‘It’s what tha towd me, lad!’ he said.
Parkin did not answer. He suddenly seemed to Constance such a furtive bird.
‘What did you tell him?’ she asked softly.
‘Me!’ He looked her in the eye. ‘I towd him folks like us an’ folks like you an’ Sir Clifford wasn’t in the same world an’ never would be.’
‘But have you found me in a very different world from the world you are in?’ she said.
‘Ay!’ he answered, pushing a piece of cake into his mouth, and speaking as he chewed. ‘Different as owt could be.’
He spoke in a curious bitterness and heaviness.
‘But need it be?’ she said.
He chewed like an ox. Then he said: ‘Ay, bound to be! Bound to be from the beginning.’
‘Have another cup o’ tea, do!’ said Mrs Tewson. ‘I’m sure these two men here, they’d talk the leg off an iron pot. They don’t give a body a chance, Bill was bad enough afore, but since Mr Parkin’s come I can’t put a spoke i’ t’wheel o’ nohow, try as I may. A lot o’ clat-fartin’ ideas an’ a’ —’
Bill looked at her as if she was a noise somewhere away outside. He looked too as if he had had a blow. He leaned forward in his intense way to Constance.
‘Now do leave it alone, Bill, an’ offer folks a bit o’ something to eat instead of all that talk,’ put in his wife.
He caught himself up for a second, looked vaguely round the table, then into Constance’s face, and asked simply:
‘Shall yer have anything else to eat?’
‘No, thank you.’
‘You’ve finished? You’re sure now? Don’t let me put you off!’
‘Nothing more, thank you.’
‘Ay! Well now! Let’s get to the bottom of this. You say there’s a difference, a big difference, between the feelings of a man like Sir Clifford and a man like me. And Oliver says that even you and him are in different worlds when it really comes to: though you come from artistic people who sort of know all the worlds: and Oliver —Oliver’s not so simple as he looks. Are yer, lad?’ he added banteringly, turning to Oliver.
‘I’m a fool of my own sort,’ said Oliver.
Bill gave a funny roar of laughter, then subsided again immediately into earnestness.
‘We’re all that — fools of our own sort,’ he said. ‘But what I want to know — what puzzles me — is how folks can be in the same country —speak the same language — read the same papers an’ all that — an’ yet be really, really different in their feelings. That beats me. Take Sir Clifford now. He’s got a wife. And I’ve got a wife. He cares for his wife surely! And I care for mine — don’t I, dear, in my own fool’s sort of way?’ He laughed a guffaw. ‘Well then! Well then, where’s the difference, where’s the difference?’
‘You care for the sound of your own voice a lot more than you care for your wife,’ said Mrs Tewson.
‘Ay! Hold on a minute!’ he said, glancing at her as if she were going to make him drop something. Then he turned to Constance. ‘Where’s the difference?’ he insisted. ‘Is there any difference?’
Constance was laughing at him and at his driving her into philosophic or analytic corners.
‘There is a difference,’ she said. ‘But it’s very difficult to put it into words.’
‘Then does it matter? Does it amount to anything?’ he asked quickly.
‘Your wife’s part of your own flesh and blood. Sir Clifford’s wife is part of his fortune,’ said Parkin harshly.
Constance looked at him in quick surprise.
‘Misfortune perhaps!’ she said softly, laughing. ‘Fortune or misfortune, t’one or t’other,’ he said.
Bill looked quizzically at his own wife.
‘I might say my wife was part of my fortune,’ he said.
‘You might, for she’s a good investment to you,’ said Mrs Tewson drily.
‘Hark at that!’ he said with his guffaw of laughter.
And it was strange to see him instantly subside into perplexed seriousness, heavily serious, rubbing his brow in a sort of pain. He cared! Something deep in him was troubled. How queer he was!
‘But does it matter if people are different?’ she said.
‘It’s like this,’ Bill said to her with utmost gentleness. ‘There’s many of us are socialists in our shop, and many of them are Communists, out-and-out bolshies. And they argue that our feelings, of us working men, and the feelings of the masters and bosses are two different things. They say that we feel for one another, to a certain extent at least. But the masters, they don’t feel for anybody, only for their own pocket. Now is it true? Don’t men like Sir Clifford have feelings for their fellow men, same as most of us?’
