John Thomas and Lady Jane

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John Thomas and Lady Jane Page 18

by D. H. Lawrence


  ‘There are men in the world. Does it matter?’

  ‘Is there a man in the world, may I ask?’

  ‘Why should you ask, Clifford? There might be,’ she said, with that queer, unseizable simplicity that made her seem so innocent and remote from certain actualities.

  ‘Quite! There might be! But between might-be and may-be is such a long stride—’

  He felt for some reason so very sure of himself and his prerogatives, at the moment.

  ‘But if I said, I may be going to have a child: what would you say? What would you feel?’

  ‘Is it true that you may be going to have a child?’ he asked, with a mocking insistency.

  ‘No-o!’ she said, with hesitancy. It was not true. She was not pregnant. ‘But it might be,’ she said.

  ‘When might changes to may,’ he said, ‘then I’ll tell you how I feel. Till then, it seems to me I’ve no need to rack my feelings imaginatively, rumour or no rumour.’

  ‘I suppose not,’ she said slowly.

  But inside herself, she was thinking: ‘You perhaps need only wait till April changes to May.’ And she wanted to go to Parkin to give herself into his arms again.

  Not that she wanted, really, to be bound to either man: or to any man. It was as if a stone had fallen into her consciousness, a clear round stone of awareness, and had sunk deep, deep, to the bottom of her depths. And there she could see it, far down, still faintly glimmering its awareness. And it said: ‘I don’t want to be committed to any man. I am attached to Clifford, and I am in love with Parkin. But I don’t want to be fastened tight close up to either man, or to any man.’

  She recognised, emotionally, that the idea of eternal love, or life-long love even, and the idea of marriage, had a disastrous effect upon the will. The idea of permanency stimulates the possessive instinct, the possessive instinct rouses the egoistic will to self-assertion, and there is a vicious circle. Let there be permanency if it happens so. But let there be no convention of permanency, especially in emotional or passional relationships.

  So, Constance found herself moving more alone. She wanted to go out, but not under anybody’s wing. It was May, but cold and wet again. She could not stay indoors. She decided to drive to Uthwaite, if Clifford did not want the car, or the young man Field, who was his man when they went out.

  The car was free, and in the afternoon she set off. In spite of the buds on the trees, the country was dismal. It was rainy and rather chilly, with smoke upon the rain. One had continually to live from one’s endurance. But that is more natural to the northern peoples.

  The car ploughed uphill through the long, sordid straggle of Tevershall village, the black-red miners’ dwellings, the glistening black slate roofs, the black earth, the wet, dark-grey asphalt pavements, the utter hopeless absence of any beauty, any cheer at all. It was as if the dismalness of the climate had penetrated into every human expression, and all was dismal, dismal, dismal, fatally and fundamentally so. In the shops were stacks of soap and soap-powder packages, or in the green-grocer’s, yellow lemons, pink rhubarb, foreign apples, in the draper’s, models of garments, quite expensive, and of an innate dreariness to make one sink down. A load of coal had been tipped up in the street, and, wet with rain, was waiting to be got in, when the collier came home from the pit. The Wesleyan Chapel stood behind iron railings. It was of blackened red brick, with stone facings, and black notice boards. The Methodist Chapel, higher up, was newer, still rather pinky, red in comparison with the rest of the buildings, and like a large cinema building, with a big slate roof. The cinema itself was built of concrete, and had lurid posters with the original heading ‘A Woman’s Love’, posters which helped, for some reason, to add to the rainy dismalness even by their would-be dramatic luridness. Beyond the chemist’s and the shoe-shop was the Congregational Chapel which, considering itself the aristocrat of nonconformity, was built of sandstone and had a steeple. And just behind it were the new school buildings, very modern and grand, but giving off the most awful sound of Standard Five’s singing lesson. How could they call that noise singing? It had as much relation to song, spontaneous song, as the squeaking on the brake of the coal-cart coming down the hill. And there was the Sun Inn, the only approach to an hotel in Tevershall, where the commercial travellers stayed. And that was Sam Black, the landlord, who had been a school-teacher but made a far better job of the Sun. Down to the left stood the old church, among black trees. Then the car began to slip greasily downhill, past the Mechanics’ Hall and its much more modern successor, the Miners’ Welfare, on towards Stacks Gate.

