Winifred saw at once the deferential, slightly servile, slightly cunning regard he had for Ursula, which made the girl at once so proud and so perplexed.
“But is this place as awful as it looks?” the young girl asked, a strain in her eyes.
“It is just what it looks,” he said. “It hides nothing.”
“Why are the men so sad?”
“Are they sad?” he replied.
“They seem unutterably, unutterably sad,” said Ursula, out of a passionate throat.
“I don’t think they are that. They just take it for granted.”
“What do they take for granted?”
“This — the pits and the place altogether.”
“Why don’t they alter it?” she passionately protested.
“They believe they must alter themselves to fit the pits and the place, rather than alter the pits and the place to fit themselves. It is easier,” he said.
“And you agree with them,” burst out his niece, unable to bear it. “You think like they do — that living human beings must be taken and adapted to all kinds of horrors. We could easily do without the pits.”
He smiled, uncomfortably, cynically. Ursula felt again the revolt of hatred from him.
“I suppose their lives are not really so bad,” said Winifred Inger, superior to the Zolaesque tragedy.
He turned with his polite, distant attention.
“Yes, they are pretty bad. The pits are very deep, and hot, and in some places wet. The men die of consumption fairly often. But they earn good wages.”
“How gruesome!” said Winifred Inger.
“Yes,” he replied gravely. It was his grave, solid, selfcontained manner which made him so much respected as a colliery manager.
The servant came in to ask where they would have tea.
“Put it in the summer-house, Mrs. Smith,” he said.
The fair-haired, good-looking young woman went out.
“Is she married and in service?” asked Ursula.
“She is a widow. Her husband died of consumption a little while ago.” Brangwen gave a sinister little laugh. “He lay there in the house-place at her mother’s, and five or six other people in the house, and died very gradually. I asked her if his death wasn’t a great trouble to her. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘he was very fretful towards the last, never satisfied, never easy, always fret-fretting, an’ never knowing what would satisfy him. So in one way it was a relief when it was over — for him and for everybody.’ They had only been married two years, and she has one boy. I asked her if she hadn’t been very happy. ‘Oh, yes, sir, we was very comfortable at first, till he took bad — oh, we was very comfortable — oh, yes — but, you see, you get used to it. I’ve had my father and two brothers go off just the same. You get used to it’.”
“It’s a horrible thing to get used to,” said Winifred Inger, with a shudder.
“Yes,” he said, still smiling. “But that’s how they are. She’ll be getting married again directly. One man or another — it does not matter very much. They’re all colliers.”
“What do you mean?” asked Ursula. “They’re all colliers?”
“It is with the women as with us,” he replied. “Her husband was John Smith, loader. We reckoned him as a loader, he reckoned himself as a loader, and so she knew he represented his job. Marriage and home is a little side-show.
“The women know it right enough, and take it for what it’s worth. One man or another, it doesn’t matter all the world. The pit matters. Round the pit there will always be the sideshows, plenty of ‘em.”
He looked round at the red chaos, the rigid, amorphous confusion of Wiggiston.
“Every man his own little side-show, his home, but the pit owns every man. The women have what is left. What’s left of this man, or what is left of that — it doesn’t matter altogether. The pit takes all that really matters.”
“It is the same everywhere,” burst out Winifred. “It is the office, or the shop, or the business that gets the man, the woman gets the bit the shop can’t digest. What is he at home, a man? He is a meaningless lump — a standing machine, a machine out of work.”
“They know they are sold,” said Tom Brangwen. “That’s where it is. They know they are sold to their job. If a woman talks her throat out, what difference can it make? The man’s sold to his job. So the women don’t bother. They take what they can catch — and vogue la galere.”
“Aren’t they very strict here?” asked Miss Inger.
“Oh, no. Mrs. Smith has two sisters who have just changed husbands. They’re not very particular — neither are they very interested. They go dragging along what is left from the pits. They’re not interested enough to be very immoral — it all amounts to the same thing, moral or immoral — just a question of pit-wages. The most moral duke in England makes two hundred thousand a year out of these pits. He keeps the morality end up.”
Ursula sat black-souled and very bitter, hearing the two of them talk. There seemed something ghoulish even in their very deploring of the state of things. They seemed to take a ghoulish satisfaction in it. The pit was the great mistress. Ursula looked out of the window and saw the proud, demonlike colliery with her wheels twinkling in the heavens, the formless, squalid mass of the town lying aside. It was the squalid heap of side-shows. The pit was the main show, the raison d’etre of all.
How terrible it was! There was a horrible fascination in it — human bodies and lives subjected in slavery to that symmetric monster of the colliery. There was a swooning, perverse satisfaction in it. For a moment she was dizzy.
Then she recovered, felt herself in a great loneliness, where-in she was sad but free. She had departed. No more would she subscribe to the great colliery, to the great machine which has taken us all captives. In her soul, she was against it, she disowned even its power. It had only to be forsaken to be inane, meaningless. And she knew it was meaningless. But it needed a great, passionate effort of will on her part, seeing the colliery, still to maintain her knowledge that it was meaningless.
