would be worst in the long run for everybody, if they must
close down. So he could make no answer to the appeals of his old and
trusty servants, he could only repeat 'Gerald says.'
So the father drew more and more out of the light. The whole frame of
the real life was broken for him. He had been right according to his
lights. And his lights had been those of the great religion. Yet they
seemed to have become obsolete, to be superseded in the world. He could
not understand. He only withdrew with his lights into an inner room,
into the silence. The beautiful candles of belief, that would not do to
light the world any more, they would still burn sweetly and
sufficiently in the inner room of his soul, and in the silence of his
retirement.
Gerald rushed into the reform of the firm, beginning with the office.
It was needful to economise severely, to make possible the great
alterations he must introduce.
'What are these widows' coals?' he asked.
'We have always allowed all widows of men who worked for the firm a
load of coals every three months.'
'They must pay cost price henceforward. The firm is not a charity
institution, as everybody seems to think.'
Widows, these stock figures of sentimental humanitarianism, he felt a
dislike at the thought of them. They were almost repulsive. Why were
they not immolated on the pyre of the husband, like the sati in India?
At any rate, let them pay the cost of their coals.
In a thousand ways he cut down the expenditure, in ways so fine as to
be hardly noticeable to the men. The miners must pay for the cartage of
their coals, heavy cartage too; they must pay for their tools, for the
sharpening, for the care of lamps, for the many trifling things that
made the bill of charges against every man mount up to a shilling or so
in the week. It was not grasped very definitely by the miners, though
they were sore enough. But it saved hundreds of pounds every week for
the firm.
Gradually Gerald got hold of everything. And then began the great
reform. Expert engineers were introduced in every department. An
enormous electric plant was installed, both for lighting and for
haulage underground, and for power. The electricity was carried into
every mine. New machinery was brought from America, such as the miners
had never seen before, great iron men, as the cutting machines were
called, and unusual appliances. The working of the pits was thoroughly
changed, all the control was taken out of the hands of the miners, the
butty system was abolished. Everything was run on the most accurate and
delicate scientific method, educated and expert men were in control
everywhere, the miners were reduced to mere mechanical instruments.
They had to work hard, much harder than before, the work was terrible
and heart-breaking in its mechanicalness.
But they submitted to it all. The joy went out of their lives, the hope
seemed to perish as they became more and more mechanised. And yet they
accepted the new conditions. They even got a further satisfaction out
of them. At first they hated Gerald Crich, they swore to do something
to him, to murder him. But as time went on, they accepted everything
with some fatal satisfaction. Gerald was their high priest, he
represented the religion they really felt. His father was forgotten
already. There was a new world, a new order, strict, terrible, inhuman,
but satisfying in its very destructiveness. The men were satisfied to
belong to the great and wonderful machine, even whilst it destroyed
them. It was what they wanted. It was the highest that man had
produced, the most wonderful and superhuman. They were exalted by
belonging to this great and superhuman system which was beyond feeling
or reason, something really godlike. Their hearts died within them, but
their souls were satisfied. It was what they wanted. Otherwise Gerald
could never have done what he did. He was just ahead of them in giving
them what they wanted, this participation in a great and perfect system
that subjected life to pure mathematical principles. This was a sort of
freedom, the sort they really wanted. It was the first great step in
undoing, the first great phase of chaos, the substitution of the
mechanical principle for the organic, the destruction of the organic
purpose, the organic unity, and the subordination of every organic unit
to the great mechanical purpose. It was pure organic disintegration and
pure mechanical organisation. This is the first and finest state of
chaos.
Gerald was satisfied. He knew the colliers said they hated him. But he
had long ceased to hate them. When they streamed past him at evening,
their heavy boots slurring on the pavement wearily, their shoulders
slightly distorted, they took no notice of him, they gave him no
greeting whatever, they passed in a grey-black stream of unemotional
acceptance. They were not important to him, save as instruments, nor he
to them, save as a supreme instrument of control. As miners they had
their being, he had his being as director. He admired their qualities.
But as men, personalities, they were just accidents, sporadic little
unimportant phenomena. And tacitly, the men agreed to this. For Gerald
agreed to it in himself.
He had succeeded. He had converted the industry into a new and terrible
purity. There was a greater output of coal than ever, the wonderful and
delicate system ran almost perfectly. He had a set of really clever
engineers, both mining and electrical, and they did not cost much. A
highly educated man cost very little more than a workman. His managers,
who were all rare men, were no more expensive than the old bungling
fools of his father's days, who were merely colliers promoted. His
chief manager, who had twelve hundred a year, saved the firm at least
five thousand. The whole system was now so perfect that Gerald was
hardly necessary any more.
It was so perfect that sometimes a strange fear came over him, and he
did not know what to do. He went on for some years in a sort of trance
of activity. What he was doing seemed supreme, he was almost like a
divinity. He was a pure and exalted activity.
But now he had succeeded--he had finally succeeded. And once or twice
lately, when he was alone in the evening and had nothing to do, he had
suddenly stood up in terror, not knowing what he was. And he went to
the mirror and looked long and closely at his own face, at his own
eyes, seeking for something. He was afraid, in mortal dry fear, but he
knew not what of. He looked at his own face. There it was, shapely and
healthy and the same as ever, yet somehow, it was not real, it was a
mask. He dared not touch it, for fear it should prove to be only a
composition mask. His eyes were blue and keen as ever, and as firm in
their sockets. Yet he was not sure that they were not blue false
bubbles that would burst in a moment and leave clear annihilation. He
could see the darkness in them, as if they were only bubbles of
darkness. He was afraid that one day he would break down and be a
purely meaningless babble lapping round a darkness.
But his will yet held good, he was able to go away and read, and think
about things. He liked to read books about the primitive man, books of
anthropology, and also works of speculative philosophy. His mind was
very active. But it was like a bubble floating in the darkness. At any
moment it might burst and leave him in chaos. He would not die. He knew
that. He would go on living, but the meaning would have collapsed out
of him, his divine reason would be gone. In a strangely indifferent,
sterile way, he was frightened. But he could not react even to the
fear. It was as if his centres of feeling were drying up. He remained
calm, calculative and healthy, and quite freely deliberate, even whilst
he felt, with faint, small but final sterile horror, that his mystic
reason was breaking, giving way now, at this crisis.
And it was a strain. He knew there was no equilibrium. He would have to
go in some direction, shortly, to find relief. Only Birkin kept the
fear definitely off him, saved him his quick sufficiency in life, by
the odd mobility and changeableness which seemed to contain the
quintessence of faith. But then Gerald must always come away from
Birkin, as from a Church service, back to the outside real world of
work and life. There it was, it did not alter, and words were
futilities. He had to keep himself in reckoning with the world of work
and material life. And it became more and more difficult, such a
strange pressure was upon him, as if the very middle of him were a
vacuum, and outside were an awful tension.
He had found his most satisfactory relief in women. After a debauch
with some desperate woman, he went on quite easy and forgetful. The
devil of it was, it was so hard to keep up his interest in women
nowadays. He didn't care about them any more. A Pussum was all right in
her way, but she was an exceptional case, and even she mattered
extremely little. No, women, in that sense, were useless to him any
more. He felt that his MIND needed acute stimulation, before he could
be physically roused. _
Read next: CHAPTER XVIII. Rabbit
Read previous: CHAPTER XVI. Man to Man
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