  Tevershall! — the home village for Wragby. How utterly and unspeakably dismal it was! Connie had been accustomed to Scotch hills, Kensington, or Sussex, and she had always felt a certain connection still with the old England, Shakespeare’s, Chaucer’s even, Jane Austen’s, Dickens’. But transplanted into these Midlands, she seemed to have left England altogether, to have entered some weird and unnatural country where everything came from underground. It was no country. It was another no-man’s-land.

  Yet, gradually, it came to have a certain hold over her. It was sad country, with a grey, almost gruesome sadness. Yet it was not dead. It was alive, labouring under a queer, savage weight of dismalness and acquiescence. It was not cowed nor broken, either. No, the very ugliness seemed to have preserved a manly relentlessness in the men, a sort of slow, smouldering courage of death and desperation. But no hope. No immediate hope. There was a grim sort of acceptance of hopelessness, something underground and uncanny. And, when the disillusion was complete, a capacity for a ruthless destruction. That she felt. When the disillusion was finally complete. Because it was still a country of men, men with weird, incomprehensible underground natures, like trolls. On the surface, they were usually decent, and deferential to a woman. But that was only in the overhead works, so to speak. Below, down pit, they were womanless, and partook of the elementality of the minerals.

  Parkin was one of them — with a difference. He had been sent down pit as a lad. But he could not bear it. And he could not really mix in. Colliers, in truth, are a tribe, they have an elementary tribal instinct. Parkin, who inherited the instinct, had also a recoil from the underground tribal association. He had to. get clear. He had to be alone.

  Connie thought of him, as she drove on. Coming out of all this ugliness, he had his share of it. He had a mineral sort of ugliness, imperviousness, too. But he also had another kind of beauty, another kind of manliness. She wanted his children. But there was a certain mystery to Parkin, even if it went with a certain gruesomeness. He was passionate, too, with the underground passion. — No, she did not want to be committed to him. But she wanted to go to him. At the thought of him, a flame went through her bowels. She wanted his children.

  But he did not touch her heart. That, as usual, remained free. Nobody touched her heart, except, perhaps, children. Yes, her heart belonged to children. Clifford, she was attached to him personally. The other man held her with passion. Nothing and nobody held her altogether, and she did not want it.

  The car began rising again to Stacks Gate. It had ceased raining, and in the air was the queer pellucid gleam of early May, the grey gleam which yet is bright with spring. The country rolled away in long waves, north towards the Peak, east towards Mansfield and Nottingham. She was running south.

  On her left, hanging over the rolling country, she could see Warsop Castle, a shadowy, powerful bulk. And below it was the pinkish plastering of newish mining dwellings with dark slate roofs, and plumes of dark smoke, plumes of white steam rose from the great colliery that had put hundreds of thousands of pounds into the Duke’s pocket. There it was, away on the low sky-line, the hanging bulk of the castle, with the black plumes and the white waving on the damp air just below.

  Stacks Gate, as seen from the high-road, was just a crossroads with a huge and gorgeous new hotel, the Coningsly Arms, standing red and white and gilt, in barbarous isolation. But if you looked, away on the left, you saw rows and rows
of spick-and-span pink dwellings, set down in blocks like a game of dominoes that was going to be played on the surprised earth. And beyond them, the huge pit-bank and all the astonishing and frightening overhead erections of a really modern mine, chemical works and long galleries, all the new apparatus for by-products. Down-hill, below the hotel’s isolation, was the blackish-red old village, and the grey pit-banks of the little old mine. Down there were the brick chapels, the little pubs, the shops. Up at the new colliery were the weird works, the plumes of smoke and vapour, the proud and awful activity of the devil: and also, the spick-and-span model dwellings. Up here, they needed no chapels. Even the grand hotel stood a little aloof. The monstrous new colliery was the Eleusis, the sacred place of the terrific modern demon. The grand hotel was really nothing but a miners’ pub. But it was to scale.

  A strange world! Even in Constance’s little day these model dwellings had arisen, and the people had flowed in, from nowhere. Loose families had come in quickly, but at random, from all over the place. And now Stacks Gate was on the sign-posts, it was a place of importance, the miners there had money to jingle, not like at poor Tevershall. And it was these new, riff-raff colliers that poached Clifford’s game.