But her Uncle Tom and her mistress remained there among the horde, cynically reviling the monstrous state and yet adhering to it, like a man who reviles his mistress, yet who is in love with her. She knew her Uncle Tom perceived what was going on. But she knew moreover that in spite of his criticism and condemnation, he still wanted the great machine. His only happy moments, his only moments of pure freedom were when he was serving the machine. Then, and then only, when the machine caught him up, was he free from the hatred of himself, could he act wholely, without cynicism and unreality.
His real mistress was the machine, and the real mistress of Winifred was the machine. She too, Winifred, worshipped the impure abstraction, the mechanisms of matter. There, there, in the machine, in service of the machine, was she free from the clog and degradation of human feeling. There, in the monstrous mechanism that held all matter, living or dead, in its service, did she achieve her consummation and her perfect unison, her immortality.
Hatred sprang up in Ursula’s heart. If she could she would smash the machine. Her soul’s action should be the smashing of the great machine. If she could destroy the collliery, and make all the men of Wiggiston out of work, she would do it. Let them starve and grub in the earth for roots, rather than serve such a Moloch as this.
She hated her Uncle Tom, she hated Winifred Inger. They went down to the summer-house for tea. It was a pleasant place among a few trees, at the end of a tiny garden, on the edge of a field. Her Uncle Tom and Winifred seemed to jeer at her, to cheapen her. She was miserable and desolate. But she would never give way.
Her coldness for Winifred should never cease. She knew it was over between them. She saw gross, ugly movements in her mistress, she saw a clayey, inert, unquickened flesh, that reminded her of the great prehistoric lizards. One day her Uncle Tom came in out of the broiling sunshine heated from walking. Then the perspiration stood out upon his head and brow, his hand was wet and hot and suffocating in its clas
p. He too had something marshy about him — the succulent moistness and turgidity, and the same brackish, nauseating effect of a marsh, where life and decaying are one.
He was repellent to her, who was so dry and fine in her fire. Her very bones seemed to bid him keep his distance from her.
It was in these weeks that Ursula grew up. She stayed two weeks at Wiggiston, and she hated it. All was grey, dry ash, cold and dead and ugly. But she stayed. She stayed also to get rid of Winifred. The girl’s hatred and her sense of repulsiveness in her mistress and in her uncle seemed to throw the other two together. They drew together as if against her.
In hardness and bitterness of soul, Ursula knew that Winifred was become her uncle’s lover. She was glad. She had loved them both. Now she wanted to be rid of them both. Their marshy, bitter-sweet corruption came sick and unwholesome in her nostrils. Anything, to get out of the foetid air. She would leave them both for ever, leave for ever their strange, soft, half-corrupt element. Anything to get away.
One night Winifred came all burning into Ursula’s bed, and put her arms round the girl, holding her to herself in spite of unwillingness, and said,
“Dear, my dear — shall I marry Mr. Brangwen — shall I?”
The clinging, heavy, muddy question weighed on Ursula intolerably.
“Has he asked you?” she said, using all her might of hard resistance.
“He’s asked me,” said Winifred. “Do you want me to marry him, Ursula?”
“Yes,” said Ursula.
The arms tightened more on her.
“I knew you did, my sweet — and I will marry him. You’re fond of him, aren’t you?”
“I’ve been awfully fond of him — ever since I was a child.”
“I know — I know. I can see what you like in him. He is a man by himself, he has something apart from the rest.”
“Yes,” said Ursula.
“But he’s not like you, my dear — ha, he’s not as good as you. There’s something even objectionable in him — his thick thighs — ”
Ursula was silent.
“But I’ll marry him, my dear — it will be best. Now say you love me.”
A sort of profession was extorted out of the girl. Nevertheless her mistress went away sighing, to weep in her own chamber.
In two days’ time Ursula left Wiggiston. Miss Inger went to Nottingham. There was an engagement between her and Tom Brangwen, which the uncle seemed to vaunt as if it were an assurance of his validity.
Brangwen and Winifred Inger continued engaged for another term. Then they married. Brangwen had reached the age when he wanted children. He wanted children. Neither marriage nor the domestic establishment meant anything to him. He wanted to propagate himself. He knew what he was doing. He had the instinct of a growing inertia, of a thing that chooses its place of rest in which to lapse into apathy, complete, profound indifference. He would let the machinery carry him; husband, father, pit-manager, warm clay lifted through the recurrent action of day after day by the great machine from which it derived its motion. As for Winifred, she was an educated woman, and of the same sort as himself. She would make a good companion. She was his mate.
CHAPTER 13
The Man’s World
Ursula came back to Cossethay to fight with her mother. Her schooldays were over. She had passed the matriculation examination. Now she came home to face that empty period between school and possible marriage.
At first she thought it would be just like holidays all the time, she would feel just free. Her soul was in chaos, blinded suffering, maimed. She had no will left to think about herself. For a time she must just lapse.
But very shortly she found herself up against her mother. Her mother had, at this time, the power to irritate and madden the girl continuously. There were already seven children, yet Mrs. Brangwen was again with child, the ninth she had borne. One had died of diphtheria in infancy.