‘Oh!’ said Constance. ‘Clifford is very kind.’
‘He is! Kind for his colliers as well? You say so?’
‘Yes!’ said Constance slowly. ‘I’m sure he’d like the miners to be as well off as possible. And I’m sure he’d help any one of them that was in trouble, if he could. He’s very just.’
‘There! There! You hear that!’ said Bill, turning with accusing voice to Parkin. ‘If a man’s just and wants to be fair, you can’t say much against him.’
There was a pause during which Mrs Tewson lifted Marjory from her chair and sponged her face, and the other two children wriggled out under the table and escaped. They had been prisoners long enough, having eaten all they could.
‘Now mind Marjory, Dorothy, and don’t go down on Stanswell Road, with all them motors. You hear what I say!’
‘All right.’
‘I’m frightened to death of those motors and buses and lorries. They nothing but a death-trap for children,’ the mother said to Constance.
‘They are frightening even for grown-ups,’ said Constance. And she felt that she too should be leaving.
‘Ay!’ said Bill, who had been rubbing the hair on his forehead. ‘If a man’s just — if the owners want to be just and fair — well, I can’t do no better myself, can I?’
‘If you owned all the coal royalties the Duke of Oakwood owns, it wouldn’t be fair for you to give any of ’em up, would it?’ said Parkin, in his strange, vibrant harsh voice that somehow had a catlike voluptuousness in its harsh timbre.
‘Ay! Well that’s a different matter. Perhaps even the Duke would be willing to even things up a bit if the proper way was found to do it.’ He turned to Constance, and asked naively, yet cunningly: ‘Don’t you think so?’
Constance, who knew the Duke, laughed.
‘I don’t think he believes there could ever be a proper way found to do it,’ she said.
‘You don’t think he’d let go some of his rights, like, to even things up a bit?’ asked the earnest Bill.
‘He thinks things are evened up enough by what is taken from him in taxes,’ said Constance.
‘Ay, but that’s another thing, that is,’ said Bill.
She wondered over his seriousness. And she didn’t see any great difference between taking the Duke’s money from him in taxes, or taking away his royalties on coal.
‘If he sort of felt,’ Bill continued, ‘something like this, shall we say. — Well! We’re all men, all of us together. But I happen to be very wealthy, and many have just what wage they earn. Well! That’s not my doing nor anybody else’s. The world was made that way before we were born into it. We’re not, so to speak, responsible, any of us. But perhaps the time has come to even up a bit, like—’
Here Parkin gave a loud hiss like a torn cat, and Constance laughed.
‘Pff!’ Went Parkin. ‘Hold thy face! Hold thy face! Even up a bit! — Why, they’d rather be hung an’ drawn an’ quartered, rather than even up a bit; yi, an’ rather than own as it would even be evenin’ up. They don’t think as we’re all men together. That’s blarney! That’s blitherin’ sawdust, that is! They don’t think as we’re the same as they are. They don’t think as we’re the same flesh an’ blood. — An’ they’re right. They’re nobbut sort of fishes, an’
what they’ve laid hold on they’ll keep, if you tear ’em to bits to get it from ’em.’
A strange, quiet, but deadly stream of hatred came out of the ex-gamekeeper. He hated Clifford and the gentry who had shot his pheasants at Wragby. He had felt insulted by them, and he hated them. Constance listened in irritation and depression. This kind of hatred got on her nerves.
‘Oh but come now! They’re men like we are,’ said Bill. But even he lacked conviction as he said it.
‘Nay they arena’! They’re like fishes — there’s big red ones like salmon, and long-nosed dirty ones like mackerel, and there’s them you can a’most see through like whiting: ay, an’ plenty of ’em’s red herrings an’ all! But they aren’t — they arena’ —, he shook his head rapidly — ‘our sort o’ men. I’m not one o’ them, an’ they’re not one of us.’
Bill wiped his brow wearily.
