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 to
close 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 two
halftruths, 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, 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
was perfectly 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.
Gradually Gerald got hold of everything. And then began the great
reform. Expert engineers were introduced in every department. An
enormous electric plant was installed, both for lighting and for
haulage underground, and for power. The electricity was carried into
every mine. New machinery was brought from America, such as the miners
had never seen before, great iron men, as the cutting machines were
called, and unusual appliances. The working of the pits was thoroughly
changed, all the control was taken out of the hands of the miners, the
butty system was abolished. Everything was run on the most accurate and
delicate scientific method, educated and expert men were in control
everywhere, the miners were reduced to mere mechanical instruments.
They had to work hard, much harder than before, the work was terrible
and heart-breaking in its mechanicalness.
But they submitted to it all. The joy went out of their lives, the hope
seemed to perish as they became more and more mechanised. And yet they
accepted the new conditions. They even got a further satisfaction out
of them. At first they hated Gerald Crich, they swore to do something
to him, to murder him. But as time went on, they accepted everything
with some fatal satisfaction. Gerald was their high priest, he
represented the religion they really felt. His father was forgotten
already. There was a new world, a new order, strict, terrible, inhuman,
but satisfying in its very destructiveness. The men were satisfied to
belong to the great and wonderful machine, even whilst it destroyed
them. It was what they wanted. It was the highest that man had
produced, the most wonderful and superhuman. They were exalted by
belonging to this great and superhuman system which was beyond feeling
or reason, something really godlike. Their hearts died within them, but
their souls were satisfied. It was what they wanted. Otherwise Gerald
could never have done what he did. He was just ahead of them in giving
them what they wanted, this participation in a great and perfect system
that subjected life to pure mathematical principles. This was a sort of
freedom, the sort they really wanted. It was the first great step in
undoing, the first great phase of chaos, the substitution of the
mechanical principle for the organic, the destruction of the organic
purpose, the organic unity, and the subordination of every organic unit
to the great mechanical purpose. It was pure organic disintegration and
pure mechanical organisation. This is the first and finest state of
chaos.
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.
CHAPTER XVIII.
RABBIT
Gudrun knew that it was a critical thing for her to go to Shortlands.
She knew it was equivalent to accepting Gerald Crich as a lover. And
though she hung back, disliking the condition, yet she knew she would
go on. She equivocated. She said to herself, in torment recalling the
blow and the kiss, 'after all, what is it? What is a kiss? What even is
a blow? It is an instant, vanished at once. I can go to Shortlands just
for a time, before I go away, if only to see what it is like.' For she
had an insatiable curiosity to see and to know everything.
She also wanted to know what Winifred was really like. Having heard the
child calling from the steamer in the night, she felt some mysterious
connection with her.
Gudrun talked with the father in the library. Then he sent for his
daughter. She came accompanied by Mademoiselle.
'Winnie, this is Miss Brangwen, who will be so kind as to help you with
your drawing and making models of your animals,' said the father.
The child looked at Gudrun for a moment with interest, before she came
forward and with face averted offered her hand. There was a complete
SANG FROID and indifference under Winifred's childish reserve, a
certain irresponsible callousness.
'How do you do?' said the child, not lifting her face.
'How do you do?' said Gudrun.
Then Winifred stood aside, and Gudrun was introduced to Mademoiselle.
'You have a fine day for your walk,' said Mademoiselle, in a bright
manner.
'QUITE fine,' said Gudrun.
Winifred was watching from her distance. She was as if amused, but
rather unsure as yet what this new person was like. She saw so many new
persons, and so few who became real to her. Mademoiselle was of no
count whatever, the child merely put up with her, calmly and easily,
accepting her little authority with faint scorn, compliant out of
childish arrogance of indifference.
'Well, Winifred,' said the father, 'aren't you glad Miss Brangwen has
come? She makes animals and birds in wood and in clay, that the people
in London write about in the papers, praising them to the skies.'
Winifred smiled slightly.
'Who told you, Daddie?' she asked.
'Who told me? Hermione told me, and Rupert Birkin.'
'Do you know them?' Winifred asked of Gudrun, turning to her with faint
challenge.
'Yes,' said Gudrun.
Winifred readjusted herself a little. She had been ready to accept
Gudrun as a sort of servant. Now she saw it was on terms of friendship
they were intended to meet. She was rather glad. She had so many half
inferiors, whom she tolerated with perfect good-humour.
Gudrun was very calm. She also did not take these things very
seriously. A new occasion was mostly spectacular to her. However,
Winifred was a detached, ironic child, she would never attach herself.
Gudrun liked her and was intrigued by her. The first meetings went off
with a certain humiliating clumsiness. Neither Winifred nor her
instructress had any social grace.
Soon, however, they met in a kind of make-belief world. Winifred did
not notice human beings unless they were like herself, playful and
slightly mocking. She would accept nothing but the world of amusement,
and the serious people of her life were the animals she had for pets.
On those she lavished, almost ironically, her affection and her
companionship. To the rest of the human scheme she submitted with a
faint bored indifference.
She had a pekinese dog called Looloo, which she loved.
'Let us draw Looloo,' said Gudrun, 'and see if we can get his
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