CHAPTER 17. THE INDUSTRIAL MAGNATE

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 andrent 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. Inthem 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 awonderful 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 shelterher 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. Sheloved 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 tobe 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 attractedThe 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 werehis 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 weremere 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 toclose 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 twohalftruths, 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, self and went to work with me and murmuring and he was about ninetye and the whole matter of fact that you have been trained. 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 wasperfectly 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.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.