  The car ran on, along the uplands, seeing the rolling country spread out. The country! One might well have been proud, once, of being a lord of such a country. In front, looming again and hanging on the brow of the skyline, was the huge and splendid bulk of Cheswick Hall, one of the most famous Elizabethan halls in England. Noble it stood above its great park, yet with a forlorn nobility. It was still kept up, but as a show place. It did not live. Looking at it was like looking into the past.

  The future was below. Already the car was turning, between blackish-red old miners’ cottages, to descend to Uthwaite. And Uthwaite was sending up its smoke and steam to the gods that care to receive them. Uthwaite down in the valley, with the dark stripe and steel threads of the railway to Sheffield, and the coal-mines and the great steel-works sending up smoke from long. tubes, and the pathetic corkscrew spire of the church, that is going to tumble down, still pricking among the fumes, always affected Constance deeply. It was an old town, a centre of the dales, an old market-centre. And the Chatterleys knew it as their home town. There, Wragby was known as Wragby, as if it were a place: not, as it is to outsiders, merely Wragby Hall, near Tevershall.

  The miners’ cottages, dreary, but dreary with that queer, exciting smallness and crudeness of a hundred years ago, now lined all the way, the road became a street, and you forgot instantly the open, rolling country where the castles and big, houses had once dominated like lions. Now you were above the tangle of naked railway-lines, and foundries and other works rose above you, so big that you were only aware of walls. And iron clanked, and lorries shook the earth, and steam whistles screamed.

  Yet again, once you got into the twisted and crooked heart of the place, behind the church, you were in the old world, in the crooked streets which would lead out towards the open, wide region where the castles and the stately houses hung couchant.

  Yet at the corner the policeman held up his hand as three lorries rolled past, shaking the poor old church. And not till the lorries had passed could he salute her ladyship.

  So it was. Upon the old, crooked burgess streets hordes of oldish, black-red miners’ dwellings crowded, lining all the roads out. And immediately these gave way to the pinker, newer, rather larger but still more depressing blocks of more modern dwellings. And beyond again, in the wide, rolling region of the castles, smoke waved against steam, and patch after patch showed the new mining settlements, sometimes in the hollows, sometimes gruesomely ugly along the skyline of the slopes. And in between, bits of the old Robin Hood England where now the miners prowl with the dismalness of suppressed sporting instincts.

  They talked about England, but this is the heart of England. One meaning blots out another. The great houses, ‘stately homes of England’, still loom and make good photographs. But they are dead. The handsome old halls are there, smuts falling on their drab stucco, that is no longer gold, And one by one they are abandoned. Fritchley Hall, a beautiful old Georgian mansion, was even now being pulled down, though it was in perfect repair. It was too big, and in the wrong place, next the mines which had made its wealth. It was derelict from the eighteenth century.

  This is England. One meaning blots out another. So the mines were blotting out the halls. It was inevitable. When the great land-owners started the mines, and made new fortunes, they started also their own obliteration from the English countryside. One meaning blots out another.

  It had taken Constance a long time to accept the inevitable. The old England was doomed to be blotted out, with a terrifying absoluteness, by a new and gruesome England. It was inevitable. Nay, it had almost happened. Fritchley was gone, Eastwood was gone. And Squire Winter knew perfectly well that, once he was dead, his beloved place, Shipley, would go too. They would just tear it down.

  Shipley was a very pleasant stucco hall, of the middle of the eighteenth century. It had suave round bays with winking Georgian panes, and a beautiful alley of yew-trees, much older than the hall. Inside, the rather low, beautiful rooms were panelled and delicately painted, and furnished with excellent old-fashioned taste. Squire Winter loved the place.

  But his little park was fringed by three collieries, and had right of way through it, so that the colliers were everywhere, save across the little lake where the house itself stood. The squire had been a generous man, in his ideas. He had almost welcomed the colliers into his park. Had not the mines made him immensely rich! So, when he saw gangs of colliers lounging by his ornamental water, and furtively looking for a chance, maybe, to poach a bird, he would say, ‘The miners are perhaps not so ornamental as deer, but they are far more profitable.’ He had said this to King Edward, when, as Prince of Wales, the latter was staying for a few days at Shipley. And the Prince had replied in his free way, in his rather guttural English:

  ‘You are quite right. If there were coal beneath the lawns at Sandringham, I would open a mine there, and the miners should walk through the park. Of course! And I should think it fine landscape gardening.’

