The examination came, and then school was over. It was the long vacation. Winifred Inger went away to London. Ursula was left alone in Cossethay. A terrible, outcast, almost poisonous despair possessed her. It was no use doing anything, or being anything. She had no connection with other people. Her lot was isolated and deadly. There was nothing for her anywhere, but this black disintegration. Yet, within all the great attack of disintegration upon her, she remained herself. It was the terrible core of all her suffering, that she was always herself. Never could she escape that: she could not put off being herself.
She still adhered to Winifred Inger. But a sort of nausea was coming over her. She loved her mistress. But a heavy, clogged sense of deadness began to gather upon her, from the other woman’s contact. And sometimes she thought Winifred was ugly, clayey. Her female hips seemed big and earthy, her ankles and her arms were too thick. She wanted some fine intensity, instead of this heavy cleaving of moist clay, that cleaves because it has no life of its own.
Winifred still loved Ursula. She had a passion for the fine flame of the girl, she served her endlessly, would have done anything for her.
‘Come with me to London,’ she pleaded to the girl. ‘I will make it nice for you,—you shall do lots of things you will enjoy.’
‘No,’ said Ursula, stubbornly and dully. ‘No, I don’t want to go to London, I want to be by myself.’
Winifred knew what this meant. She knew that Ursula was beginning to reject her. The fine, unquenchable flame of the younger girl would consent no more to mingle with the perverted life of the elder woman. Winifred knew it would come. But she too was proud. At the bottom of her was a black pit of despair. She knew perfectly well that Ursula would cast her off.
And that seemed like the end of her life. But she was too hopeless to rage. Wisely, economising what was left of Ursula’s love, she went away to London, leaving the beloved girl alone.
And after a fortnight, Ursula’s letters became tender again, loving. Her Uncle Tom had invited her to go and stay with him. He was managing a big, new colliery in Yorkshire. Would Winifred come too?
For now Ursula was imagining marriage for Winifred. She wanted her to marry her Uncle Tom. Winifred knew this. She said she would come to Wiggiston. She would now let fate do as it liked with her, since there was nothing remaining to be done. Tom Brangwen also saw Ursula’s intention. He too was at the end of his desires. He had done the things he had wanted to. They had all ended in a disintegrated lifelessness of soul, which he hid under an utterly tolerant good-humour. He no longer cared about anything on earth, neither man nor woman, nor God nor humanity. He had come to a stability of nullification. He did not care any more, neither about his body nor about his soul. Only he would preserve intact his own life. Only the simple, superficial fact of living persisted. He was still healthy. He lived. Therefore he would fill each moment. That had always been his creed. It was not instinctive easiness: it was the inevitable outcome of his nature. When he was in the absolute privacy of his own life, he did as he pleased, unscrupulous, without any ulterior thought. He believed neither in good nor evil. Each moment was like a separate little island, isolated from time, and blank, unconditioned by time.
He lived in a large new house of red brick, standing outside a mass of homogeneous red-brick dwellings, called Wiggiston. Wiggiston was only seven years old. It had been a hamlet of eleven houses on the edge of heathy, half-agricultural country. Then the great seam of coal had been opened. In a year Wiggiston appeared, a great mass of pinkish rows of thin, unreal dwellings of five rooms each. The streets were like visions of pure ugliness; a grey-black macadamised road, asphalt causeways, held in between a flat succession of wall, window, and door, a new-brick channel that began nowhere, and ended nowhere. Everything was amorphous, yet everything repeated itself endlessly. Only now and then, in one of the house-windows vegetables or small groceries were displayed for sale.
In the middle of the town was a large, open, shapeless space, or market-place, of black trodden earth, surrounded by the same flat material of dwellings, new red-brick becoming grimy, small oblong windows, and oblong doors, repeated endlessly, with just, at one corner, a great and gaudy public-house, and somewhere lost on one of the sides of the square, a large window opaque and darkish green, which was the post-office.
The place had the strange desolation of a ruin. Colliers hanging about in gangs and groups, or passing along the asphalt pavements heavily to work, seemed not like living people, but like spectres. The rigidity of the blank streets, the homogeneous amorphous sterility of the whole suggested death rather than life. There was no meeting place, no centre, no artery, no organic formation. There it lay, like the new foundations of a red-brick confusion rapidly spreading, like a skin-disease.
Just outside of this, on a little hill, was Tom Brangwen’s big, red-brick house. It looked from the front upon the edge of the place, a meaningless squalor of ash-pits and closets and irregular rows of the backs of houses, each with its small activity made sordid by barren cohesion with the rest of the small activities. Further off was the great colliery that went night and day. And all around was the country, green with two winding streams, ragged with gorse, and heath, the darker woods in the distance.
The whole place was just unreal, just unreal. Even now, when he had been there for two years, Tom Brangwen did not believe in the actuality of the place. It was like some gruesome dream, some ugly, dead, amorphous mood become concrete.
Ursula and Winifred were met by the motor car at the raw little station, and drove through what seemed to them like the horrible raw beginnings of something. The place was a moment of chaos perpetuated, persisting, chaos fixed and rigid. Ursula was fascinated by the many men who were there—groups of men standing in the streets, four or five men walking in a gang together, their dogs running behind or before. They were all decently dressed, and most of them rather gaunt. The terrible gaunt repose of their bearing fascinated her. Like creatures with no more hope, but which still live and have passionate being, within some utterly unliving shell, they passed meaninglessly along, with strange, isolated dignity. It was as if a hard, horny shell enclosed them all.
Shocked and startled, Ursula was carried to her Uncle Tom’s house. He was not yet at home. His house was simply, but well furnished. He had taken out a dividing wall, and made the whole front of the house into a large library, with one end devoted to his science. It was a handsome room, appointed as a laboratory and reading room, but giving the same sense of hard, mechanical activity, activity mechanical yet inchoate, and looking out on the hideous abstraction of the town, and at the green meadows and rough country beyond, and at the great, mathematical colliery on the other side.
They saw Tom Brangwen walking up the curved drive. He was getting stouter, but with his bowler hat worn well set down on his brows, he looked manly, handsome, curiously like any other man of action. His colour was as fresh, his health as perfect as ever, he walked like a man rather absorbed.
Winifred Inger was startled when he entered the library, his coat fastened close and correct, his head bald to the crown, but not shiny, rather like something naked that one is accustomed to see covered, and his dark eyes liquid and formless. He seemed to stand in the shadow, like a thing ashamed. And the clasp of his hand was so soft and yet so forceful, that it chilled the heart. She was afraid of him, repelled by him, and yet attracted.
He looked at the athletic, seemingly fearless girl, and he detected in her a kinship with his own dark corruption. Immediately, he knew they were akin.
His manner was polite, almost foreign, and rather cold. He still laughed in his curious, animal fashion, suddenly wrinkling up his wide nose, and showing his sharp teeth. The fine beauty of his skin and his complexion, some almost waxen quality, hid the strange, repellent grossness of him, the slight sense of putrescence, the commonness which revealed itself in his rather fat thighs and loins.
Winifred saw at once the deferential, slightly servile, slightly cunn
ing 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, self-contained 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 side-shows, 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 galère.’*
‘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, demon-like 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’être 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, wherein 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 colliery, 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 clasp. He too had something marshy about him—the succulent moist-ness and turgidity, and the same brackish, nauseating effect of a mar
sh, 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—’