pg28948 [175]
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 summer-house, 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 side-show.
"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 side-show, 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. "It is the office, or the shop, or the business that gets the man, the woman gets the bit the shop can't digest. What is he at home, a man? He is a meaningless lump—a standing machine, a machine out of work."
"They know they are sold," said Tom Brangwen. "That's where it is. They know they are sold to their job. If a woman talks her throat out, what difference can it make? The man's sold to his job. So the women don't bother. They take what they can catch—and vogue la galère."
"Aren't they very strict here?" asked Miss Inger.
"Oh, no. Mrs. Smith has two sisters who have just changed husbands. They're not very particular—neither are they very interested. They go dragging along what is left from the pits. They're not interested enough to be very immoral—it all amounts to the same thing, moral or immoral—just a question of pit-wages. The most moral duke in England makes two hundred thousand a year out of these pits. He keeps the morality end up."
Ursula sat black-souled and very bitter, hearing the two of them talk. There seemed something ghoulish even in their very deploring of the state of things. They seemed to take a ghoulish satisfaction in it. The pit was the great mistress. Ursula looked out of the window and saw the proud, demonlike colliery with her wheels twinkling in the heavens, the formless, squalid mass of the town lying