第60章

The Wesleyan chapel,higher up,was of blackened brick and stood behind iron railings and blackened shrubs.The Congregational chapel,which thought itself superior,was built of rusticated sandstone and had a steeple,but not a very high one.Just beyond were the new school buildings,expensivink brick,and gravelled playground inside iron railings,all very imposing,and fixing the suggestion of a chapel and a prison.Standard Five girls were having a singing lesson,just finishing the la-me-doh-la exercises and beginning a 'sweet children's song'.Anything more unlike song,spontaneous song,would be impossible to imagine:a strange bawling yell that followed the outlines of a tune.It was not like savages:savages have subtle rhythms.

It was not like animals:animals mean something when they yell.

It was like nothing on earth,and it was called singing.Connie sat and listened with her heart in her boots,as Field was filling petrol.What could possibly become of such a people,a people in whom the living intuitive faculty was dead as nails,and only queer mechanical yells and uncanny will-power remained?

A coal-cart was coming downhill,clanking in the rain.Field started upwards,past the big but weary-looking drapers and clothing shops,the post-office,into the little market-place of forlorn space,where Sam Black was peering out of the door of the Sun,that called itself an inn,not a pub,and where the commercial travellers stayed,and was bowing to Lady Chatterley's car.

The church was away to the left among black trees.The car slid on downhill,past the Miners'Arms.It had already passed the Wellington,the Nelson,the Three Tuns,and the Sun,now it passed the Miners'Arms,then the Mechanics'

Hall,then the new and almost gaudy Miners'Welfare and so,past a few new 'villas',out into the blackened road between dark hedges and dark green fields,towards Stacks Gate.

Tevershall!That was Tevershall!Merrie England!Shakespeare's England!

No,but the England of today,as Connie had realized since she had come to live in it.It was producing a new race of mankind,over-conscious in the money and social and political side,on the spontaneous,intuitive side dead,but dead.Half-corpses,all of them:but with a terrible insistent consciousness in the other half.There was something uncanny and underground about it all.It was an under-world.And quite incalculable.How shall we understand the reactions in half-corpses?When Connie saw the great lorries full of steel-workers from Sheffield,weird,distorted smallish beings like men,off for an excursion to Matlock,her bowels fainted and she thought:Ah God,what has man done to man?What have the leaders of men been doing to their fellow men?They have reduced them to less than humanness;and now there can be no fellowship any more!It is just a nightmare.

She felt again in a wave of terror the grey,gritty hopelessness of it all.With such creatures for the industrial masses,and the upper classes as she knew them,there was no hope,no hope any more.Yet she was wanting a baby,and an heir to Wragby!An heir to Wragby!She shuddered with dread.

Yet Mellors had come out of all this!--Yes,but he was as apart from it all as she was.Even in him there was no fellowship left.It was dead.

The fellowship was dead.There was only apartness and hopelessness,as far as all this was concerned.And this was England,the vast bulk of England:as Connie knew,since she had motored from the centre of it.

The car was rising towards Stacks Gate.The rain was holding off,and in the air came a queer pellucid gleam of May.The country rolled away in long undulations,south towards the Peak,east towards Mansfield and Nottingham.Connie was travelling South.

As she rose on to the high country,she could see on her left,on a height above the rolling land,the shadowy,powerful bulk of Warsop Castle,dark grey,with below it the reddish plastering of miners'dwellings,newish,and below those the plumes of dark smoke and white steam from the great colliery which put so many thousand pounds per annum into the pockets of the Duke and the other shareholders.The powerful old castle was a ruin,yet it hung its bulk on the low sky-line,over the black plumes and the white that waved on the damp air below.

A turn,and they ran on the high level to Stacks Gate.Stacks Gate,as seen from the highroad,was just a huge and gorgeous new hotel,the Coningsby Arms,standing red and white and gilt in barbarous isolation off the road.But if you looked,you saw on the left rows of handsome 'modern'dwellings,set down like a game of dominoes,with spaces and gardens,a queer game of dominoes that some weird 'masters'were playing on the surprised earth.And beyond these blocks of dwellings,at the back,rose all the astonishing and frightening overhead erections of a really modern mine,chemical works and long galleries,enormous,and of shapes not before known to man.The head-stock and pit-bank of the mine itself were insignificant among the huge new installations.And in front of this,the game of dominoes stood forever in a sort of surprise,waiting to be played.

This was Stacks Gate,new on the face of the earth,since the war.But as a matter of fact,though even Connie did not know it,downhill half a mile below the 'hotel'was old Stacks Gate,with a little old colliery and blackish old brick dwellings,and a chapel or two and a shop or two and a little pub or two.

But that didn't count any more.The vast plumes of smoke and vapour rose from the new works up above,and this was now Stacks Gate:no chapels,no pubs,even no shops.Only the great works',which are the modern Olympia with temples to all the gods;then the model dwellings:then the hotel.

The hotel in actuality was nothing but a miners'pub though it looked first-classy.