‘It seems like it sometimes,’ he said.
‘But surely,’ said Constance, ‘there are some quite human people even among the upper classes. The working people can’t claim all the privilege of human feeling. Think of your own wife. Think of Tevershall and the people there — they’re working-class people — and think how human they were to you!’
‘Yes!’ he said obstinately. ‘I know it. I know it.’
‘You surely can’t blame the upper classes for your wife and the Tevershall bullies!’
‘No!’ he said. And he absently picked at the wound of his thumb.
‘Do leave your thumb alone!’ she said.
He looked up at her.
‘Ay!’ he said, in that harsh, peculiar voice with the metallic tomcat ring in it. ‘The working class is devils, and the upper class is another sort of devils. But in the working class you can come to the end of their devilment. An’ wi’ th’ upper class, you canna. They’ve always got a door shut in your face, an’ they’re always behind the door, laughing at you.’
‘What door?’ she said.
‘Nay!’ he retorted quickly. ‘That’s what I’m axin’ you.’
‘You mean even I have a door?’ she said.
‘An’ hanna yer?’ he asked drily.
‘I wasn’t aware that I’d shut it in — anybody’s face.’
‘Why you canna open it. You sit inside it like a cat in a garret, an’ it’s niver been opened — since you was a baby.’
From the scullery came the clinking of Mrs Tewson washing up the tea things. Bill sat staring at Parkin in dazed wonder, only half-comprehending.
‘I don’t think that’s true,’ she said.
‘Yi!’ he replied. ‘You folks is all doors, an’ you keep ’em all shut even with yourselves. And sometimes you open one, and sometimes you open two. But you niver open ’em all, not to God nor man nor the devil. You’ve always got yourselves shut up somewhere where nothing can get at you: Though a body might think you was open as the day —’
She paused. It was a new idea to her.
‘But one must have some place private to oneself,’ she said.
‘Ay, you must,’ he said dully, smoothing the white tablecloth with his dull, swollen hands.
She rose, offended. Really! The man always had some grudge against her.
‘I suppose I shall find my way to York Road?’ she said.
‘Oh, Oliver’ll go with you. — Well, it’s been rare havin’ a talk with one like you. You’re a bit of a socialist, like the Countess of Warwick used to be, so you’ll take no notice if we say too much. — Shall you come again, do you think?’
‘I should like to.’
‘These two men’s great talkers! An’ I can see as you like a bit of discussion as well. I’m not that way, myself, I keep off high subjects. But I hope as you wasn’t offended at anything, you know,’ broke in Mrs Tewson, who had wiped her hands and hastily taken off her apron, and stood once more in her smart buff silk dress, that hung somewhat sacklike, alas, from her rather stooping shoulders. Unlike both the men, she had no bearing, poor thing. Both Bill and Parkin carried their heads lightly.
She walked down the cruel stone street in silence, Parkin at her side. He wore a navy blue suit and a black hat, and didn’t look quite like a workman. There was, for her at least, a certain stillness and distance in his face that was poignant as beauty to her.
‘They are nice people!’ she said. ‘I’m glad they were so simple with me.’
‘What else should they be?’ he said.
But she was thinking of Lady Warwick! Lady Warwick! Did they see her like that?
They sat in the tram in silence, he with his swollen hands between his knees. He paid the tram fare for her, pushing his hand in his trousers pocket as the working men do. The tram was crowded, and she felt very strange. These people were as strange to her as if they had been Zulus or Esquimo — nay, more alien because their form of sophistication was more weird.
He left her at the corner of the York Road.
‘Shall I come again, really?’ she said.
‘If you like.’
‘Won’t you come to Wragby one weekend? We could sit at the hut for an hour.
‘I shan’t come to Wragby — nor to Tevershall — while I’m getting my divorce.’
‘Very well! Then I’ll come to Sheffield. And we might take a taxi and go for a drive over the moor — or to Buxton —’
He did not answer.
‘Wouldn’t you like to?’
‘Yes! One day.’
‘Goodbye!’ she said, holding out her hand.
He shook hands with her for the first time.
