The Rainbow, D. H. Lawrence [books for new readers .txt] 📗

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 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 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, 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 summerhouse, 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 sideshow.

“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 sideshow, 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.