第5章

Connie and Clifford came home to Wragby in the autumn of 1920.Miss Chatterley,still disgusted at her brother's defection,had departed and was living in a little flat in London.

Wragby was a long low old house in brown stone,begun about the middle of the eighteenth century,and added on to,till it was a warren of a place without much distinction.It stood on an eminence in a rather line old park of oak trees,but alas,one could see in the near distance the chimney of Tevershall pit,with its clouds of steam and smoke,and on the damp,hazy distance of the hill the raw straggle of Tevershall village,a village which began almost at the park gates,and trailed in utter hopeless ugliness for a long and gruesome mile:houses,rows of wretched,small,begrimed,brick houses,with black slate roofs for lids,sharp angles and wilful,blank dreariness.

Connie was accustomed to Kensington or the Scotch hills or the Sussex downs:that was her England.With the stoicism of the young she took in the utter,soulless ugliness of the coal-and-iron Midlands at a glance,and left it at what it was:unbelievable and not to be thought about.From the rather dismal rooms at Wragby she heard the rattle-rattle of the screens at the pit,the puff of the winding-engine,the clink-clink of shunting trucks,and the hoarse little whistle of the colliery locomotives.Tevershall pit-bank was burning,had been burning for years,and it would cost thousands to put it out.So it had to burn.And when the wind was that way,which was often,the house was full of the stench of this sulphurous combustion of the earth's excrement.But even on windless days the air always smelt of something under-earth:sulphur,iron,coal,or acid.And even on the Christmas roses the smuts settled persistently,incredible,like black manna from the skies of doom.

Well,there it was:fated like the rest of things!It was rather awful,but why kick?You couldn't kick it away.It just went on.Life,like all the rest!On the low dark ceiling of cloud at night red blotches burned and quavered,dappling and swelling and contracting,like burns that give pain.It was the furnaces.At first they fascinated Connie with a sort of horror;she felt she was living underground.Then she got used to them.

And in the morning it rained.

Clifford professed to like Wragby better than London.This country had a grim will of its own,and the people had guts.Connie wondered what else they had:certainly neither eyes nor minds.The people were as haggard,shapeless,and dreary as the countryside,and as unfriendly.Only there was something in their deep-mouthed slurring of the dialect,and the thresh-thresh of their hob-nailed pit-boots as they trailed home in gangs on the asphalt from work,that was terrible and a bit mysterious.

There had been no welcome home for the young squire,no festivities,no deputation,not even a single flower.Only a dank ride in a motor-car up a dark,damp drive,burrowing through gloomy trees,out to the slope of the park where grey damp sheep were feeding,to the knoll where the house spread its dark brown facade,and the housekeeper and her husband were hovering,like unsure tenants on the face of the earth,ready to stammer a welcome.

There was no communication between Wragby Hall and Tevershall village,none.No caps were touched,no curtseys bobbed.The colliers merely stared;the tradesmen lifted their caps to Connie as to an acquaintance,and nodded awkwardly to Clifford;that was all.Gulf impassable,and a quiet sort of resentment on either side.At first Connie suffered from the steady drizzle of resentment that came from the village.Then she hardened herself to it,and it became a sort of tonic,something to live up to.It was not that she and Clifford were unpopular,they merely belonged to another species altogether from the colliers.Gulf impassable,breach indescribable,such as is perhaps nonexistent south of the Trent.But in the Midlands and the industrial North gulf impassable,across which no communication could take place.You stick to your side,I'll stick to mine!A strange denial of the common pulse of humanity.

Yet the village sympathized with Clifford and Connie in the abstract.

In the flesh it was--You leave me alone!--on either side.

The rector was a nice man of about sixty,full of his duty,and reduced,personally,almost to a nonentity by the silent--You leave me alone!--of the village.The miners'wives were nearly all Methodists.The miners were nothing.But even so much official uniform as the clergyman wore was enough to obscure entirely the fact that he was a man like any other man.No,he was Mester Ashby,a sort of automatic preaching and praying concern.

This stubborn,instinctive--We think ourselves as good as you,if you are Lady Chatterley!--puzzled and baffled Connie at first extremely.

The curious,suspicious,false amiability with which the miners'wives met her overtures;the curiously offensive tinge of--Oh dear me!I am somebody now,with Lady Chatterley talking to me!But she needn't think I'm not as good as her for all that!--which she always heard twanging in the women's half-fawning voices,was impossible.There was no getting past it.It was hopelessly and offensively nonconformist.

Clifford left them alone,and she learnt to do the same:she just went by without looking at them,and they stared as if she were a walking wax figure.When he had to deal with them,Clifford was rather haughty and contemptuous;one could no longer afford to be friendly.In fact he was altogether rather supercilious and contemptuous of anyone not in his own class.He stood his ground,without any attempt at conciliation.And he was neither liked nor disliked by the people:he was just part of things,like the pit-bank and Wragby itself.