第71章

'I'd like to give something,'she said.'But I'm not allowed.Everything is to be sold and paid for now;and all the things you mention now,Wragby and Shipley sells them to the people,at a good prof it.Everything is sold.You don't give one heart-beat of real sympathy.And besides,who has taken away from the people their natural life and manhood,and given them this industrial horror?Who has done that?'

'And what must I do?'he asked,green.'Ask them to come and pillage me?'

'Why is Tevershall so ugly,so hideous?Why are their lives so hopeless?'

'They built their own Tevershall,that's part of their display of freedom.

They built themselves their pretty Tevershall,and they live their own pretty lives.I can't live their lives for them.Every beetle must live its own life.'

'But you make them work for you.They live the life of your coal-mine.'

'Not at all.Every beetle finds its own food.Not one man is forced to work for me.

'Their lives are industrialized and hopeless,and so are ours,'she cried.

'I don't think they are.That's just a romantic figure of speech,a relic of the swooning and die-away romanticism.You don't look at all a hopeless figure standing there,Connie my dear.'

Which was true.For her dark-blue eyes were flashing,her colour was hot in her cheeks,she looked full of a rebellious passion far from the dejection of hopelessness.She noticed,ill the tussocky places of the grass,cottony young cowslips standing up still bleared in their down.

And she wondered with rage,why it was she felt Clifford was so wrong ,yet she couldn't say it to him,she could not say exactly where he was wrong.

'No wonder the men hate you,'she said.

'They don't!'he replied.'And don't fall into errors:in your sense of the word,they are not men.They are animals you don't understand,and never could.Don't thrust your illusions on other people.The masses were always the same,and will always be the same.Nero's slaves were extremely little different from our colliers or the Ford motor-car workmen.I mean Nero's mine slaves and his field slaves.It is the masses:they are the unchangeable.An individual may emerge from the masses.But the emergence doesn't alter the mass.The masses are unalterable.It is one of the most momentous facts of social science.Panem et circenses !Only today education is one of the bad substitutes for a circus.What is wrong today is that we've made a profound hash of the circuses part of the programme,and poisoned our masses with a little education.'

When Clifford became really roused in his feelings about the common people,Connie was frightened.There was something devastatingly true in what he said.But it was a truth that killed.

Seeing her pale and silent,Clifford started the chair again,and no more was said till he halted again at the wood gate,which she opened.

'And what we need to take up now,'he said,'is whips,not swords.The masses have been ruled since time began,and till time ends,ruled they will have to be.It is sheer hypocrisy and farce to say they can rule themselves.'

'But can you rule them?'she asked.

'I?Oh yes!Neither my mind nor my will is crippled,and I don't rule with my legs.I can do my share of ruling:absolutely,my share;and give me a son,and he will be able to rule his portion after me.'

'But he wouldn't be your own son,of your own ruling class;or perhaps not,'she stammered.

'I don't care who his father may be,so long as he is a healthy man not below normal intelligence.Give me the child of any healthy,normally intelligent man,and I will make a perfectly competent Chatterley of him.

It is not who begets us,that matters,but where fate places us.Place any child among the ruling classes,and he will grow up,to his own extent,a ruler.Put kings'and dukes'children among the masses,and they'll be little plebeians,mass products.It is the overwhelming pressure of environment.'

'Then the common people aren't a race,and the aristocrats aren't blood,'

she said.

'No,my child!All that is romantic illusion.Aristocracy is a function,a part of fate.And the masses are a functioning of another part of fate.

The individual hardly matters.It is a question of which function you are brought up to and adapted to.It is not the individuals that make an aristocracy:

it is the functioning of the aristocratic whole.And it is the functioning of the whole mass that makes the common man what he is.'

'Then there is no common humanity between us all!'

'Just as you like.We all need to fill our bellies.But when it comes to expressive or executive functioning,I believe there is a gulf and an absolute one,between the ruling and the serving classes.The two functions are opposed.And the function determines the individual.'

Connie looked at him with dazed eyes.

'Won't you come on?'she said.

And he started his chair.He had said his say.Now he lapsed into his peculiar and rather vacant apathy,that Connie found so trying.In the wood,anyhow,she was determined not to argue.

In front of them ran the open cleft of the riding,between the hazel walls and the gay grey trees.The chair puffed slowly on,slowly surging into the forget-me-nots that rose up in the drive like milk froth,beyond the hazel shadows.Clifford steered the middle course,where feet passing had kept a channel through the flowers.But Connie,walking behind,had watched the wheels jolt over the wood-ruff and the bugle,and squash the little yellow cups of the creeping-jenny.Now they made a wake through the forget-me-nots.

All the flowers were there,the first bluebells in blue pools,like standing water.

'You are quite right about its being beautiful,'said Clifford.'It is so amazingly.What is quite so lovely as an English spring!'

Connie thought it sounded as if even the spring bloomed by act of Parliament.