第62章

Connie liked the interior much better than Wragby.It was much lighter,more alive,shapen and elegant.The rooms were panelled with creamy painted panelling,the ceilings were touched with gilt,and everything was kept in exquisite order,all the appointments were perfect,regardless of expense.

Even the corridors managed to be ample and lovely,softly curved and full of life.

But Leslie Winter was alone.He had adored his house.But his park was bordered by three of his own collieries.He had been a generous man in his ideas.He had almost welcomed the colliers in his park.Had the miners not made him rich!So,when he saw the gangs of unshapely men lounging by his ornamental waters--not in the private part of the park,no,he drew the line there--he would say:'the miners are perhaps not so ornamental as deer,but they are far more profitable.'

But that was in the golden--monetarily--latter half of Queen Victoria's reign.Miners were then 'good working men'.

Winter had made this speech,half apologetic,to his guest,the then Prince of Wales.And the Prince had replied,in his rather guttural English:

'You are quite right.If there were coal under Sandringham,I would open a mine on the lawns,and think it first-rate landscape gardening.

Oh,I am quite willing to exchange roe-deer for colliers,at the price.

Your men are good men too,I hear.'

But then,the Prince had perhaps an exaggerated idea of the beauty of money,and the blessings of industrialism.

However,the Prince had been a King,and the King had died,and now there was another King,whose chief function seemed to be to open soup-kitchens.

And the good working men were somehow hemming Shipley in.New mining villages crowded on the park,and the squire felt somehow that the population was alien.He used to feel,in a good-natured but quite grand way,lord of his own domain and of his own colliers.Now,by a subtle pervasion of the new spirit,he had somehow been pushed out.It was he who did not belong any more.There was no mistaking it.The mines,the industry,had a will of its own,and this will was against the gentleman-owner.All the colliers took part in the will,and it was hard to live up against it.It either shoved you out of the place,or out of life altogether.

Squire Winter,a soldier,had stood it out.But he no longer cared to walk in the park after dinner.He almost hid,indoors.Once he had walked,bare-headed,and in his patent-leather shoes and purple silk socks,with Connie down to the gate,talking to her in his well-bred rather haw-haw fashion.But when it came to passing the little gangs of colliers who stood and stared without either salute or anything else,Connie felt how the lean,well-bred old man winced,winced as an elegant antelope stag in a cage winces from the vulgar stare.The colliers were not personally hostile:not at all.But their spirit was cold,and shoving him out.And,deep down,there was a profound grudge.They 'worked for him'.And in their ugliness,they resented his elegant,well-groomed,well-bred existence.

'Who's he!'It was the difference they resented.

And somewhere,in his secret English heart,being a good deal of a soldier,he believed they were right to resent the difference.He felt himself a little in the wrong,for having all the advantages.Nevertheless he represented a system,and he would not be shoved out.

Except by death.Which came on him soon after Connie's call,suddenly.

And he remembered Clifford handsomely in his will.

The heirs at once gave out the order for the demolishing of Shipley.

It cost too much to keep up.No one would live there.So it was broken up.The avenue of yews was cut down.The park was denuded of its timber,and divided into lots.It was near enough to Uthwaite.In the strange,bald desert of this still-one-more no-man's-land,new little streets of semi-detacheds were run up,very desirable!The Shipley Hall Estate!

Within a year of Connie's last call,it had happened.There stood Shipley Hall Estate,an array of red-brick semi-detached 'villas'in new streets.

No one would have dreamed that the stucco hall had stood there twelve months before.

But this is a later stage of King Edward's landscape gardening,the sort that has an ornamental coal-mine on the lawn.

One England blots out another.The England of the Squire Winters and the Wragby Halls was gone,dead.The blotting out was only not yet complete.

What would come after?Connie could not imagine.She could only see the new brick streets spreading into the fields,the new erections rising at the collieries,the new girls in their silk stockings,the new collier lads lounging into the Pally or the Welfare.The younger generation were utterly unconscious of the old England.There was a gap in the continuity of consciousness,almost American:but industrial really.What next?

Connie always felt there was no next.She wanted to hide her head in the sand:or,at least,in the bosom of a living man.

The world was so complicated and weird and gruesome!The common people were so many,and really so terrible.So she bought as she was going home,and saw the colliers trailing from the pits,grey-black,distorted,one shoulder higher than the other,slurring their heavy ironshod boots.Underground grey faces,whites of eyes rolling,necks cringing from the pit roof,shoulders Out of shape.Men!Men!Alas,in some ways patient and good men.In other ways,non-existent.Something that men should have was bred and killed out of them.Yet they were men.They begot children.One might bear a child to them.Terrible,terrible thought!They were good and kindly.

But they were only half,Only the grey half of a human being.As yet,they were 'good'.But even that was the goodness of their halfness.Supposing the dead in them ever rose up!But no,it was too terrible to think of.

Connie was absolutely afraid of the industrial masses.They seemed so weird to her.A life with utterly no beauty in it,no intuition,always 'in the pit'.