‘Yo’ mun take care o’ yourself,’ he said, ‘an’ don’t you bother about things, you know. When I’ve got my divorce — ’
She waited, but he did not go on. She was disappointed.
‘Be sure and let me know how that goes,’ she said.
‘Yes! I’ll let you know.’
She shook again his swollen hand and turned away to the garage. Her heart was sad for him and for herself. But also, she was rather pleased with herself. And she drew a sigh of relief when she was in the modest luxury of her own car, driving away from it all. She was glad she had been. But she was glad to go back to Wragby now. She had carefully fulfilled all her commissions in town, and she sincerely hoped she had bought just the thing Clifford had asked her for, for his radio apparatus. For he was very keen on the radio now, always trying for Berlin or Frankfurt or Madrid, He took peculiar delight in a German lecture or a Parisian opera heard in his own room at Wragby.
There was quite a party for the shooting. Clifford had asked Sir Malcolm, but that gentleman remained in Scotland. However, between relatives and friends from the Cambridge and Eton days, there was a house-party. Constance enjoyed it too, all the fussing and all the talk. To be sure, the bang-banging down in the wood irritated her, and she conceived a dislike for pheasant at table: remembering the pheasants she had raised with Parkin. She felt one of her nauseas at the imbecile futility of men who could go shooting away at the beautiful half-tame pheasants and call it sport.
‘There can be no sport,’ she said, ‘unless the thing you shoot at may shoot back, If a pheasant had a deadly little rifle under its wing —’
‘You want another war—’ said Sir Clifford rudely.
He and she did not get on very well nowadays. She was increasingly aware of Clifford’s silent will trying to tyrannise over her. He wanted to dominate her stream of life as he had done in the past. But now that her stream of life no longer flowed obediently in the channel he drew for it, having found some sort of natural channel of its own, there was naturally conflict, though it was chiefly silent.
Clifford had taken to going out again. She could not bear motoring with him. The movement of the car acted on his nerves in an unhealthy way, he became curiously tense and irritable, and sometimes whistled to himself unconsciously for an hour at a time, like a madness, gazing fixedly out of the automobile. Then in town, he would get out and swing along the pavement on his crutches with those great, flying, stiltlike s
trides, the chauffeur running after him, Constance following in dismay. The excitement of it and the risk, and the staring of the half-horrified, half-compassionate people, was very bad for Clifford, It made him afterwards lie exhausted and shattered with nervous irritability. Yet he would do it.
‘I shall be in the grave long enough,’ he replied, when Constance urged him to stay peacefully at home.
And he always wanted her to drive with him. It became a torture to her at last to sit there in the car with him and his crutches and his poor, withered legs while the running of the machine ran his nerves into a kind of frenzy, and his face became like the face of some clock, registering only degrees of nervous tension, amounting after a time to a species of madness. She had finally to declare that she loathed motoring: which was true. So that if she wanted specially to go somewhere on her own errand, she went without telling him, leaving a message for him. And when she came back he looked at her in his tense way, and said:
‘I might have gone with you.’
‘Might you, Clifford! But I had so many silly little errands to do that take so long. You’d have been so tired.’
He was becoming much more irritable and abstracted as the weeks went by. The only thing that really roused him to life was the business. When it was a question of the mines he came to life. He spent many mornings at the pit, and many evenings the general manager or the engineer or the underground manager would sit closeted with him. He was like a madman again in his intense concentration on the mining industry. And when a strike threatened, or the market for English coal depreciated, he seemed to have slight accesses of apprehensive insanity, as if the end of the world were really coming.
His one great relaxation now was the thing he had at first so despised, the radio. He had a very expensive set and was very successful in getting all kinds of stations. But he had also a loud-speaker, and this was the bane of Constance’s life. He was always looking blindly and abstractedly at his watch to see what time it was, which station would be calling. It became a passion with him to get the distant or difficult calls. Constance heard weird noises in the small hours and sat up in bed in terror. Then she remembered, he was trying to get New York, which would be calling at half-past two in the morning.
The First Lady Chatterley's Lover Page 21