  But then, the Prince had perhaps an exaggerated idea of the value of money and the wonders of industrialism.

  Now, Squire Winter felt almost swamped. There were these new mining villages crowding on him, and so many new colliers, and a whole new world. He used to feel, in a bright, almost grand way, lord of his own domain and of the colliers. Now by a subtle pervasion of the new spirit, he felt more and more a nobody. Mining had become less and less a personal affair, was part of scientific industrialism, with the artisan hordes on one hand, the exploiting capitalist op the other. He no longer liked to walk across his park after dinner, in his dinner jacket and his lacquer shoes. He winced away from the colliers. They did not salute him. They stared at him a moment, and turned away, muttering to one another. And he had to walk by, wincing, pretending not to see them. Yet he saw them well enough, and that little smile of derisive resentment on their faces. They resented him. They resented all the upper classes. It was rather a subtle, derisive resentment than dislike. No no, they didn’t dislike him. But they resented him, resented his ‘superiority’. That was it. When they saw him there in the park in his dinner jacket and silk, socks and lacquer slippers, a deep grudge rose up in them, not against him personally, but against the difference that there was between them and him.

  They would never accept the difference. They couldn’t any more. And somewhere in his secret English self, he didn’t even want them to. Yet they drove him away. By simple force of mass resentment they made him wince, and withdraw himself, and go away.

  He died rather suddenly a little while after his visit to Wragby, and he left Clifford, who was his god-son, some quite valuable shares: in copper, not in coal. But to Shipley, there happened what he had expected. The heirs would not live there, neither would they keep up the place, with its forty bedrooms. It was a white el
ephant nowadays.

  So, with the consent of the joint heirs, it was just broken up, pulled down. Nothing else could be done with it. The timber of the park was cut, even the splendid rows of yews. Beech-trees, chestnuts, ash-trees, they were all cut. With startling rapidity the hall was torn down. A strange bald desert the park looked, another weird no-man’s-land, when the clearage was made. But then they began almost at once to erect rows of dwellings where the hall had stood. It was so near to Uthwaite, there would be a rush for the houses, and a solid profit. ‘Shipley Hall Estate’, they called the settlement of new dwellings.

  And this is the second stage of that landscape gardening which has a coal-mine on the lawn for ornament. And this .is the England we have to reckon with.

  Connie knew it all, and accepted it far more inevitably than Clifford did. The world of the Cliffords and the Winters was doomed. Another, more awful world was coming. Yet perhaps the more awful world had more life, more weird passion in it; and life, no matter how weird the form, is the only eternal conqueror. The weird passion that was in Parkin, the volcanic something she felt in him, perhaps had the germs of a new life. She didn’t know. She didn’t want to know. She didn’t want to think too far. It was all too weird and too fearsome, it would have to wait for fate.

  She spent some time shopping in Uthwaite, and chatting a little. Then she had a cup of tea in the clean, awkward little tea-shop kept by Miss Bentley. Constance felt she was out in the world again, as in the days when she went to the Academy School, in London. After all, though the outer world scared one a little, it also refreshed one. She felt stronger, and more inclined to accept fate, and much less sure of her own ability to direct fate or destiny, after her trip to Uthwaite. The world was so big, so weird, so fearsome. The common people were so many, and really, so terrible. So she thought as she sat in the car, going home, and saw the colliers trailing along the pavements, going home from pit, in their underworld grey clothes, with underworld grey faces, rolling the whites of their eyes and cringing a little at the neck, as if they had the rock still down upon their heads. Yet they were men! Ah God, men! — that one might bear children to! She quivered with fear and dread. Yet her Parkin was almost one of them. How awful the world was! And again, she knew it was not true. For her, the colliers were not quite men, men one might bear children to. They were weird, shapeless creatures, no doubt as good as gentlemen, the word ‘good’ means anything in that connection. But they were not quite men. No no! Ghoulish and uncanny, they had been born apart from life. — And Parkin was not one of them.

 

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