Even this fact of her mother’s pregnancy enraged the eldest girl. Mrs. Brangwen was so complacent, so utterly fulfilled in her breeding. She would not have the existence at all of anything but the immediate, physical, common things. Ursula inflamed in soul, was suffering all the anguish of youth’s reaching for some unknown ordeal, that it can’t grasp, can’t even distinguish or conceive. Maddened, she was fighting all the darkness she was up against. And part of this darkness was her mother. To limit, as her mother did, everything to the ring of physical considerations, and complacently to reject the reality of anything else, was horrible. Not a thing did Mrs. Brangwen care about, but the children, the house, and a little local gossip. And she would not be touched, she would let nothing else live near her. She went about, big with child, slovenly, easy, having a certain lax dignity, taking her own time, pleasing herself, always, always doing things for the children, and feeling that she thereby fulfilled the whole of womanhood.
This long trance of complacent child-bearing had kept her young and undeveloped. She was scarcely a day older than when Gudrun was born. All these years nothing had happened save the coming of the children, nothing had mattered but the bodies of her babies. As her children came into consciousness, as they began to suffer their own fulfilment, she cast them off. But she remained dominant in the house. Brangwen continued in a kind of rich drowse of physical heat, in connection with his wife. They were neither of them quite personal, quite defined as individuals, so much were they pervaded by the physical heat of breeding and rearing their young.
How Ursula resented it, how she fought against the close, physical, limited life of herded domesticity! Calm, placid, unshakeable as ever, Mrs. Brangwen went about in her dominance of physical maternity.
There were battles. Ursula would fight for things that mattered to her. She would have the children less rude and tyrannical, she would have a place in the house. But her mother pulled her down, pulled her down. With all the cunning instinct of a breeding animal, Mrs. Brangwen ridiculed and held cheap Ursula’s passions, her ideas, her pronunciations. Ursula would try to insist, in her own home, on the right of women to take equal place with men in the field of action and work.
“Ay,” said the mother, “there’s a good crop of stockings lying ripe for mending. Let that be your field of action.”
Ursula disliked mending stockings, and this retort maddened her. She hated her mother bitterly. After a few weeks of enforced domestic life, she had had enough of her home. The commonness, the triviality, the immediate meaninglessness of it all drove her to frenzy. She talked and stormed ideas, she corrected and nagged at the children, she turned her back in silent contempt on her breeding mother, who treated her with supercilious indifference, as if she were a pretentious child not to be taken seriously.
Brangwen was sometimes dragged into the trouble. He loved Ursula, therefore he always had a sense of shame, almost of betrayal, when he turned on her. So he turned fiercely and scathingly, and with a wholesale brutality that made Ursula go white, mute, and numb. Her feelings seemed to be becoming deadened in her, her temper hard and cold.
Brangwen himself was in one of his states or flux. After all these years, he began to see a loophole of freedom. For twenty years he had gone on at this office as a draughtsman, doing work in which he had no interest, because it seemed his allotted work. The growing up of his daughters, their developing rejection of old forms set him also free.
He was a man of ceaseless activity. Blindly, like a mole, he pushed his way out of the earth that covered him, working always away from the physical element in which his life was captured. Slowly, blindly, gropingly, with what initiative was left to him, he made his way towards individual expression and individual form.
At last, after twenty years, he came back to his woodcarving, almost to the point where he had left off his Adam and Eve panel, when he was courting. But now he had knowledge and skill without vision. He saw the puerility of his young conceptions, he saw the unreal world in which they had been conceived. He now had a new strength in his sense of reality. He felt as if he wer
e real, as if he handled real things. He had worked for many years at Cossethay, building the organ for the church, restoring the woodwork, gradually coming to a knowledge of beauty in the plain labours. Now he wanted again to carve things that were utterances of himself.
But he could not quite hitch on — always he was too busy, too uncertain, confused. Wavering, he began to study modelling. To his surprise he found he could do it. Modelling in clay, in plaster, he produced beautiful reproductions, really beautiful. Then he set-to to make a head of Ursula, in high relief, in the Donatello manner. In his first passion, he got a beautiful suggestion of his desire. But the pitch of concentration would not come. With a little ash in his mouth he gave up. He continued to copy, or to make designs by selecting motives from classic stuff. He loved the Della Robbia and Donatello as he had loved Fra Angelico when he was a young man. His work had some of the freshness, the naive alertness of the early Italians. But it was only reproduction.
Having reached his limit in modelling, he turned to painting. But he tried water-colour painting after the manner of any other amateur. He got his results but was not much interested. After one or two drawings of his beloved church, which had the same alertness as his modelling, he seemed to be incongruous with the modern atmospheric way of painting, so that his church tower stood up, really stood and asserted its standing, but was ashamed of its own lack of meaning, he turned away again.
He took up jewellery, read Benvenuto Cellini, pored over reproductions of ornament, and began to make pendants in silver and pearl and matrix. The first things he did, in his start of discovery, were really beautiful. Those later were more imitative. But, starting with his wife, he made a pendant each for all his womenfolk. Then he made rings and bracelets.
Then he took up beaten and chiselled metal work. When Ursula left school, he was making a silver bowl of lovely shape. How he delighted in it, almost lusted after it.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 151